Here’s part 3 of our Halloween series, from Julie, who leads our marketing team at Spout.

See, I’m just not into horror flicks. Just not. Psycho never scared me. I could not think of a reason to watch Freddie or Chuckie. The extraterrestrial beings might make me jump, but they don’t really give me a reason to go to the movies. Ghosts and mummies and angry hybrid creatures and biological experiments gone terribly wrong….

Yawn.

On the other hand, I lust for vampires. There it is. And I’m troubled by that. When I take a loose poll among my friends, people I admire, thoughtful people, I find it tends to fall out this way–the women of my generation are hot for vampires.

We are the pre-Buffy vampire generation. That may have something to do with it. I’m not sure. I have yet to see the Buffy movie or the shows. They’re on my want to see it list, for sure. I think Buffy might save me, help me to evolve a bit. That is, if I want to be saved….

I inherited my vampire lust. My mom was addicted to the TV daytime drama Dark Shadows. She and her friends were Navy wives, whose husbands were gone for long stretches. Barnabas Collins became an object of extreme focus for them, and I watched some of those episodes myself, at the ripe old age of, oh six or seven or something. Barnabas Collins may have been my first crush, in fact.

But my first real-boy love was for a boy named Doug. I was eight or nine, and he was 10 or 11. We lived on a naval base in the Philippines, where the only thing in the world to do at night was go to the movies. They were free, so we all did. Often we saw the same movies over and over. It was one night around Halloween, when The Horror of Dracula was playing, when Doug honored me by punching me hard on the shoulder as he walked by, near the base theatre. I sat in that movie, nursing my bruised shoulder, breathless in the knowledge that Doug knew I was alive, and watching women succumb to Christopher Lee’s domination–rather gladly. I was in thrall over both things.

How sick is that? On any scale of perversion? High, wouldn’t you say? Yes, indeedy.

So I’ve been thinking about this vampire thing, and yesterday called up my friend and former lit professor, Kathleen. She has spent some time looking into gothic and monster lit. And I just wanted to know, why are my friends and I hot for vampires?

She was quick to point out that the bloodletting themes in folklore and literature are very much a form of sexual iconography. That the death by vampire bite is a thinly veiled metaphor for sexual climax. She talked about how vampire traditions really only make sense in countries where there is a wide understanding of Christian themes, because the Dracula stories are mirrored Christian stories. Dracula takes blood, Christ gives it. Both promise eternal life, but very opposite pictures of it, etc.

“But,” she says, “for you and your friends, it’s probably all about domination.”

What?!? But, but, but…. We’re talking working women here. In their 40s and more. Grownups. Good feminists. Women who have worked hard not to succumb to male domination. We’re talking about a generation of women who don’t need men to survive in the world. Attracted to domination? What the…?

“Yeah,” says Kathleen, “there’s the us we want to be, we wish to be, and then there’s the part that hasn’t evolved. Or the dark side. We all have a dark side, right?”

Sometimes, I hate the truth. It’s so inconvenient.

Why do we love vampire movies? They go where we don’t want to go in real life, I guess. Or where we pretend we don’t want to go. They tickle at repressed desire. And heavens help me, I love them. Especially this one.

Horrifying? You bet.