Vampires and Zombies as Allegory

No longer do I have to concentrate on TV channels devoted to horror and science fiction in order to find shows about vampires and zombies (not that I have any particular interest in doing so). They seem to be all over the place now, and they tend to target the adolescent viewing audience. There seems to be several shows involving this supernatural element of "humanity" on the minor networks, while MTV has its own popular comedy Death Valley police show parody of the phenomenon. And we have the enormous popularity of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight series and its adaptation to film. So are there really vampires and zombies?

No, at least not in the literal sense, or at least not as they are portrayed on TV or the big screen. But the idea of being bitten by a vampire and becoming transformed into a completely different type of being is a clear allegory for "coming of age" with sexuality in adolescence. This accounts for much of the great interest for vampire shows among the young. But apart from this, I see some other connections between vampires, zombies, and "real" people like you and me.

Zombies are the "walking dead" that can infect people and "convert" them over by a single bite, much in the same way that vampires can recruit others into their ranks. The allegorical idea here is that carnal feelings trump rationality in determining people's personal philosophies and ideology. When someone gets "bitten" and becomes an ideologue continually spewing out another's talking points without showing any independent thinking, that person really does seem, in a sense, like a zombie, one of the walking "mentally dead". It matters not which ends of different political and religious spectrums we're talking about either. For such a character, it is no use to try to reason with them anymore: they have passed over to the "other side" and already regard me as an enemy of sorts (unless they can succeed in "biting" me over, that is). Vampires can also be used with this analogy.

Another type of analogy is that, as time seems to wear on these days in the 21st century, there also seems to be something wrong with people. There is a disconnect here as more and more become removed from their immediate environment, instead being tuned in to their cell phones and Internet connections. I have experienced several occasions over the past couple of years when I heard someone speaking as if they were addressing me. I would turn around, greeting them in return, only to find that they were hooked into their cell phone. And one of my more recent "creepy" experiences happened the last time I went to one of the University of Florida libraries. Instead of seeing students reading books, writing papers, and engaged in discussions, I saw table after table after table, full of students with their laptop computers, cut off from their surroundings and staring at the screens like... well, zombies!

The final analogy I'll make is that it seems gross and horrible for these creatures to be feasting on people. But, really, it is people who are feasting on other sentient beings when they eat meat. If you want to react with ecstatic horror to vampires and zombies while stuffing a bloody medium-rare steak into your mouth, then maybe you're just identifying with the subject matter you're watching...