Last summer it was my pleasure to have breakfast with Margo at the Sirius Rising Festival in New York, to hear her speak to those gathered about her new book Vampires Are Us: Understanding Our Love Affair with the Immortal Dark Side (Weiser Books), and her questions about why Vampires are so important in contemporary storytelling, why people are so fascinated with the Vampire, and how vampires have changed from their earlier origins. The reluctant vampires of Angel and Twilight are not the same as the monsters of Bela Lugosi's time.
I pondered on this blog the work of Joe Slate and his research on Psychic Vampires and Judith Orloff's comments on Energy Theft , but Margo Adler takes the conversation about Vampires into a whole new place.
On a personal note, I wish Margo was still with us for many reasons, and I imagine she would have something to say about the disturbing rise of movies and books about Zombies now. I'll leave that one alone for now, although I sometimes have my concerns...............the walking dead? Oh............
"As Adler, a longtime NPR correspondent and question asker, sat vigil at her dying husband's bedside, she found herself newly drawn to vampire novels and their explorations of mortality. Over the next four years--by now she has read more than 270 vampire novels, from teen to adult, from gothic to modern, from detective to comic--she began to see just how each era creates the vampires it needs. She explores the issues of power, politics, morality, identity, and even the fate of the planet that show up in vampire novels today. Perhaps, as Adler suggests, our blood is oil, perhaps our prey is the planet. Perhaps vampires are us. "
Directed by Andrew Bennett
Produced by Jay Schweid
an Ephelants Production
