(Female, 30’s) The other night, I had a very short dream that left quite an impression on me.

“…and there was a spurt of blood that shot out and hit the wall…”

My husband was sitting in chair, like in a dining room, and he didn’t have a shirt on. I walked over to hug him, and when I bent down to put my cheek on his shoulder, I noticed this scab on the back of his shoulder. It was about the size of the eraser on a pencil. I reached over and picked the scab off— and there was a spurt of blood that shot out and hit the wall, leaving a big red streak! Quickly, I bent down and put my mouth over the wound and started drinking his blood. There were like 8 or 9 spurts before he stopped bleeding.

I don’t know if I did picked the scab off on purpose or by accident. Did I want to drink his blood, or it was just an impulse to keep the wall from getting bloody. What a strange dream, huh?

As a footnote to the post from yesterday about how vampires suck, er, that is, how they don’t seem to suck anymore, here’s the obvious video clip. I know you’ve already seen this clip but I still crack up when I watch it.

Fun little article at Slate.com about how contemporary vampires suck, or more precisely, that they don’t. The once terrifying Other is now just a cuddly idealized boyfriend – who no longer sucks blood. The article nicely traces a line from Bram Stoker’s Dracula, to Anne Rice’s tortured immortals to Buffy’s beau Angel to the monster’s nadir in the paranormal romance genre a la the Twilight series.

( http://www.slate.com/id/2223486/ )

Makes me wonder if all objects of terror undergo a certain domestication, a processes of Disneyfication where anything that is truly terrifying is sanded flat, made safe and consumable. Happens with all attempts to depict the wholly Other, I suspect, making that “make no graven images” commandment a bit more sensible. After an experience of awe / wonder / terror / amazement it’s understandable to make some record of that encounter. But then there will be folks whose only experience of that Other is via the representation, through the vicarious thrill. At the risk of sounding like a neo-Platonist here, the continued repetition of representation pushes the Other farther and farther away from our actual experience. It’s how that piss-your-pants / fall-on-the-ground-numb / struck-blind-with-scales-on-your-eyes experience of true religion becomes gradually codified into something boring and mundane like ethics and orthodoxy.

Damn. Did I slip from talking about the Monstrous to talking about the Holy again?

(Male, 40’s) Despite the fact that this nightmare was about vampires, the overall feel I had was frustration more than fear. I was a member of a team of about 5 professionals who were looking over a building with the perspective of renting it or buying it. It was a standard building by which I mean a generic office space without cubicles. And it was completely windowless. Sound like the office where you work?

The weird thing was that the place had about a half dozen life-sized marble statues. As we sort of wandered the space, these statues would quickly turn into flesh and blood, living (or I guess non-living) vampires, attack one of our group, then change back to a statue. We’d rush over and would notice the mutilated corpse and not realize that the statue had anything to do with it. This happened over and over but no one listened when I suggested “Hey, maybe we should get out of here.” Then I actually *saw* one of the attacks but again, no one was much concerned. It was down to me and the Boss, who incidentally looked like Jean-Luc Picard from Star Trek: The Next Generation. One of the statues changed and tried to attack him but he was able to hold it at an arm’s distance and do something to it to kill it. Now the trick became trying to kill the vampires when they changed but obviously before they changed back to stone which was much harder.

At one point there were two vampires attacking me — it probably doesn’t matter but they were female vampires with flowing glittery skirts, like they were nightclub vampires — and the only thing they could grab onto was one of my fingers which I kept them from biting, though I must confess I was getting pretty tired of being human at that point with all the drudgery of office work, the stupidity of my co-workers and the arrogance of my boss. But we defeated the vampires that were in the main room of the office.

My dream ended when I opened the double doors of a closet and there were two more, female vampires.

I thought my eyes were wrung out and weary of smooth, digital illustration but perhaps I was only irritated that so much of it fixates on happy-puppy subject matter. Check out these pieces by Etsy.com artist Goobeetsa. The Medusa is my favorite of the “Spooky” portraits but my heart truly belongs to the Dracula paper puppets. Hours of fun on a rainy afternoon, I tell ya. And reasonably priced.

(The Grim Gnome) I don’t like vampires, generally speaking. The whole rule-bound / old-world / invitation-only aspects make them about as scary as a supernatural Certified Public Accountant. Except for the ones in “30 Days of Night.” If you haven’t heard of this series you either have been moldering away in a casket or you’re metaphysically immune to the effects of horror-culture. A few years back, writer Steve Niles and artist Ben Templesmith wove together a freshly twisted premise with spattery exuberant artwork and pumped life back into the genre of the horror comic. The fresh twist on the vampire rules that gets “30 Days of Night” rolling is obvious from the title; if vampires hate sunlight, then what if they attacked a place that didn’t have much of it, say, a city located near the Arctic circle? What if a whole ragtag clan of vampires threw a party of sorts during the month of darkness and attacked the whole town. Add human hero. Stir well. Garnish with a nasty skewer at the end and, heck that’s what started the juggernaut. I really have to recommend it. Quite highly.

A sequel picked up the storyline and propelled it forward, again ending with a sickening little twist. And a third, completing a classical trilogy, right? If I understand the chronology correctly, the movie started development around this time and the comics kept coming. A collection of tales appeared, including a rather dumb one about vampires in space. Some of these feature artists other than Templesmith and honestly, I feel cheated with those issues, especially cheated when the artist is attempting to make work that sort of / kind of / almost resembles Templesmith’s art. So though I can’t highly recommend them all — one reason I can’t is because they’re STILL making new ones — I still have to confess I’ve bought and savored every one of them.

Niles’s other comics are nothing to ignore… but for the moment I WILL ignore them, or to be more exact I’ll postpone looking at them until another post. Who knew that comics would work so well for horror? I sure didn’t. I thought the EC’s Crypt Keeper was just weird and, OK, so I was afraid of “The Tomb of Dracula” but I was kid back then. I even thought “Dark Shadows” was scary.

And then there’s the “30 Days of Night” movie. I admit that I felt an actual quiver of excitement when I first heard Sam (“Army of Darkness”) Raimi’s name connected with the project. Alas, it was only as a producer. There are parts of the movie that are very good. For instance, some of the shots are very haunting, like an aerial tracking shot that shows the carnage of the initial attack. And throughout the movies human faces seem to have unusually de-saturated color which makes everyone look cold .. and then also makes the blood really pop out. And I really appreciated that at least a couple times when humans were standing outside in sub-zero temperatures that there were clouds of condensation when they breathed or spoke. As curmudgeonly northerner, I can’t STAND fake winters on screen. My comments don’t sound like a love-fest, though do they? Perhaps I’m grumpy for paying good money to see the movie in the theatre. I’m a stingy curmudgeon. But furthermore, I can’t help but thinking that the comic book was scarier. There was a LOT of back story in the comic book that was simply removed for the movie, so much that there doesn’t seem to be much possibility for a sequel. I was honestly pretty shocked that so much editing was required because I don’t usually consider comics to be that dense when it comes to story line.

“30 Days of Night” – the movie – comes out on video this week. Though I don’t feel unusually COMPELLED to see the movie again when it comes out on video, if I’m honest with myself, I’m pretty sure I will. If for no other reason than it will remind me of how much I loved the original comic.