Vampires are real! A notion like this is hard to believe, huh? Most of the people who disagree with this do so because they are looking for a tall pale figure in a cape that has blood on his fangs, but vampires are never just vampires. This archetypal figure with the same type of situations wouldn't have had existed as long as it has and been included in so much literature from Victorian to Teen-Modern, if it was just meant to be a scary bed time story. Vampires are beings, traditionally men, who would pray upon young innocent women in hopes to steal their life force, blood. The vampire puts his needs above hers in order to progress himself, in the process weakening her and planting a seed of selfish lust to do the same. You won't see a psycho like this walking the streets at night. This figure exists in the behavior and the character flaws that rest within people.
I guess the reason people don't want to believe that such evil exists is because they don't want to believe that it might exist within them. Not the blood sucking, sexual assaulting monster we've come to love, but the manipulative, self gratifying, and egocentric being that easily find its way into us. A vampire can be anybody, that's the scary part. They walk around in broad daylight and carry on with same agenda as Stoker's character, to survive by feeding off of others, leaving them starving whilst planting a corrupt seed. What is truly sad is the state of tarnished innocence that the victim is left in because once it is lost it's not something that can be regained. As Henry David Thoreau said, "There is no odor so bad as that which arises from goodness tainted".
A great literary and cinematic example of the idea of the vampire is that of "The Devil Wears Prada". A story where successful NYU student and paper editor, Andrea "Andy" Sachs, goes to work for major fashion magazine editor, Miranda Priestly. From the start Andy has a child-like innocence to the world of fashion but relies on her quick wit and intelligence. The crass and demanding Miranda does her best to try to break Andy by having her perform Herculean tasks that seem impossible but Andy fulfills them. Miranda is the vampire. She sucks the life force from Andy by eating her time, and pushing her to do the impossible for her own gain at the cost of stress on Andy's interpersonal relationships with her boyfriend and group of close night friends whilst her own relationships are crumbling due to her life choices. In the midst of being fed upon, Andy starts to change, becoming someone she truly isn't. This shift almost costs Andy what matters most, her relationships, her life source. When given the opportunity to continue in the way that Miranda has, she turns it down and regains herself before fully losing it.
As shown in "The Devil Wears Prada", vampires come in all shapes and sizes and can be hard to detect due to their sometimes charming velour. We must remember that the vampires we've heard in stories our entire lives are just reminders of the darkness that lies within people and how the transfer of the darkness or the "feeding" is subtle. All we can do is examine ourselves and don't get bitten. Vampires are real so look out.
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