With The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn - Part 1 leading the box office since its November release on movie screens across North America, stories about vampires and their relationships with humans have captivated the popular imagination. But there’s a new twist to the story: the vampires currently on the big screen and in several popular television series are bloodsucking creatures of the digital age.

By Anna Roberts ’12 / Published December 6, 2011

Can the idea of the traditional vampire survive as a modern creature in the digital age? Absolutely, says Alexandra Keller, associate professor of film studies. After all, vampires today have iPods, blogs, Facebook pages and they text.

Intrigued by representations of vampires and what she calls the “digital vampire” and a longtime fan of the TV series “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” Keller studies the cultural uses of the vampire through cinema. Turning to depictions of vampires in such works as Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula and the 1922 film Nosferatu and comparing them to modern images such as 1998’s Blade and the current HBO television series “True Blood,” Keller delves into the underworld of vampires in the digital age.

Keller, who is also the director of Smith’s Film Studies Program, says that although common narratives, with roots in folklore, depict vampires as ancient beings, their immortal quality also gives them the ability to transcend time. Therefore, they adapt to the technological advancements of any given period—in effect rendering them as modern creatures.

For example, in Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the character Lucy Westenra is the daughter of an aristocratic family who is turned into a vampire by Dracula himself. Keller notes that she “has this wax cylinder that she speaks into to record stuff—she has the Victorian equivalent of an iPod....She’s got the most current technology,” Keller explains. “It may seem very quaint and antiquated to us now, but everyone [in the novel] is on the cutting edge of technology.”

Stoker wrote Dracula around the same time as the invention of cinema. “Stoker’s Dracula was different from any vampire that preceded him, and the moving image and the vampire have been mutually fascinated ever since,” remarks Keller. Behaviors we have come to regard as vampiric are thus inextricably linked to early cinematic technique.

Nosferatu: Ein Symphonie des Geauens (“A Symphony of Terror”) (1922), a German silent film, marked “the first time that a vampire was killed by sunlight,” explains Keller. She urges us to think back to the essence of cinema, with simply a projector and a white screen. The addition of sunlight in this model would destroy the projected picture. “The cinematic image dies when the sun comes up. So right in that one movie, cinematically the vampire and cinema are wed, they become the same thing.”

“The special effects of cinema define, like nothing else ever could have before, the things that vampires can do,” says Keller. “Nosferatu’s vampire, Count Orlok, has all of his supernatural powers orchestrated through cinematic technology. He can go super fast. Well, how is that done? Director F.W. Murnau sped up the film. Or he can go backwards. The fact that Orlok can come up from his coffin like this is because the film is running backwards.”

Just as the powers of vampires changed with advances in film, some of these vampiric features will also be dispelled with the progression to digital.

Keller explains, “One of the things that used to be a big deal was that [vampires] couldn’t see themselves in a mirror, or on camera...because of the silver nitrate in the film, but now it’s digital. Digital cameras mean vampires can now be photographed, everybody can be seen.” The physical filmstrip is rarely used in contemporary filmmaking, therefore removing the fatal connection between sunlight and the vampire; modern vampires are able to walk around unscathed, even when exposed to daylight. The digital realm, therefore, has an equalizing effect—on both the undead and the alive.

The idea that the lives of the alive are more public or that people are more exposed to the world as a result of the digital age and the Internet, informs Keller’s work significantly. “30,000 people a year die [who have had a presence] on Facebook, and there’s very little you can do about those pages....There’s a way in which you’re not only immortal on the Internet but also you are now specifically undead. But your afterlife in the digital realm is mutable, it changes all the time. Other people continue to interact with you or some vestige of you.”

Technology has also affected the location of vampire narratives. Classic Victorian vampire stories take place in cities like London during the inception of the industrial age because, as Keller says, “Modernity calls the vampire to the metropolis. For the vampire, cities are an all-you-can-eat buffet.” But now, Keller notes, “The most popular vampire narratives of the moment seem to be taking place outside of cities and I think that has a lot to do with the fact that so many people have access to the Internet.” For example, Twilight is set in Forks, Washington, and “True Blood” takes place in Bon Temps, Louisiana—both small towns. However, because all the characters are connected to the rest of the world through the Internet, the need for a big city diminishes.

Present-day vampire characters and depictions regularly rely on technology. Jessica, a character in “True Blood,” has her own blog where she keeps viewers up to date on her day-to-day life between episodes. Eric Northman, another “True Blood” character, participates in a Skype trial during an episode. As with Count Orlok in Nosferatu, certain vampiric qualities displayed in “True Blood,” such as vampire sex, can only be created using current cinematic technology. Keller notes that the producers of the show use a program called After Effects to generate high-speed vampire intimacy.

So, where is Keller’s research headed? “The claims that I can make now have to do with the 24/7 on the network thing. We have an afterlife. We are not entirely dead. We have to manage that afterlife even though we will not be here to see it. All of that brings us closer to the classical imagination of the vampire.” She continues to watch and listen to all things vampire. Since humans continue to be intrigued by vampires, and the digital world undeniably isn’t disappearing, surely vampire narratives will continue to morph in the coming years.

“Cinema showed us what the vampire could do,” Keller notes. Once at home in the world of classical cinema, the vampire is now a creature of the digital age.

Vampires help us puzzle out the problems of the human condition, says Alexandra Keller, associate professor of film studies. And that becomes clearer with every new film or television show released around the vampire narrative.

“What it is that we don’t want to deal with in ourselves, we displace onto this other [the vampire] and we work it out over there. And it’s that [vampire] over there that comes and menaces us and we either kill it or it kills us—though more recently we seem to want to make peace with the vampire, often to the point of cohabitating with it,” Keller notes. “We have an endless relationship with it.”

“This notion that we use it to work out our own issues is the one consistency. What the particular anxieties are, it could be homophobia, it could be the AIDS crisis, it could be xenophobia, it could be any number of other things.”

But what has necessitated this? Vampires have become a social outlet, says Keller, a way to characterize questions and issues within our culture that we have trouble dealing with head on.

The “good” vampires in the “True Blood” TV series prefer to drink synthetic blood, but their true nature persists.

“The vampire as a cultural metaphor has certainly always existed, but it becomes really literal in the ’80s when you think about the AIDS crisis and the idea of transmitting something that you don’t want, via the blood.”

Whether it’s something as serious as AIDS, or even a commentary on American dietary habits, vampires are being called upon to flesh out these issues for us. Keller comments on the almost whimsical nature of the new “warm and fuzzy” vampires, who can choose not to prey on humans, just as humans can choose not to consume animal products.

For instance, Keller says, the “good” vampires in the “True Blood” HBO series prefer to drink synthetic blood. In the Twilight movies the vampires are “vegetarian,” controlling their urges for human blood and drinking only a substitute.

The Cullen family in the Twilight series is not a picture of classic blood-crazed vampires because they, like enlightened human beings, have the mental power and moral capacity to exercise restraint when it comes to choosing whose blood they consume, says Keller. The same can be said in reference to the recent pro-life angle of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1, where Bella Swan, already quite corrupted by the Cullen coven, decides to keep her vampire child although it is literally destroying her from the inside out. She is willing to give up her life as a human and cross over into the realm of the vampire to save her child.

“Vampires are also part of the American consumer society. The very first thing that I did in the vampire class (originally taught with Comparative Literature Professor Ann Jones) was to make a YouTube playlist of all these commercials that had used vampires to sell an amazing range of stuff—batteries, wine, condoms, Doritos, everything,” Keller says. Vampires have become so accessible in American consumer culture that using their image to sell something as mundane as a battery makes sense. As long as one has the ability to turn on a television or access the Internet, it is almost impossible to avoid encountering a vampire.

Not only are vampires ingrained in consumer society, says Keller, they also reflect capitalist ideals. She makes reference to Karl Marx who says in Das Kapital (1867), “Capital is dead labour, that vampire-like, only lives by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks.”

So although vampires can choose to live a more morally sound life and abstain from sucking the blood of living organisms, their true nature persists, as does the nature of capitalism. “True Blood”’s Bill Compton can continue to drink synthetic blood, and Twilight’s Edward Cullen can swear off drinking human blood, but they are only suppressing their baser instincts and remain an anomalous minority in their narratives.

“Vampires are like capitalism in that the money is there, the money is immortal, it’s the people who aren’t,” says Keller. The system of capitalism requires the acquisition of revenue, and because of their immortality, vampires, not humans, are the ones that are able to stick around to see their investments grow. Common narratives throughout the years have depicted vampires that are either visibly rich or simply never express anxiety about finances.

When a vampire is without means in a modern narrative, there’s probably an explicit reason. They, along with their money, pursue immortality. “Given the robust development of the Occupy Wall Street movement, it will be interesting to see whether ‘bad’ vampires start turning up as CEOs and ‘good’ ones turn up at Zuccotti Park.”