Vampires get their teeth into US public
NEW YORK — She loves the taste of blood, hates the sun, and, if you ask, will tell you she died in a train accident back in 1892: meet Seregon O’Dalley, a would-be vampire living in New York. She’s far from alone. Vampires are in fashion across the United States, encouraged by the hit TV series True Blood, now in its third season, the Twilight movies and Vampire Diaries. Stories about feeding on blood are greedily consumed and eagerly published. For a pastime with dark, anti-religious overtones vampire fashion is itself becoming oddly like an organized religion. There are rules, priests, private gatherings and large-scale celebrations. Hundreds of “vampires” attend balls every few months, with the next vampire ball taking place in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on July 31. Believers in this sect-like lifestyle range from teenage devotees of Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight to adults who got hooked on Ann Rice’s Vampire Diaries in the 1970s. Rice is the author credited with turning the European model vampire — exemplified by Dracula, the horrific character at the center of Bram Stoker’s 19th century novel set in Transylvania — into a more user-friendly American version. In the very un-Transylvanian setting of New Jersey, O’Dalley keeps her apartment well curtained from the sun and decorates with bat motifs. “It’s like a religion. There are houses, and pageants, and clans, and kind of presidents, ministers,” she said. Still, this is an age of kinder, gentler vampires. O’Dalley actually enjoys garlic, the traditional weapon against vampires, and her blood consumption is modest, to say the least.... MORESource: The Daily Tribune URL: http://www.tribuneonline.org/commentary/20100723com3.html |
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