http://www.nzherald.co.nz/lifestyle/news/article.cfm?c_id=6&objectid=10583924Fangs For The Memories
Sunday, July 12, 2009 @ 4:00 AM
By Geraldine Johns Forget Anna Paquin. There's more at stake than TV ratings for adherents to the 'vampyre lifestyle'. Geraldine Johns investigates what's going on in our cemeteries after midnight.
At risk of stating the bleeding obvious, it's very hard to be a vampire devotee these days. They may be hot on screen and page, but it's not so easy to keep the faith when you have to hold down a 21st century day job and give a nod to modern-day necessities as well.
To picture the vampire is to imagine matters Gothic. But true devotion touches regions far deeper than first impressions of members of the black-clad, high hair, gloomy music movement might suggest.
It's not just the unending stares that you have to endure. Or the rejections of both the personal and career kind. It's not even the abuse and misunderstanding; that all goes with the territory.
The modern-day vampire lover's lot is much more tough. There are the pretenders who demean the status of the truly, deeply dedicated. It costs a lot. And there are health and safety implications to consider that could generate a whole new chapter in an OSH manual.
Consider the case of one Wellington vampire lover. It is no great surprise that she does not want to have her name attached to this piece. She has the voice of a tinkling piano. She writes polite emails. She has a sharp brain but it's her teeth that she really wants to hone.
At the top of her Lotto list of wants should she ever win is a little bit of dentistry. This young woman wants to get her two canine teeth filed into points. Or, more precisely, fangs. But there are a few obstacles in her way. Even if she could afford the procedure said to cost a few thousand dollars there are what she calls the 'impracticalities' to consider. "I don't want to bite someone and cause pain. And I don't eat meat, so I don't need to tear anything apart."
There are other 'impracticalities' to consider, too. Like finding someone to perform such a procedure. An exploration of the finer details of tooth-filing reveals that although it is an accepted practice in Balinese Hindu societies and some African tribal regions, it's not the done thing professionally speaking here.
Auckland dentist Deanna Nelson says she was approached by someone who wanted just such a job done with metal caps to complete the job. Nelson declined.
"I like to make smiles more beautiful, and I really didn't feel that silver fangs would achieve this," she says.
Another dentist (now retired and preferring to remain anonymous) says that although there is nothing legally wrong with the practice, he too would have declined to perform such a procedure on professional grounds. To do so is to remove natural tissue, he explains. "And once the tissue has been destroyed, it won't grow back again. It can only be remedied with expensive cosmetic treatment."
Vampires are the, er, new black of television and film. There is True Blood, starring our very own Anna Paquin. (She is big enough now for a one-page profile in Vanity Fair but not big enough to have her own true identity stolen from her; they still recognise her birthplace as New Zealand.) There are the Twilight movies, and Lesbian Vampire Killers. Even CSI has dedicated a couple of episodes to Gothic characters. The books old and new are doing a roaring trade too.
It was the rise in the number of people drawn to the vampire as a real, living thing that got Dr Andrew Cardow interested. Cardow lectures in management and international business at Massey University's Auckland campus. In 2007 he wrote a research working paper titled Everyman with fangs: the acceptance of the modern vampire. In it, he says that the romantic idea of the vampire has really grown up since the publication of the first dedicated novels of the 1880s. That's when the vampire was seen as a thing of abject terror "a ghastly killing machine", he says.
My, how things have changed. "Then we had the lovely little east-European suave and sophisticated nobility as vampires, and in the late 20th century, the idea that the vampire could be anyone: The Lost Boys, Buffy the Vampire Slayer".
With that, Cardow says, we came full circle. "Now, there's a retreat away from the evil killing machine back to the idea of the vampire as something noble."
He points to the rise of the vampire in romance and popular culture novels as evidence of his argument. The way he sees it, vampires are currently being treated as misunderstood, as creatures of nobility with noble purposes.
"For example, in Twilight, the protagonist is a mid-20th century character: noble and conflicted in spirit; not quite evil, not quite good. This resonates with people. For some reason, people can identify with it."
The vampire, says Cardow, is an interesting beast, because it's so old. People who believe in it see it not as a fictional demon, but as a genuine beast that wanders around, he explains.
In between the shifts in vampire affection came the Gothic sub-culture, Cardow continues. And here he lets forth a shrieking laugh of crypt-shattering proportions of his own as he volunteers the following: "I'd hesitate to say the movement was dead!"
He has never been a Goth - "in my youth I was into heavy metal" but he continues to be interested in the way vampires have changed and how it's now accepted that anyone can be one.
Tash Micheletti is a committed "old school" Goth who "totally" believes in vampires although she does not believe she is one herself. The 22-year-old South African lives in Wellington. Her wardrobe is entirely black, as are the curtains of the room she rents in a shared house. Her naturally blonde hair is permanently dyed black. She says her friends have tried to get her into colour but she is not at all comfortable with it.
She is completing a degree in criminology and psychology with a view to a career in social work (specialising in working with either children, or troubled youth or sex offenders.)
Micheletti's embracement of matters vampiric gets quite romantic. "My ultimate dream, once I have a life partner, is to swap blood phials." But again it would require some modern-day interventions. "I'd do it medically, because I don't know how fast blood comes out. And I would hate for it to be dangerous when it's something really special." So much for romanticism: the clinical and practical clearly win out.
It can get lonely out there. Not too many people are willing to front up publicly as vampires, or even Goths with a love of vampirisim.
Micheletti says she can't think of a time when her love of matters Gothic kicked in, "but it's just progressed to this." Her mum, who lives in Auckland, still questions her daughter about her devotion to the cause: "She looks at me and she says 'Are you sure you're a Goth?"' But her dad still in South Africa is all for it. He introduced her to Gothic books and gave her her first vampire dictionary: "A thick book, but useful," Micheletti says.
Another local vampire lover is broadcaster and commentator Noelle McCarthy. They are, she says her favourite things in the world. "My half-finished M Phil thesis was largely about Bram Stoker's Dracula, which I first read aged 13 and have been madly in love with ever since."
McCarthy counts the Count as the type she likes. "I'm not all that sold on the 'gentlemanly' sorts popping up in Twilight and True Blood. The Count was a dandy but never a wuss."
She has uttered what we all know when writing in her column that the thrill of the vampire is sexual. ("Pure and simple. It always has been and always will.")
Cardow, too, talks about the sexual aspect. "It seduces, it bites, it sucks the living life out."
There is indeed a term for it. It's called odaxelagnia and it means sexual arousal from biting a partner or sexual arousal gained from being bitten by a partner. There are websites aplenty dedicated to this particular affliction, including postings by both those who believe they have it and those who wish to experience it. That is but one of a myriad of subjects devoted to vampires everything from dating to online churches that can be found with a quick use of Google.
It is here that much can be learned: about vampire role-players (popular with juveniles and young adults, who can alter ego in a vampire role-playing game; about vampires and the fetish scene (look it up for yourself) and blood rituals and blood play (ditto).
The spread of the internet, says Cardow, has allowed more people to adopt vampire cults. It is also where things can get a bit woolly. One minute you're looking up a site that looks like it offers a relatively harmless perusal of vampiric matters and the next you're learning about sexual practices that seem a long, long way away from the subject you initially explored.
On a more physical level, on any given night in any old churchyard, you might find a bunch of vampire lovers in their local graveyard. Ideally, they like to congregate around a crypt, and it's even better if there's a bit of mist rolling in. Any moon will do (it doesn't have to be full) but the best hours at which to gather together are from late night to early morning.
For those who prefer to further up the ante, there are the self-reported sorts who claim to indulge in blood imbibation.
At Thornapple Bootique, a New Zealand-based internet store selling Goth fashion, proprietor "Thorny" Towart says he has about one enquiry a month about the more "extreme end of the vampyre subculture".
"You are more likely to find people talking of eating raw meats, sleeping in coffins, cutting and blood-letting than openly saying they drink blood," he says.
"It's generally only a very small quantity, say a few mls. Foods, also, dramatically change the taste of the blood as well. For instance, iron-rich foods make it more metallicy."
Sometimes the pursuit of vampire goes hideously and brutishly wrong. A Welsh teenager, obsessed with vampires, is currently serving a life sentence after butchering his elderly neighbour and drinking her blood.
Mathew Hardman, 17, repeatedly stabbed the 90-year-old widow and then cut out her heart in a macabre ritual. At sentencing in 2002, the judge said he was drawn to the conclusion that vampirism had become a near-obsession with Hardman. "You hoped for immortality [by drinking another's blood] but all you have achieved is the brutal ending of another person's life and the bringing of a life sentence upon yourself," the judge said.
In Brisbane, two women were jailed for life over what became known as the city's vampire murder.
Tracey Wigginton and her former lesbian lover Lisa Ptaschinski were jailed for the 1989 murder of Brisbane City Council worker Edward Baldock. The court was told Ptaschinski and two other women lured the drunken Baldock into their car at Kangaroo Point for the purpose of fulfilling Wigginton's 'need to feed'. They then drove to another address, where Wigginton stabbed him 27 times and drank his blood. Ptaschinski was last year granted gradual release back into the community, while self-proclaimed 'vampire' Wigginton is still behind bars.
Tash Micheletti currently works part-time: as a cleaner at a kindergarten and as a carer. She does not get kitted out in full Goth regalia all the time partly because of cost and because she doesn't like wearing make-up in the day. Even so, she bears some identifiable features: pierced ears; a nose ring, three lip rings and a tongue ring. This full face of metal has, she says, denied her some work placements, "but I'm over that now".
Micheletti has yet to meet the partner that would warrant the sacred sharing of phials. And she has not met a vampire either.
"If I did, I would probably ask him or her to bite me. And then I would be gutted, because I would have to live forever."
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