I'm in the middle of writing a scene for class tomorrow. It's about vampires, modern day vampires. This is hilarious to me because I have never ever ever been a fan of the vampire genre. I have never seen an episode of Buffy, I don't even know the titles of any Anne Rice novel.
I did kinda sorta know a guy who was trying to write the Great American Vampire novel, and it was sort of like that movie The Mummy, if it hadn't taken itself so seriously, it would've been a lampoon on the genre and been funny instead of painful.
Basically, what I'm writing is a girl who lives with vampires, and is hiding the fact that she isn't one. It's just a shortish scene, I don't expect to stretch it out longer than that. The frightening thing, for me, is that the little bit of research I've done has taken me places I certainly didn't want to know existed.
I was trying to find out if there was a word for a vampire who is a seventh son of a seventh son rather than becoming a vampire. (Some are born vampires, some become vampires, and some have vampirness thrust about them.) There is a whole community out there who not only believe in vampires, believe that they themselves are vampires, genetically.
I am willing to believe some pretty weird stuff. If you tell me you hear voices, fine, you hear voices. If you tell me your grandmother visits you every night before you go to bed, and she's been dead for three years, OK. It's when we start getting to the abducted by aliens government conspiracy vampire folks that I have to take a step back and say, "WTF?"
I suppose in some ways one is equally as bizarre as the other, but now I'm wondering, are there a culture of people out there who believe they're werewolves? And what about the tooth fairy? How many people out there believe that by a cruel twist of fate they are destined to wear a pink dress and sneak into to kid's bedrooms to collect their teeth? Cake stands, how many people truly believe that they are really cake stands?
I think I will leave off and go make myself a tin foil hat now, just to be safe.