A New Dawn

I have a feeling this is going to be a very unusual sort of letter. You see my problem isn’t a real problem; it’s fictional. I’ve always been the sort of girl who gets far too obsessed with books, and right now I’m obsessed with the Twilight series. You may have heard of it—it’s the story of Bella, a teenage girl forced to choose between two wonderful guys: her best friend Jacob and her boyfriend Edward. Edward is romantic and wonderful and says things like, “Before you, Bella, my life was like a moonless night.” He even wanted to pay for her to go to college. Jacob is kind and strong and capable of total devotion. There’s something else I should mention: Edward is a vampire, and Jacob is a werewolf, so of course for a long time they hated each other, and not just because of Bella. Even though the series is over now and Bella picked Edward (and Jacob fell in love with their daughter—long story), none of my friends can agree on which guy Bella should have chosen. I thought maybe your extensive experience advising people about relationships could help me make up my mind. Who would Bella have been better off with—Edward or Jacob? The vampire or the werewolf?

Aunt Charlotte is indeed familiar with the books in question, and let me tell you, I understand your distress. It’s always hard to choose between wonderful guys, and since fictional men are just better, well, that makes the decision even harder. Aunt Charlotte would also like to note that this kind of question is a nice change of pace, since in books it always seems to be a girl torn between a vampire and a werewolf, unlike in real life when she would be torn between a mail-man and an area insurance adjuster named Bob.

The thing about deciding between fictional supernatural men is this: You can’t turn to real-life examples to help you solve your dilemma. After all, in the real world perfectly sensitive, perfectly caring teenage boys who also have high cheekbones and luminous golden eyes do not exist. Ahem. What Aunt Charlotte meant to say was that, in the real world, vampires and werewolves do not exist. So how can we decide what they might be like as romantic partners? Well, by turning to the medium in which they were first depicted as romantic figures: the silver screen.

Years ago vampires and werewolves were seen merely as repulsive, evil monsters. It was in a large part due to their haunting portrayals in such films as The Wolf Man, Dracula, The Howling, The Lost Boys, The Company of Wolves, and Buffy the Vampire Slayer that led to their widespread acceptance as the figures of romantic melancholy they are today. In fact, films have played a huge part in developing our current vampire and werewolf mythology. For instance, the fact that werewolves change shape at the full moon, are allergic to silver, and can be defeated by wolfsbane was first invented in the 1941 film The Wolf Man.

The Wolf Man is the tale of an American-educated Englishman, Laurence Talbot, who returns to his ancestral home in Wales to reconcile with his father. He falls in love with Gwen, a local girl, who gives him a walking stick decorated with the silver head of a wolf. She tells him this represents a “werewolf,” and recites a local poem:

Even a man who is pure in heart
and says his prayers by night
may become a wolf when the wolfbane [sic] blooms
and the autumn moon is bright.

Talbot scoffs at the legend, which in horror movies always means you’re about to become lunch for a local monster. Sure enough, he’s soon bitten while attempting to protect Gwen’s friend Jenny from an apparent wolf attack. The curse of lycanthropy is passed along to Larry, who proceeds to prowl the countryside, marauding, until he’s beaten to death by the father he came home to reconcile with—ironically, with the silver-headed walking stick Larry got from Gwen.

The Wolf Man presents the wolf as a tormented hero. He’s a human being who knows he can’t control his transformations into a monster. Werewolves are generally seen as masculine, testosterone-fueled figures, unlike their more foppish cousins, the vampires. (Interesting that a monster so associated with rampant masculinity would be controlled by the moon, a planet usually associated with the feminine. Or perhaps women are the werewolf’s weakness?) The werewolf as presented here wants to be a good boyfriend—he’s a romantic and in love with Gwen—but just can’t control his animal side. A love affair with a guy like this would by necessity be fatally flawed—he’s a good man who can’t stop himself from killing and is therefore doomed.

The werewolf made numerous appearances in film after The Wolf Man proved popular, including The Curse of the Werewolf, Werewolves on Wheels, The Beast Must Die, I Was a Teenage Werewolf, and the memorably named Werewolf in a Girls’ Dormitory. Werewolves in these films are rarely portrayed as thinking, feeling creatures, much less romantic heroes. They tend to be rapacious monsters—“the horror of all mankind!” as one movie poster promises—bent on death and bloodshed. Part of this was due to the proliferation of production companies like Amicus and Hammer, who churned out formulaic horror pictures at a remarkable rate that left little time for paying attention to script and character detail. Another part was due to early, crude special effects that made a convincing—and moving—transformation from man into wolf difficult to achieve.

The Howling, released in 1981, is notable not only for its advanced special effects but also for presenting werewolves as sexy and sexual beings. The heroine, hiding out after a traumatic experience with a serial killer, finds herself among a band of werewolves—but these werewolves are comfortable with themselves and their animal natures, unlike the tortured hero of The Wolf Man. Touching on some of the back-to-nature and environmental movements popular at the time, these werewolves are portrayed as in touch with nature, the earth, and their own sexuality. But while they’re sexual, they’re not precisely romantic. One gets the sense that these werewolves aren’t much with the giving of flowers, or the long walks on the beach. Their sexuality may be natural, but it’s also brutal and abrupt, and one gets the sense that they’d be just as comfortable eating the heroine as making love to her. In fact, they may have some trouble telling the difference.

An American Werewolf in London, on the other hand, presents the werewolf as a regular guy trapped in a nightmare. After being attacked by a werewolf while backpacking across the Yorkshire Moors (as anyone who reads Gothic romances knows, nothing good ever happens on the Yorkshire Moors), young American traveler David moves in with the beautiful nurse who took care of him in the hospital. They fall in love, but once the night of the full moon arrives, David changes into a wolf in a painful and lengthy transformation involving agonizing twisting of flesh and snapping of bones. But it’s nothing compared to the torment David suffers when he realizes he’s responsible for the death of a dozen Londoners. He’s finally shot and killed after being lulled into a sense of security by his girlfriend, who tells him she loves him.

Boyfriend factor: not good. David is an ordinary, affable guy by day, but a vicious and mindless killer by night. He has absolutely no control over his transformations, nor over his behavior during the times he’s transformed. The brutality of the transformation itself presages the brutality David shows to everyone he meets while in wolf form. Romance with a werewolf might be possible if the werewolf were conscious of his actions during the time he’s transformed, or if there were some way of restraining him (à la Oz in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series), but An American Werewolf in London doesn’t posit either as a possibility: Lycanthropy here is a disease, like rabies or syphilis, that takes your will and mind before it takes your life. David might love the nice nurse, but it’s not enough to control his bloodlust.

Teen Wolf sends the opposite message: The werewolf in this film would be a great boyfriend. Partly because he is played by Michael J. Fox, who is inherently likeable, and partly because lycanthropy in this version of events seems to have no actual drawbacks. It doesn’t make you bloodthirsty, savage, or driven to eat rabbits by the light of the moon. It just makes you hairier, zippier, and better at basketball and dancing to ’80s synth pop. While the lycanthrope in this film is charming and eventually gets the girl, he does lack the animalistic magnetism we’ve come to expect from our werewolf boys—he’s such a sweet, ordinary guy that he seems a bit anemic (the work of our friend the vampire, perhaps?). One notable thing about this werewolf mythology is that Fox’s character is born a werewolf rather than made one through an attack. It’s an inherited trait, like male pattern baldness, which may help explain why he adjusts to it so easily and with minimum drama.

Wolfen presents an intriguing picture of the werewolf as a relic of a more natural world. Though the werewolves in the film do kill, often brutally, they’re driven by more than appetite: Their first victim is a land developer, someone who’s directly responsible for destroying the natural habitat of wolves and driving them into human habitats. These aren’t wolves, precisely, but wolfen: creatures tied to Native American myths of shapechangers and skinwalkers. Like Jacob in the Twilight series, these werewolves are born what they are, and their shapechanging magic reaches back into their origins in Native American folklore. “Wolves and Indians evolved and were destroyed simultaneously. Their societies are practically one and the same. They’re both tribal, they look out for their own, they don’t overpopulate, and they’re both superb hunters,” says one of the characters in the film, making the connection explicit. Now, how romantic are these wolfen as mythic figures? Well, boyfriend-wise, they’re kind of like that guy in college who was really dedicated to environmental causes and activism and didn’t have a lot of time for romance. These wolves are killers, but that’s not really the problem: They’re fighting for the continuation of their species and seem entirely dedicated to that purpose. So while they’re noble warriors, which can be attractive, they don’t seem like they have much time for the opposite sex.

And then there’s Underworld. You said in your letter that since Edward and Jacob are a werewolf and a vampire, they have “other reasons to hate each other besides Bella.” It does seem to be the case that werewolves and vampires are often considered natural enemies, creatures that have hated each other since the dawn of time. And yet in House of Dracula, one of the earliest horror films in which both Dracula and the Wolf Man made an appearance, they seem friendly enough, both searching for cures for their supernatural afflictions (only the Wolf Man gets one, and rides off happily into the sunset, perhaps stoking the fires of resentment in his less fortunate colleague). In the later Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, the Wolf Man is on hand to warn the comedians of Dracula’s nefarious schemes, casting himself as the “good monster” while Dracula is the bad one. Though both these films made use of Universal’s more famous horror properties, neither of them gave audiences what they were clearly dying to see: vampires and werewolves fighting each other.

Some vampire legends maintain that vampires fear wolves and that a wolf can be used to keep a vampire at bay. Other legends maintain that a werewolf becomes a vampire after death, or that a vampire can take wolf form as well as bat form. No specific legend states that vampires and werewolves dislike each other, but that hasn’t stopped Hollywood from running with the idea. In Underworld, both lycanthropy and vampirism are caused by a virus—a mutation of a plague, which caused vampirism in a man bitten by a bat and lycanthropy in his brother who was bitten by a wolf. Werewolves and vampires go on to be each other’s mortal enemies throughout the centuries, each group dedicated to eradicating the other.

Both the Lycans and the vampires in Underworld are portrayed as sexy and attractive in their human forms. The main Lycan, Michael, is a deeply romantic figure: Uncomfortable with his monstrous side at first, he eventually adjusts and becomes a tough and self-possessed warrior. He’s handsome, tormented, and in love with a vampire girl named Selene (that her name means “moon” in Latin harks back to Aunt Charlotte’s earlier guess that women, like the moon, are a male werewolf’s weakness). Would he make a good boyfriend? Probably, if he could get past his need to take part in the endless war raging between vampires and werewolves.

The vampires in Underworld would also make excellent boyfriend material if they would just put down the silver bullets for a few minutes and concentrate on the romance. They’re also gorgeous—their eyes glow blue, and they wear super-sexy tight leather outfits. They also evince many of the traits we’ve come to associate with vampires—increased strength and speed and heightened senses and perception, not to mention beauty and charm. They’re presented as sophisticated, elegant, and cultured—Darcys to the Lycans’ more rough-and-tumble Heathcliffs.

The depiction of vampires as elegant and charming on film is a fairly recent one—in the classic Nosferatu, probably the first vampire film ever made, the titular vampire has repulsive, ratlike features and long dirty fingernails. Also his ears are huge. He looks like a cross between a rodent and the World Cup. If he was the vampire clamoring for Bella’s affections, she wouldn’t have any problem picking the hot werewolf. Nosferatu would not make a good boyfriend. It’s somewhat unclear in the film if he can even talk, though some might regard this as a plus.

In Dracula, released in 1931, we see the first emergence in film of the vampire as steamy upper-class seducer. His slow and deliberate speech patterns, his unnerving glowing stare (the cinematographer shone pinpricks of light into his eyes so they’d reflect), his elegant attire, and his unmistakable Old World elegance combine to paint the portrait of an attractive, not repulsive, monster. The fact that Dracula seems to feed exclusively on pretty young women, preferring to make his male victims into ghoul-like slaves, addresses the underpinnings of eroticism associated with the act of vampiric blood-drinking. Christopher Lee went on to portray Dracula again in the 1958 film Horror of Dracula, where the erotic appeal of the vampire was more plainly addressed, with a tagline to the poster announcing Count Dracula as “the terrifying lover who died . . . Yet lived!” No other film had so explicitly presented the count as a potential object of desire before.

Francis Ford Coppola’s 2000 remake of the film sets the events of the film again in the Victorian era, positioning the vampire as a figure of erotic sexuality at war with repressed Victorian mores. But Coppola’s Dracula is more about romance than sex—this Dracula is motivated by longing. Adding a subplot missing from Stoker’s novel, the filmmaker made Dracula a figure of intense romantic melancholy: Both his immortality and his vampirism seem to be caused by a broken heart after the death of his wife hundreds of years previous. (Vampirism and heartbreak have been connected before in fiction, but rarely quite so explicitly.) Dracula’s need for blood is an explicit need for life and rebirth, for love and humanity (though the stolid legal clerk played by Keanu Reeves quickly twigs to the vampiric nature of the ladies inhabiting Dracula’s castle with no more than their wanton sexuality to go on—vampires, in other words, are quickly identifiable by their unusually high level of physical attractiveness).

There is, of course, more to the world of screen vampires than the Count. Shortly after Coppola’s Dracula came out, another vampire movie was released, one that ramped up the presentation of the vampire as romantic object and sex symbol: Interview with the Vampire , based on the Anne Rice book by the same name. The vampires of Interview are stylish bad boys who haunt the nights of antebellum New Orleans, feeding on the beautiful and lost. Oceans of lace spill from their wrists and they have attractive, pearly fangs. You get the sense they’re more afraid of leaving the house without perfect hair than they are of sunlight or crosses. These vampires fear damnation, though—they’re essentially lonely, cut off from humanity, and believe themselves to be cursed. They’re able to fall in love and form romantic attachments, even with humans, though their love takes the form of turning those humans into fellow vampires—who are not always happy with the result. Whether they’d make good boyfriends is somewhat up for debate—they’re certainly attractive, and seem like the sort of boyfriends who would bring flowers and recite poetry, but their love almost always ends in doom and a messy death.

So what do we learn from all this? Vampires are depressed. They’re positively emo. Even though they have everlasting life and good looks, none of them ever seem very happy about it. At least until you get to The Lost Boys, which presents the vampire as party boy. The eponymous boys of the title are a group of California vampire teens whose motto is, “Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It’s fun to be a vampire.” And it is fun. This is the vampire as ultimate juvenile delinquent—they spend their time razzing cops, riding motorcycles on the beach, and jumping off bridges with their ’80s rocker hair flying. Oh, and occasionally they eat somebody. If Edward had this much fun all the time, which I have to admit it doesn’t sound like he does from what I’ve heard, I’d say Bella should stay with him. Especially if he also wears a feather earring like David, the leader of the Lost Boys. The Lost Boys are eventually dispatched by the Frog brothers, a duo of ordinary teenagers who’ve picked up their vampire-killing pointers through exhaustive comic book research (at one point they read a comic book called Vampires Everywhere, urging a cohort to consider it a “survival manual”). They use Super Soakers full of holy water to put the vampires down. The real downside here is that the one female member of the Lost Boys, Star, never seems to have any fun—she has to drink blood out of a bottle and doesn’t get to ride a motorcycle on the beach. Instead she stays home, dusting the lair. I’d say that the members of the Lost Boys would make pretty good boyfriends except that they clearly don’t know how to take a lady’s needs into account. Girls want to have fun, too.

So what can we learn from all this tireless horror movie-watching? Well, Aunt Charlotte has a view, but she doesn’t think you’re going to like it. Then again, that’s why she’s the advice columnist and you’re not. Both vampires and werewolves, it seems, are intensely romantic figures, though in different ways. The werewolf is tied to the cycles of life, the earth, and the moon. Werewolves are very much a part of nature, and as such are deeply in touch with their animal selves. They’re fierce, feral—and dangerous. Vampires, on the other hand, being immortal, have wrenched themselves free of life’s natural cycles and stand very much apart, inhabiting almost another plane of existence. They’re distant, romantic, cold—and also dangerous.

It’s too late for Bella now, of course—not that her life’s turned out too badly—but the lesson to be learned from all this is that if she had wanted to stay safe, she should have dated neither a vampire nor a werewolf, but found herself a nice human boy. Preferably one who already knew about the supernatural. One great truth we absorb from movies is that geeky boys who read comic books have a lot of useful knowledge in the clutch—they know how to fend off not just vampires and werewolves, but presumably mummies, zombies, and even Frankenstein’s monster. In the end, they’re your best bet to stay alive and get to college. Whoever pays for it.

Cassandra Clare was born in Tehran and spent much of her childhood traveling the world with a suitcase full of books. She now lives in New York City, whose urban landscapes inspired her New York Times bestselling young adult fantasy novel City of Bones. You can also find her work in the upcoming young adult anthologies Geektastic and Vacations from Hell. She prefers vampires to werewolves.