The Vampire Subculture, folk just got queerer!!!

Now I’m an open minded kind of guy, I don’t really like to knock the beliefs, interests or ethics of other people, as the old saying goes ‘there is nout queerer than folk. Society is comprised of a myriad of personalities and in a world dominated by the worldwide web it is now easier than ever for people with common interest to meet and form communities.

Now despite being an atheist I have a bit of an interest in the supernatural, you know the shit that just makes your skin crawl. Now let me just establish I don’t believe in ghosts, ghouls or entities at least I don’t believe in them as the spirits of the deceased, behind every myth I believe there is a rational answer based on science and often the true answer can be more mind bogglingly interesting than the actual myth, still though these supposed true stories scare the shit out of me. So any way some times late at night I find myself trawling www.youtube.com looking for documentaries on ‘real life’ hauntings and other weird stuff. Anything that will prompt me to want to turn on the hallway light as I’m going to bed, then do the old Mohamed Ali trick of turning the light off and getting in bed before the room goes dark (I never succeed, I only end up pissing off my fiancée as I  inevitably end up kicking her or bumping her in some way). It was on one such evening foray that I stumbled across a video purporting to be about ‘real vampires’ ummm scary shit I know, intrigued I delved in unsure of what I would discover.

Frederic Nietzsche wrote ‘If you gaze long enough into the abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you’. This was a lot like my experience of discovering the Vampire Subculture. Despite my misgivings and almost instantaneous cynicism towards this subculture, I had to delve deeper. Before long I was consumed by the sanguine abyss. As I stated before I do not like knocking the beliefs and interests of others, but on this occasion I’m making an exception to that rule. This has to be the oddest, most vacuous and superficial movement I have ever come across I honestly cannot see how it benefits any of it’s practitioners or members it’s very strange and frankly just pop culture inspired clap trap.

However this is what I’ve managed to glean from the interviews, documentaries and websites I have ‘blundered’ onto.

• Its not a form of Satanism, apparently these so called vampires like to follow the righteous path and have their own kind of code that they try and ‘live’ by. This code is known as the Black Veil and is comprised of five principles:

 1. Law: Living Vampires are not criminals and remain within the boundaries of mortal corporeal laws.

2. Adults: Living Vampirism is reserved for the adult mind.  No minors shall be
formally initiated into the Family.
3. Blood: Living Vampires see Blood as a Metaphor for something far more subtle and do not drink of corporeal blood.
4. Quest: Living Vampires respect free will of all sentient beings and never proselytize, only inspire.
5. Secrets: What happens within the Family remains within the Family. Secrets bind and protect the Living Vampire.

So yeah, some quite interesting principles there, to be fair to them most are quite common sense, if you are going to have principles for a religion based on make believe creatures, at least make sure they are grounded. However some of these principles contradict certain aspects of this subculture, I will discuss this later. Also at this point I feel the need to add that these principles are completely at odds with the traditional concept of what a vampire actually is.

 Most people will be familiar with Vampires as portrayed in modern culture. Dracula will come to mind straight away, closely followed by Interview with a Vampire, True Blood and for the screaming teenage girls out there Twilight. The development of the Vampire in western culture has gone from monstrous creature of the night to tortured hero. The original Vampire of European folklore was a very different beast from what now graces our cinema screens. These things were wretched creatures that stank of grave soil, they were bloated with the blood of their victims and sported long dagger like nails; in short these things were fucking predators, one up on the food chain from us. This in a way is what annoys me most about this subculture come religion, their version of vampirism is based on the romantic and therefore the convenient. Why not get closer to the root of the vampire tradition? Well the answer to this is they can’t because like the rest of humanity they are little more than sheep, albeit sheep dressed in wolves clothing. They may feel empowered by their gothic clothing and prosthetic fangs, but this empowerment is merely an illusion, amongst their inner circle, yeah, they will feel a part of something, but on the tube/bus home they will stand out like a saw thumb and inevitably be preyed upon by societies real predators (I’m going to say chavs) , if not physically then at least verbally. Thus the ‘great predator’ becomes little more than an isolated individual in a Halloween costume, on the wrong night of the year.  I have digressed and I apologise.
So what else did I find out, back to the bullet points folks!!!

·         There are apparently three kinds of Vampire in this subculture (honestly its like reading the fucking D&D monster manual):

1.      Sanguinarians, this type feeds on blood apparently. Now aside from this being a, Dangerous b, Nasty and c, plain weird I take further issue with this grim little practice. Principle no.3 of ‘The Black Veil’ states quite firmly blood is seen as a metaphor and no corporeal blood is partaken of. Well this statement is clearly null and void as ‘Sanguinarians’ are defined by their consummation of the good old Kensington Gore (fans of Hammer Horror will get this reference). In fact there are videos of this practice on discovery channel documentaries (yeah NatGeo did a whole expo on this shit).

2.      Psychic Vampires or Psi’s for short, eurgh this one is just plain nonsense. The very concept of it is ephemeral and like the skin of an old fish wife completely translucent and without substance. Apparently this type feed off ‘psychic’ energies (oooo the energies, the energies!!!) they drain this ‘energy’ from a persons aura and believe that it helps repair damaged chakra’s. As an atheist I have to scoff at this, on principle, energy ffs.

3.      Then there are hybrids, a mixture of both Psi’s and Sanguinarians. So essentially double the nonsense.

·         The figurehead of this subculture is a guy called Don Henrie, (he was the subject of the NatGeo documentary I was talking about) he styles himself as the Vampire Emperor (I never knew the undead were imperialistic, or had an Empire, cant see them having much of an economic policy really). He is apparently a hybrid (well he’d have to be right) a celibate and apparently has distanced himself from secular society in order to pursue priestly activities and the study of different religions (I cant really fault this, as nothing is greater than the pursuit of knowledge). Doing a quick web search it also appears that Don was an electronics engineer prior to his TV career that, he is also Gothic and alternate clothing model (I have to wonder if he was a ‘vampire’ during his engineer career, maybe something harrowing happened meh I dunno).

·         Some members of the Vampire Subculture believe they need human blood to survive. Don Henrie himself has said on many shows that I he feels a need for blood, some also maintain that they have an aversion towards sunlight. Again Don Henrie has stated he gets sun sickness very easily.

·         Many Vampires belong to covens; however they lead quite solitary lives outside the coven.

·         There are a circle of donors who provide blood for the vampires, they are heavily screened.

·         The general consensus among Vampire is that they are just another breed of human, just like there are many different breeds of cats and dogs.

Ok I’m going to have to stop here, or else I’m going to be at this all night and that abyss I was talking about earlier is threatening to devour me body and what ever passes for the atheist version of a soul. As you can probably tell from the information I have put up, this subculture is fucking cracked.

Now yeah I understand that it’s an outlet for people with strange almost fetishist interest in Vampires . That’s not what bothers me, what bothers me is that this subculture/religion is nothing but an extreme emulation of modern fiction, its theatre played out on a stage of documentaries and reality shows. A superficial psychodrama enacted for the entire world to see, it uses shock value as its main hook enticing people in to be revolted or enthralled. It enlightens no one, conformists are repulsed by it, intelligent people will mock or simply ignore it and all the while the practitioners will sit back feeling elevated by the fact that they are more enlightened than those around them who scoff and regard them as simple freaks. Well I’ll be honest Vampire people, I don’t think you are freaks and that’s the issue, if you were freaks I could forgive you. You are just like everyone else, striving pitifully for that precious fifteen minutes of fame, you are the kid who eats worms in the play ground, only you have swapped worms for haemoglobin and when the cameras shutter closes nothing is left but makeup and prosthesis. You will never be true Vampires because if literature and legend has taught us anything about these supernatural beings, the power of the Vampire comes from its ability to blend in, to transform, and to be hidden, there is a lesson in that somewhere and lesson we could all learn from

Anyway, I hope this has given some insight and provoked some thought. I’ll add links for those who wish to delve deeper. Good Night!!!

http://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=don+henrie+vampire&aq=1&oq=don+henr

http://www.sanguinarium.net/

The Kids Aint Alright!!!

 I’ll warn you this is going to be a rant, but before the inevitable vitriol starts seeping through my pores like some kind of venomous ichor let me take you back, back to 1993. A little film was released about Dinosaurs, you may have heard of it, Jurassic Park I believe it was called. At the time of its release I was 6 years old and well Dinosaurs were my life, I had books, toys, board games and mugs, so as you can imagine when I saw a review of the film on the long extinct show, Movies, Games and Videos (if any readers remember this show, 10 nostalgia points.!) I jumped for joy, it was a must see. Luckily the film was a PG so my mother and my auntie took me and my three cousins to go and see it at the local Odeon and so began my love of film. Seeing these larger than life creatures alive on screen simply blew me away and along with my cousins I stayed routed to my seat until the end credits rolled.

 Note that I said me and my cousins stayed routed to our seats until the credit sequence, the four of us were between the ages of 4 and 9 with only two adults to mind us, yet still we stayed firmly in our seats and at no point did we utter as much as a word. All of us knew this was a rare treat, an experience to be savoured and enjoyed and we were grateful for it. Nowadays this just does not seem to be the case; the spectacle of the Cinema seems to be completely lost on children. On more than one occasion now I have gone to see a film rated between PG-12A and I have had my experience utterly ruined by the following:

1. A screaming child
2. A group of screaming children
3. A child on a mobile phone
4. A child running around the screen
5. A child kicking my seat repeatedly
6. An unruly parent screaming at an unruly child
7. A mixture of all of the above

 Now I know what some of you may be thinking, if you don’t want to endure this kind of crap then don’t watch kids movies. To this I reply, well just because a film is PG-12A doesn’t mean it’s just for kids (hell Watership Down is a U rating and about bunnies and that shit is fucking harsh). The certificate is a reflection of the films content; Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus for example is PG but a kid’s film it aint. But even then what if it was a kids film? Harry Potter for example started life as a book aimed squarely at children, yet the adult following is vast. The cold fact of the matter is that when all is said and done I have paid between £6 and £7 of my hard earned money to immerse myself in the cinema experience. Frankly it is hard to enjoy or immerse oneself if there is an unruly cretin of a four year old using the seat next you as a trampoline, wailing like a fucking banshee, as his mother snaffles her way through a pack of revels, completely oblivious to the anti Christ she has inflicted on the world.

So to all those cinemas out there I beg you, please make straight jackets and muzzles compulsory for under 15 screenings, either that or just hobble the children on entry.

Note: This rant was inspired by that little bastard that ruined my enjoyment of Transformers: Dark of the Moon…..If you are reading this, Santa is dead, Optimus Prime killed him.

.

So here I am!!!

So this is the first in what I hope to be many blog entries, I say this but frankly due to my changeable (some would say capricious) nature this may well be the only entry I make, we shall see.

So what should you expect, the title may fool you into thinking this is a historical blog, well I'm sorry to disappoint but this is not that kind of blog. The title "Built for the Dark Age" is simply an insight into my sometimes barbaric alcohol fuelled nature, a few bottles of my choice tipple and I'm a regular Attila the Hun. What you can expect is film reviews, random musings and the odd rant, original I know!!!

So peruse, enjoy and comment