Of all monstrous children in horror films addressed to adults, the most monstrous and horrific of all is arguably the child-vampire. Perhaps indicative of this is that filmic representations of child-vampires are often memorable but surprisingly rare in US adult horror cinema, especially in comparison to other forms of monstrous children.9 Of the few
9 The Internet Movie Database (IMDb) only contains fifteen feature films tagged with the key phrase
‘child vampire’ (IMDb, 2016a), compared with fifty-four results for feature films tagged with the key phrase ‘ghost child’ (IMDb, 2016b), forty-three tagged with ‘zombie child’ (IMDb, 2016c), and eighty-
120 representations of child-vampires in US adult horror, two of the most exemplary are Homer (Joshua Miller) in Near Dark (Bigelow, 1987) and Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) in Interview with the Vampire (Jordan, 1994). It may be precisely due to the uncomfortable juxtaposition of the child and the vampire that their representations on film are so infrequent. The vampire cannot be completely divorced from either of its two defining qualities – violence and sexuality – which are also inexorably linked by the acts of biting and bloodsucking, which Jeffrey Weinstock describes as ‘part seduction and part rape’ (2012: 7).10 The juxtaposition
of the innately violent and sexual nature of the vampire with the Romantic notion of the child is therefore one of utter horror.
While it is argued in the introduction of this chapter that children are inherently monstrous because they are metamorphic, ever-changing and unruly beings, it is conversely because the child-vampire’s body is static that they are considered monstrous. As discussed by Lisa Cunningham in reference to Claudia in Interview, the child-vampire has a ‘culturally unacceptable body. The union of [their] age and “innocence” is incompatible with the required violence of vampirism’ (2015: 215). The fact that child-vampires often have static, eternally child-like minds is also cause for discomfort. Unlike adult vampires, who Alexis Finnerty argues are immoral, but are aware of this immorality and can show regret or restraint, the child-vampire is ‘amoral; their unintentional cruelty results from moral ignorance, rather than malicious intent’ (2014: 159). The dangerous combination of hunger, violence and a childish ignorance and lack of restraint is exemplified by Claudia, who is described by the narrator and protagonist of Interview, Louis (Brad Pitt), as being ‘capable of the ruthless pursuit of blood with all a child’s demanding’. Claudia also manipulates her doubly threatening outward façade of childhood innocence and girlish vulnerability to draw
six tagged with ‘evil child’ (IMDb, 2016d). Though these results are not necessarily exhaustive, they are indicative of the lack of representations of child-vampires on film.
10 The innately sexual nature of the vampire is explored in further detail in Chapter Four in relation
121 in unassuming human adult victims. According to Nina Auerbach, this ability to be ‘deceptively cute’ makes children ‘the most successful vampires of all’ (1995: 191).
This deceptive innocence also applies to Near Dark’s Homer, but unlike Claudia he is unsettling not because he combines violent bloodlust with a childish naiveté and moral ignorance, but because his mind has aged despite his static childish appearance; as he describes himself, he is ‘a big man inside of a small body’. Homer shocks by swearing, referring to sex, smoking, gambling and killing humans with callous nonchalance, thus causing equal discomfort and humour due his unsettling juxtaposition of outward childish innocence with inward adult crassness and immorality. While the adult vampire ‘troubles our construction of humanity’ through its blurring of the monster and the human and the living and the dead, and other forms of monstrous children blur the distinction between adult and child, the child-vampire is triply unnerving because it blurs all three of these distinctions at once (Moore, 2016: 138).
It is possible that the concept of the child-vampire is so horrible for adult audiences to contemplate that it that remains almost unrepresentable on film. Even within the films which do contain these representations, the concept of the child-vampire is horrific even to adult vampires, and they are often killed before the narrative conclusion. Claudia is killed in
Interview because adult vampires consider it forbidden to make a child-vampire; this is partially because her unrestrained bloodlust led her to kill another vampire, which is considered a crime in vampiric society, and partially because she is stuck in the body of a child, making her helpless and reliant on adult vampires to survive. Homer’s death in Near Dark is a direct result of his desire to turn another child into a vampire to be his companion and, it is implied, his lover. In his desperation he pursues a human girl, and in so doing exposes himself to sunlight which causes him to combust into flames and die. In his death, therefore, two figures are ‘saved’ from the unconscionable fate of child-vampirism.
122 The fates of Claudia and Homer reveal another aspect of discomfort caused by child- vampires, which is that although they are monsters they are also tragic victims who have had their innocence and their ability to age into adults stolen from them. This paradox – that child-vampires are both ‘not children’ because they have lost their innocence, and yet not adults either – speaks to the schizophrenic conceptions of children and childhood outlined in the introduction of this chapter: children as both devils and angels, and childhood as a time of innocence that should be preserved, but also merely a preparatory developmental stage to be passed through or ‘endured’ on the way to adulthood. The context provided by the above discussion of the representations of child-vampires in adult horror is crucial to understanding the ways in which children’s horror films attempt to tread the line between taming the child-vampire without ‘de-fanging’ it completely.
Twilight’s ‘de-fanged’ vampires
Before discussing children’s horror, the films of The Twilight Saga should be addressed due to their cultural impact, their status as teen films that situate them between adult and children’s cinema, and that the final two films in the series, Breaking Dawn – Part 1 and Part 2 (Condon, 2011 and 2012) concern child-vampirism. In Part 1, the consummation of the marriage of human teenager Bella (Kristen Stewart) and teen-vampire Edward (Robert Pattinson) on their honeymoon results in an unprecedented pregnancy. Tension reminiscent of Rosemary’s Baby is drawn out from the uncertainty regarding how monstrous the unborn half-human-half-vampire will be. Part 2 concerns Edward and Bella trying to protect their child, Renesmee (Mackenzie Foy), from other, antagonistic vampires who believe the creation of child-vampires to be a sin. However, it is clear that Renesmee is not a bloodthirsty and violent child-vampire, but a benevolent hybrid whose only ‘monstrosities’ are that she ages at an abnormally rapid rate and possesses a power to project her thoughts, feelings and memories into the minds of others as images. In this way of transferring her goodness to adults – which is so effective that it convinces the antagonistic vampires that she is not a
123 threat and achieves peace between the warring factions – she can be considered the archetypal Romantic child, despite her quasi-vampiric status, who can redeem the adult (vampire) world.
Although Renesmee stands as an anomaly among the child-vampires discussed above, this needs to be considered in the context of Twilight’s overall treatment of vampirism and its status as a teen series. Unlike the child-vampires in adult horror mentioned above, teen-vampires in teen films are often sympathetic protagonists who survive their films’ narratives. Even in texts in which the teen-vampire characters are killed (e.g. The Lost Boys), vampirism is presented as an appealing alternative to the constraints, responsibilities and mundanity of ordinary mortal life. This has an obvious appeal to teenagers, a liminal group between childhood and adulthood who undergo anxieties such as puberty and negotiating one’s identity and sexuality. Vampirism’s carnivalesque upending of societal norms can also be seen as resonating with teenage restlessness and the desire to defy authority. Indeed, it may be precisely because teenagers are expected to be restless and rebellious that the teen-vampire appears to be more culturally acceptable than the child- vampire. Further, as teenagers (especially filmic teen characters who are often portrayed by adult actors) tend to look more like adults than they do children, the idea of them displaying the sexual and/or violent characteristics of vampirism may not elicit the same anxiety as when children show these tendencies.
Twilight is especially interesting in this regard as it significantly ‘tames’ or ‘de-fangs’ the vampire by reframing its relationship to its two defining characteristics: violence and sex. Edward and his family are moral ‘vegetarian’ vampires who drink the blood of animals and only kill other vampires in self-defence. Although Edward and Bella’s relationship is sexually charged – particularly because of the entanglement of Edward’s lust/love for Bella and his thirst for her blood, resulting in the danger that an innocent kiss could turn into a fatal bite
124 – it remains chaste until they are married in the penultimate film. Emblematic of Twilight’s ‘de-fanged’ depiction of vampires is that their skin sparkles, rather than burns, when exposed to sunlight. As the sparkle is, according to Mary Celeste Kearney, one of ‘the primary signifier[s] of youthful femininity’ (2015: 263) and the Twilight fan base is largely female,
Twilight’s sparkly vampires have become representative of the series’ feminisation and domestication of the vampire and why, for the series’ detractors, Twilight’s vampires are insipid and inferior to ‘traditional’ vampires (Spooner, 2013: 146). The angelic depiction of Renesmee should therefore be taken in the context of Twilight’s highly moral, non-violent and sexually chaste treatment of vampirism, as well as its status as a female-focused teen franchise – a genre in which teen-vampirism is depicted as appealing and freeing, and teen- vampires as sympathetic and ‘more likely to be regarded as a desirable romantic partner than a bloodthirsty killer’ (ibid.). Crucially, as pointed out by Finnerty, Renesmee is also the result of a consensual, post-marriage sexual union between Bella and Edward, meaning she is ‘born of love rather than violence’ (2014: 167). Renesmee therefore ‘did not have a prior life as a human to lose’ and dispels the horror caused by other cinematic child-vampires who are transformed by an act of violence (ibid.). Renesmee is therefore not necessarily an accurate reflection of the degree to which representations of child-vampires have become more culturally acceptable in Western culture. However, Twilight remains important to the wider discussion of child-friendly depictions of vampires and the children’s horror subgenre at large given its phenomenal commercial success which may have resulted in a ‘trickle- down’ effect to children’s media. It is arguable that the Hotel Transylvania films in particular, which also contain benevolent, sympathetic vampires and a human-vampire relationship that produces a half-human-half-vampire child, have Twilight to thank for making these concepts seem acceptable in the mainstream, and thus also in the realm of children’s culture.
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