Interview with a Vampire Expert

Think you know vampires just because you watch Twilight or True Blood? Think again.

Well before the latest vampire rage, horror journalist and writer extraordinaire Katherine Ramsland was hanging out with real life, pointy toothed, blood drinking vampires. She wrote about the experience in her 1999 book, Piercing the Darkness. Digital Dying spoke with her about her scariest moments, what draws her to the dark side and why vampires are so much better than zombies.

Who becomes a vampire?

I went into the vampire subculture ten years ago. There were hundreds of people, some had jobs, some didn’t. Some were architects, some were stock brokers, some were attorneys, some were college kids. It was a fad back in the 1990s, like Twilight is a fad today. They were drinking blood but not everybody was drinking blood, that isn’t really what they were in it for. It was a role playing game. They used to play games where someone would imitate one of Anne Rice’s vampires, for example. Some people were interested in how creative it was, they loved the costuming and the parties and the vampire balls. Others were looking for support because they felt marginalized. Others were looking for power. Others were in it to pick up girls.

Where did these vampires live?

Most of what I do is in New York City. It’s a place where a lot of people come together. It certainly draws artistic types, so you have a lot of people who already feel that they don’t fit into mainstream society. Same as in places like Los Angeles and Las Vegas. Big cities present a venue for being able to establish clubs where people will come on a regular basis. Almost every big city in the nineties had at least one big club that catered to vampires at least one night a week. They refer to other people as mundanes, and that’s exactly right. Why live a mundane life, when you can live the glorious rich exotic sexy life of a vampire?

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Is eternal life part of the attraction?

They don’t all believe vampires are immortal. That’s a dictionary archetype, it doesn’t play out in actual vampire culture. They are looking more for the charisma, the art, the secrecy. It’s more that they are gifted in some vampiric way. The whole thing about seeing themselves in mirrors and being immortal, that’s of less interest to them.

What’s the scariest experience you had in reporting Piercing the Darkness?

I met one man in the middle of the woods. He talked about murdering people, and said he had a partner. I kept thinking, where is the partner? I started the book on the trail of a missing reporter who was involved with people in the vampire subculture. She left home one day and didn’t come back, and she still hasn’t come back. And so here I was on the trail of a vampire, down south. I met him in an area that was unfamiliar to me. And he started to talk about having this partner and how they killed people together. I don’t know why he started telling that to me. Maybe because he wanted to be in a book, maybe because he actually murdered people. I don’t know.

What’s the difference between the vampire trend then and now?

I see a lot of people talking about the big vampire craze but actually in the nineties it was much bigger than it is now. There are many less people now who actually think they are vampires. You have to make a distinction between the vampire fiction and TV shows and the people who really consider themselves vampires. In fact, at the end of each decade since the 1960s vampires have been big. In the late 1960s there was Dark Shadows, (a gothic soap opera that was recently turned into a movie), in the late 1970s we had Anne Rice and Stephen King. There was a big vampire boom in the late 1980s, and again, the end of the 1990s was huge. Then in the late 2000s we got Twilight.

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Why are vampires so much better than zombies?

The vampire is a pretty elastic image, it can do a lot of things, much more than a zombie. Vampires are definitely deeper than zombies in terms of how they speak about something in our psyche. You find the vampire image in most world cultures; self-empowerment, using another person’s resources. We see that all around us. There are lots of vampires feeding off of these images. Vampires are powerful, vampires are exotic, vampires are sexy. I personally don’t believe zombies are sexy at all. Vampires can stay up all night, they can command the elements, things like that. What’s a zombie but a possessed person ambling around looking to eat brains.

You have also written books about ghosts, cemeteries and serial killers, what draws you to these dark worlds?

I guess I just like dark psychology. At least at that time it was an arena not that many people had explored. I like going into arenas where I am going to be a pioneer, where I am looking into things and meeting people who normally lie in the shadows—I have a blog called Shadow Boxing. I think I have always been fascinated by that. I have had success with it and I have met a lot of interesting people. I have no interest in, for example, health psychology and everything being happy and cheery.

Does your interest in dark shadows stem from a fascination with death?

I don’t try to solve my own mysteries. Certainly death is part of everything I do. I don’t, for example, pursue the ghost stuff because I want some loved one to come back or because I want to know if life continues. I don’t care if it does or doesn’t. It’s not about some personal thing I need to resolve, it’s more clinical. Probably, I like to stay near death topics because I think there is more honesty there. And I enjoy all the customs that revolve around this thing that we are all so scared of.