Otto Penzler’s new The Vampire Archives is a 900-page tome overflowing with stories of blood-sucking horror. The collection of tales is expansive, ranging from pre-Dracula 19th century legends to vampire stories told by modern masters. With teen-friendly vampires popping up everywhere these days, this collection of seriously terrifying stories, including contributions from Stephen King, Edgar Allen Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, comes along just in time. New York Press caught up with Mr. Penzler to ask him a few questions about the walking dead. In your introduction you write about how numerous cultures from all around the world have their own vampire stories. What is it about the vampire legend that makes it so universal?
For many cultures, it is touched with enough truth—real bats, for example—and the universal fear of some supernatural horror that fills story-telling. Vampires are not always in the form described by Bram Stoker, as you will see in The Vampire Archives. Ghosts are universal, too, and so are zombies and ghouls—the living dead.
Vampires are enjoying a big reawakening in pop culture in the last few years, why do you think this is?
Vampires come into vogue cyclically. In the 1970s, remember, there was a huge readership for Stephen King's Salem's Lot and the novels of Anne Rice, and a great TV audience for Dark Shadows. In the 1960s, it was the films of Christopher Lee. In the 1930s, Bela Lugosi. They never really go away. Clearly, this avalanche was begun by Stephanie Myers and piled on by Charlaine Harris, where we have the perfect storm of books, movies and television. Vampires now are very different from the truly chilling monsters of the 19th century and early part of this one. I think they now appeal to women and girls, especially, because, let's face it, they're good-looking, well-mannered, even romantic. Compared to these girls' male peers, a bunch of losers who spend their lives hanging out at the mall or playing video games with backwards baseball caps and baggy pants, of course a cool vampire is going to have appeal. He's pretty much the perfect love interest—except for that one slightly disturbing flaw of being a blood-sucking creature.
Do you prefer the romanticized version of vampires or the more modern brutal and bloody depiction?
I don't agree with the premise. Most popular modern vampires aren't brutal. But I don't like brutal and bloody depictions of anyone or anything. I'm too much of a wimp to watch the Saw movies, for example, and I think the people who enjoy the Halloween and Friday the 13th films are idiots.
In terms of just pure terror, which is the scariest vampire story you have ever heard?
It's unfair, because it was the first, but Dracula (perhaps a bit slow-moving for contemporary readers) scared the living bejeesus out of me. But I defy anyone to read Gahan Wilson's The Sea Was Wet as Wet Could Be or Everil Worrell's The Canal and not want to turn the lights up a bit.
What would you say are the best and worst vampire movies you've seen?
Nosferatu, a German silent, was so creepy that it still, 30 years after seeing it for the first time, gives me the shudders. But, also, it's obvious, but the Bela Lugosi version of Dracula remains fabulous, even if at times a trifle hokey. I thought I should watch Twilight but couldn't last, which is understandable because I'm not the audience for which it was made. I am not, thankfully, a 14-year-old girl.
