by Frida Future
featured image is Frida Future (2021)
Over the summer, I did an artist residency in Florida with my dear friend and longtime collaborator Sarah Penello. Every day we painted and wrote, filling our sweet little bungalow with productive creativity. We went to the beach, did yoga, practiced cartwheels and handstands every day. We picked fruits and vegetables straight from the garden and consumed them in lovingly home-cooked meals. it was all very wholesome…
At First.
As summer wore on, our art monk routine began to crack. Netflix and HBO began to creep in.
(Artists can have a little TV, as a treat!)
A single episode of a cartoon while we ate, or a classic movie for background noise. Sarah had recently uncovered her pre-teen cache of Anne Rice novels (the complete Vampire Chronicles, plus more) and so was reading them at the beach. One evening she suggested that we watch the 1994 film adaptation of “Interview with a Vampire” as we painted. I’d seen it before, I thought it would be perfect white noise for plugging away at more important work.
Rather than tuning out the film as familiar background fodder, I was transfixed. I fell in love with Tom Cruise’s foppish Lestat de Lioncourt, and was moved to tears by the tragic fate of Brad Pitt’s Louis de Pointe du Lac.
Like the eternally childlike vampire Claudia, I wanted some more.
Soon we attempted to watch Queen of the Damned and enjoyed ridiculing the entire production (except for precious Aaliyah), and we reveled in the other side of vampire media, the B and C stuff, the cheesy nonsense that doesn’t strike the same chord of terror or turn us on. In Queen, the Vampire Lestat becomes a clown, his aura of power popped by our delighted derision.
Unlike Sarah (who is probably the Gay Witch she is today because she imprinted on Anne Rice and Buffy the Vampire Slayer before puberty) I never went through a vampire phase. Too old for Twilight, more a Harry Potter kind of child, my fantasy tastes trended more nerdy and mystical.
But now I was hooked. We devoured 7 seasons of True Blood in just over a month. I was caught in a mesmerizing wave of magic and melodrama. By the end of the summer we were certifiable Scholars of Vampiric Media, cross-analyzing different mythologies and canons, asking important questions such as, “Can Vampires go to Space/ the Bottom of the Ocean?” as much as we were engaging with our original projects. We had envisioned our artist residency at La Casa Aqua as an opportunity to co-create a body of work for publication and a gallery show. And now, we wanted to give all of our attention to this burgeoning obsession with vampires.
But why?
What is it about vampires that so captivates us?
We find ourselves in a world that constantly focuses on positivity, perhaps to a toxic degree. We champion our own good intentions and are encouraged to find the silver linings of everything. We favor any attempt to see ourselves as heroic, identifying with the most epic protagonists.
The vampire is the antagonist, the dark side, the taboo and grotesque and Evil Other. However, since they’re so darn urbane and good looking most of the time… the vampire is a monster we can root for. Aplayful opportunity to see ourselves in the bad guys, the murderers, the denizens of forbidden sex and lust and hungers.
During the conscious day we focus on our intentions, choose positive mantras, meditate, become better than we are. We grow and heal with such ferocious determination that often we find ourselves burnt out, struck frozen by questions of our adequacy or worthiness to the epically important task at hand of Becoming What We’re Supposed to Be.
Bingeing on vampire media, staying up late to revel in romanticized bloodlust seems antithetical to the pressing project of Personal Growth. To fantasize about where one might fall on the vampire spectrum (from the sexy and tragic to the mindless and demonic), or ponder the relative sense of how one becomes a vampire from one story to the next is to disconnect entirely from a wretched swirling horror of the real world (currently: plague and division and alienation from humanity) and engage with the world of play, literature, art, history, and creation.
It’s not dissociation, though – it’s deliberate engagement with an equally important part of myself – my inner child. My innately creative and irreverent self. The ID who wants to simply enjoy and delight. I found this healing and nutritive – funny contrast to the seemingly dark and draining experiences of those in the vampire tales.
It’s like – we’re being drained in real life. We’re being torn apart, pitted against each other, consumed by dark forces. Yet rather than succumb to the horror of that swirling drama, we turn inward, cocooned in our homes, cocooned in our creative minds, playing with that dark force, rendering it comical and harmless by giving it long white fangs and threats* of endless lust.
*(Don’t threaten me with a good time!)
in From Dusk Til Dawn, Robert Rodriguez (1996)
We can not live on light alone. A healthy, playful relationship with the dark is necessary to live in balance and continue to grow, actually. Seeds grow in the dark. Some plants only bloom in moonlight.
Cyclicality plays an important part in all this.
We’re not meant for endless expansion, we cannot only exist in the light.
We must go to the dark, and lie fallow, so that we may rise again.
Frida Future:
