Dispatches from the New Yorker Festival.
VAMPIRES VERSUS ZOMBIES
Forget vampires, zombies, and blood-soaked prom-goers�Stephen King�s earliest memory of horror films was the forest fire scene in �Bambi.�
�The Disney pictures are scary as shit,� he announced on Saturday afternoon at the �The Vampire Revival.�
His fellow panelists agreed: Melissa Rosenberg, who�s adapted Stephenie Meyer�s �Twilight� books for the screen, added �Fantasia,� and Matt Reeves, the director of �Let Me In� and �Cloverfield,� admitted that he always had to close his eyes during the �Pirates of the Caribbean� ride. But the subject at hand wasn�t forest creatures or animatronic drunks. No�l Carroll, a CUNY professor and author of �The Philosophy of Horror,� and moderator and staff writer Joan Acocella joined this group to discuss sex, gore, and the characters on which they usually intersect these days: vampires.
When Stephen King released �Salem�s Lot� in 1975, vampires were so out of fashion that the publisher didn�t want to mention them on the jacket flap. In recent decades, a few pop-culture phenomenon��Buffy� a decade ago, �Twilight� now�have brought waves of fans (read: teen-age girls) back to the genre.
These vampires are lost souls, Carroll said, the type that women long to make their �projects.� The sex, King pointed out, is invariably adolescent��they just want to bite the girl�s neck��and Rosenberg elaborated: the self-loathing Edward from �Twilight� is �actually very safe, because of his own morality.� King asked if there was a parallel between maintaining abstinence and not wanting to suck her blood? Rosenberg didn�t miss a beat: �Absolutely.�
King was quick to highlight the Christianity of the undead: zombies eat the body, vampires drink the blood. And then he turned to the inevitable question: when the zombie apocalypse arrives, which of the two would win? In a room full of vampire fans, King was impressively confident: zombies. They use the whole body, after all.
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