UPBEAT The Couch

by Bridget Petrella

The vampire is one of the oldest, most resilient archetypes in modern media. It has existed in a variety of forms in nearly every culture around the world. Historically, vampire lore has reflected the values and social structures of the culture it has existed in. In the twentieth century, the United States became the focal point of the vampire genre. As the archetype became integrated into American culture, modern vampire media changed. Several cultural elements were responsible for these alterations. The American people’s relationship with religion and spirituality were important elements of the changes. Also, the American fascination with a variety of scientific theories in the fields of evolutionary, medical and psychological science, were other forces that shaped vampire media in the modern era. Modern concepts of gender and sexuality also contributed to the dynamic alteration that has ultimately occurred within vampire media in the last twenty-five years.

Okay… so I watched every last one of the Buffy The Vampire Slayer DVDs.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which spoke so eloquently to a media-literate savvy, self-aware audience, was witty, sardonic, complex and stylishly self-conscious. It worked on so many levels. It was a take on the horror genre, a soap opera about teenage and young adult angst, a bang-kapow action drama with plenty of fast-and-furious martial arts, and an exploration of modern and traditional storytelling. The scripts were more than just a bit inventive and the plots were always unpredictable, filled with a ton of sharp twists and even sharper turns. Buy the entire boxed DVD set. You’ll inevitably thank me. UB

The continued karmic musings of UPBEAT publisher Bridget Petrella were originally discovered in a Xena fan fiction cave just South of Auckland, New Zealand by a team of crack archaeologists and two Sci-Fi convention groupies (from Texas) in late 1981, ironically, 20 years after her birth, or "rebirth", depending on how you look at it. For the next 20 some odd years, a highly trained team of thirteen Armenians— each of them diligently researching and documenting but never actually communicating with one another— plodded on tirelessly... translating the ancient scrolls from their original Mycenaean format... and so it was eventually uncovered that she was just as wacky and bizarre then as she is now...