Vampires are one of, if not the single most iconic monsters in media. The blood-sucking immortals have been stalking the night for hundreds of years in folklore, but were cemented into the public zeitgeist by the endlessly influential Dracula. They’ve been adapted hundred, if not thousands of times into every form of media imaginable, and that definitely includes comic books. Superheroes are very familiar with the concept of vampirism, and plenty of iconic heroes, from Jubilee to Miles Morales, have spent at least some time as an undead pariah. However, even though vampires are endlessly iconic examples of terror, their comic book counterparts have lost that sauce and gotten boring.
Thankfully, the X-Men have provided the perfect solution to this. Midnight-X-Men is a dark, alternate reimagining of the X-Men, pitting mutants and humans against creatures of the night in both vampires and empyres, mutants transformed into vampires. The first issue has dropped and given us a look into this world, and for the first time in years, I’ve found the comic book vampires to be genuinely terrifying. The reason, simply, is that they actually treat the vampires like monsters.
The ultimate problem with the depiction of vampires in comics is that they come from a genre that clashes with the standard. Superhero stories, at their core, are power fantasies, and a huge factor in good horror is cultivating a sense of powerlessness in its main cast. Horror thrives on the unknown and the protagonists being unable to physically overpower it, forcing them to either flee or desperately out-think their enemy. Superheroes, meanwhile, deal with horrifying monstrosities like they’re minor inconveniences. Horror monsters are built around being problems, and superheroes are the ultimate narrative problem solvers. It’s very, very easy for horror creatures to inevitably fall into the trap of being depicted like any other supervillain, which only cheapens them and makes them anything but terrifying.
Superhero horror comics can definitely work. The premier examples are Alan Moore’s Saga of the Swamp Thing and most runs following John Constantine, but they need to ride a very thin line between making sure the horror maintains a powerless, anxious atmosphere without overpowering the ideals that the superheroes are built on. Too far in one direction makes the horror become mundane, and the other way usually involves mischaracterization for the heroes, or makes the horror feel cheap because it goes so much against how these characters typically react and fight.
Vampires, as the pinnacle of horror monsters in pop culture, are hit especially hard by this difficult-to-manage dichotomy. Vampire stories are already fighting an uphill battle with just how much fans know about them, their exploitable weaknesses, and how many vampires stories they’ve seen. Nothing makes horror lose it’s punch like repetition, after all. We’ve seen this in the X-Men, even. Dracula is a mainstay villain in Marvel Comics, and his battle against the X-Men, even when he turned Jubilee into a blood-sucking creature of the night, it was never horrifying. Midnight X-Men changed all of this.
The biggest problem with vampires in comics is, in essence, one of the biggest problems of long-running comics in general: everyone knows them and everyone expects the way their stories go. Midnight X-Men has completely flipped the script on this. In one issue alone we’ve been brought into a whole new world of vampire fiction, seamlessly blending with the established lore of the X-Men. We learn that empyres are the next stage in evolution for vampires, and just as tensions have risen between humans thinking mutants will replace them, vampires aim to keep empyres from doing the same. Of course, empyres are endlessly powerful, bloodthirsty renditions of our favorite mutant heroes.
The story first establishes stakes by showing that nobody is safe. Storm, Gambit, and Psylocke are some of the most popular X-Men around, but they’ve all been turned, and every other X-Man but Cyclops and Nightcrawler appears to have died. Knowing that anyone can die or be turned at any time naturally creates tension. The second biggest strength is how it uses pre-established lore of both vampires and mutants to elevate this new reality. Vampires are known to need to sleep in their coffins, but here they use high-tech renditions of the concept. The Phoenix was killed, but Hope Summers, the mutant messiah, has arrived just when things are at their darkest.
Vampires are an old, established part of this world, and the story takes the time to treat them as such instead of having them appear from the shadows out of nowhere. Letting them be an old threat helps them feel more real and the world more lived-in, as naturally humanity would notice these types of centuries-old monsters. The biggest addition, however, is how it tied the vampires to an emotionally wrought storyline. Nightcrawler loves Storm, and even though she is know queen of the undead, she still loves him, and both are taking steps to ensure the other survives. Letting Storm choose to not turn him adds so much tension, because she clearly could but chooses not to, and Nightcrawler both works for the Church and longs to see Storm cured.
Even the classic X-Men dream of coexistance has been reimagined around vampires, and that makes them feel powerful, important, and, most of all, terrifying. These monsters have taken the world we know and irrevocably changed it, leaving the survivors to pick up the pieces. Every X-Man is perfectly in character thus far as they mount their meager resistances, but even with just one issue alone, the power of the empyres feels inescapable for them as they are. The tension in this book is at the forefront, and that’s the scariest part of all.
What do you think of the empyres thus far, and how do they compare to vampires in other comics? Let us know in the comments below!
