Generation V

Saffron Howden & Alicia Wood - Sydney Morning Herald
September 26, 2010


VAMPIRES - and not just the pretty kind featured on big and small screens - are seeking fresh blood.

So much so they have caught the eye of academics and social trend trackers, taking their research beyond the Twilight books and films and the television series True Blood and on to the internet.

Researchers say the internet has provided a church for disparate individuals and groups across the globe to meet and cement new spiritual belief systems around traditionally ''dark'' mythical forces such as vampires and werewolves.

The University of Western Sydney's Adam Possamai, author of Sociology of Religion for Generations X and Y, has plotted the rise of ''hyper-real'' religions drawing on popular culture.

''People are becoming inspired by the characteristics of the vampire and see them as a source of fulfilling their potential and inner abilities,'' Associate Professor Possamai said.

Researcher Danielle Kirby used the ''Otherkin'', who meet in an online forum and believe they are partially or entirely non-human, to examine the phenomenon. In her paper, she found about 800 members of the Otherkin network, including those who identified as dragons, elves, vampires, fairies and angels. The internet had helped concentrate their underlying broadly neo-pagan beliefs, she said.

The online and secretive nature of many self-described vampires - some who profess to drink blood, others who consume ''psychic energy'' - make it difficult to pin down numbers but believers say there could be 300 in Australia.

In an article in Australasian Policing last year, Queensland scholar David Keyworth listed contemporary examples of ''vampire'' crimes - a Welsh teenager who murdered an elderly woman whose heart was removed, a 1989 Brisbane riverbank throat-cutting involving the drinking of blood, and a Kentucky teenage vampire clan who cut each other to drink blood. There was even an unofficial psychiatric disorder called Renfield's Syndrome involving drinking blood for sexual pleasure.

Australian College of General Practitioners president Chris Mitchell warned yesterday vampiric pursuits were a health hazard due to ''the potential transmission of blood-borne diseases''.

Melbourne vampire Kriss Poison, 31, who stays on the right side of the law but not the bright side of life, drinks her husband's blood: ''When you love a person you can take from them, and they can take from me.'' She can't imagine being any other way: ''I've always lived on the dark side.''