The real vampires stayed away from ‘Dracula 97’

“I’ve always been intrigued by vampires so when I read about the Dracula 97 vampire convention I wanted to go. But I was a little skeptical. I took the punk view of things: Anything done remotely legally is gonna be pretty damn boring.
When I got to the convention at the Westin Hotel near LAX, I saw this normal hotel lobby with a huge white sign saying “Dracula 97.” I went up to the concierge. Is this where the vampire convention is? He was like, yeah.
I said to myself, okay, this is going to be really commercialized. At the booths, they were selling a lot of silver jewelry, books, cool paintings with skulls, bottled leeches, pickled bats and custom fangs. Then I saw all the people in suits: folklorists and professors and business-type people. It was like a lecture hall-type deal, like going to college and taking a course on vampires, organized by the Transylvania Society of Dracula and the Count Dracula Fan Club.

Only a few Goths came
There was a scattering of cool people: true Goths and vampires, who are like a Goth subgroup. Some Gothics are more flamboyant than others; some are into vampyric stuff, some are more like metalheads. Some look like they just came from a funeral, some are satanic. Usually they wear black, but there’s no set way for a Goth to look or act or be.
On the first night, all these people dressed in funeral black took a coffin into the ballroom, and this guy called the Count popped out. And they had all these lights so the TV cameras could film it. They were milking the scene and making Goths look like fools. It was like they were trying to say, “Oh, Goths are just like everybody else, except they wear black!”
There were speakers reading poetry and reviewing Ann Rice’s writing like a book review in the New York Times. I interviewed Elizabeth Miller, the Canadian President for the Transylvanian Society of Dracula. (I don’t know why I picked her. I had to ask somebody something.) I asked her why people are intrigued with vampires. She said that people view the vampire as a rebellious figure and as a sexual figure. Come on, there’s no set way to view a vampire. I mean, how do you view people? Vampires (and Goths) are as individual as people.
This lady and I were in the ladies room, freshening up our makeup. She had fangs and a cloak with a hood. (She told me if she walked around in her hometown, Maui, like this, they would send out a lynch mob.) We may have looked abnormal, but we weren’t doing anything strange. This tourist walks in and her little girl wanted to touch the other woman. The tourist was like, NO! Get away from them!
The prices were way too high. It was like $110 prepaid, $125 at the door, so that kept a lot of Goths away. It was aimed more towards “higher society.” That was really lame because this was supposed to be a vampire convention, but the people who are into it and living this life couldn’t even go.
The hotel had no black drapes and no black rugs. Plus, they had the air-conditioning on so cold, it just made everybody want to pull on a blanket and go to sleep. Vampires are the undead, so if it’s really cold, they’re going to get really sluggish and drag around, okay? I mean, how hard is that to figure out?
Plus, everything was scheduled during the day, and the rooms were way too bright, which is kind of ridiculous. Vampires are active at night in the dark. The booths should have been open from dusk ’till 11 p .m., but they were open from 9 a.m. to 6 p.m.

The ‘Vampire Dating Game’?
A lot of stuff they did was really cheesy, like the Vampire Dating Game. I didn’t even go to that. The program said, “If you ever wanted to date a vampire, here’s your chance.” First of all, who would want to date a vampire, one of the undead? At 4:45 in the afternoon?
Me and my friend got really hungry and we went across the street to Subway. We’re just trying to eat our sandwiches in peace when this guy with a real Hicksville accent came over and looks down my shirt and goes, “So what are y’all doing at that Vampire Convention? Do you drink blood over there?”
Everything was like pseudo-Gothic, but white-washed over so that it wouldn’t offend anybody. It was really, really fake. Like, try to be Gothic, but do it with a smile, like the costume contest and vampire ball, where people wore cloaks and armor and there were girls in corsets and hoop skirts, veils and masks. It reminded me of one of those kitschy themed school dances.
Being a Goth is not a joke. It’s not about wearing black. It’s a way of being, a culture. I can’t even define it. But I know that wasn’t it.
Overall, I would give this convention a D. It’s good that they tried it, but I wouldn’t go again.”

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