为何青少年情迷吸血鬼僵尸电影？-英语点津

Our current preoccupation with zombies and vampires is easy to explain. They're two sides of the same coin, addressing our fascination with sex, death and food. They're both undead, they both feed on us, they both pass on some kind of plague and they can both be killed with specialist techniques – a stake through the heart or a disembraining. But they seem to have become polarised. Vampires are the undead of choice for girls, and zombies for boys. Vampires are cool, aloof, beautiful, brooding creatures of the night. Typical moody teenage boys, basically. Zombies are dumb, brutal, ugly and mindlessly violent. Which makes them also like typical teenage boys, I suppose.

要解释我们现在对僵尸与吸血鬼的痴迷，似乎并不困难。它们如同一枚硬币的正反面，均以其性感、死亡与特殊的主食迎合着我们的好奇心。它们长生不老，以人类为食，传播某种瘟疫，并且需要特殊手段才能被杀死----钉入心脏的木桩或者挖出脑子。但它们似乎被极端化了。永生的吸血鬼是女孩们的选择，而僵尸则更符合男孩们的胃口。吸血鬼冷酷、孤傲、俊美、昼伏夜出，正如喜怒无常的十几岁男孩。僵尸则沉默寡言，凶残，丑陋，头脑简单，脾气狂躁，也同样是十几岁男孩的典型特征。

Zombie stories are life lessons for boys who don't mind thinking about bodies, but can't cope with emotions. Vampire stories are in many ways sex for the squeamish. We don't need Raj Persaud to tell us that plunging canines into soft warm necks, or driving stakes between heaving bosoms, are very basic sexual metaphors.

如果说僵尸电影为那些对死尸毫不畏惧却为感情问题困扰的男孩上了一堂人生课，吸血鬼故事则在某些意义上为那些神经脆弱的人提供了性的暗示。拉吉·佩尔绍德（Raj Persaud）无需向我们解释将尖牙咬入温暖的颈窝或者在汹涌的胸部之间插入笔直的木桩是最基本的性隐喻。

There are now even whole sections of bookshops given over to the new genre of "supernatural romance". Maybe it was ever thus. Dr Polidori, who wrote the very first vampire novel, The Vampyr, based his central character very much on his chief patient, Lord Byron, and the Byronic "mad, bad and dangerous to know" archetype has been at the centre of both romantic and blood-sucking fiction ever since. Dracula, Heathcliffe, Rochester, Darcy and not to mention chief vampire Bill in Channel 4's new series True Blood are all cut from the same cloth. Meyer even claims that she based her first Twilight book on Pride and Prejudice, although Robert Pattinson, who plays the lead in the movie version, looks like James Dean in Rebel Without A Cause. Either way, vampire = sexy rebel.

现在有些书店甚至分出了一个新的流派——“超自然浪漫文学”。也许这种传统由来已久，首部吸血鬼题材文学作品《吸血鬼》的作者波里道利，就将他的主要病人——拜伦——作为主角的原型。也是从那时起，拜伦式的“疯狂、邪恶和危险”便成了这类充满浪漫和血腥的文学的主题。吸血鬼伯爵、希思克利夫、罗切斯特、达西更别提Channel 4新剧《真爱如血》中的吸血鬼比尔了，他们实际都同根同源。梅尔甚至声称《暮光之城》第一部的灵感来源于《傲慢与偏见》，但电影版的主演罗伯特·帕丁森中长相却酷似《无因的反抗》中的詹姆斯·狄恩。总之，吸血鬼就等于性感的反抗者。

No zombie is ever going to be a pinup on some young girl's wall. Just as Pattinson and all the Darcy-alikes will never find space on any teenage boy's bedroom walls – every inch will be plastered with revolting posters of zombies. There are no levels of Freudian undertone to zombies. Like boys, they're not subtle. There's nothing sexual about them, and nothing sexy either.

没有女孩会把僵尸的图片张贴在墙上，同样也没有男孩会把罗伯特·帕丁森，和其他“达西”们的海报张贴在卧室的墙上——那里的每一寸都应该贴满了叛逆的僵尸海报。僵尸形象中并没有隐含深层次的弗洛伊德理论，与男孩们相似，他们毫无精细可言，没有性暗示，也一点都不性感。