Dark Habits In this era the obsessive presence of the vampire in visual arts and literature spoke of the dilemma of counterculture youth and the impasse between the authoritarian world they came from and the authority-less world to which they aspired. While the Spanish State and its hierarchies were under reconstruction, the gaps left by the process of change enabled this opening to be inhabited by painting, film, poetry and drugs.
The vampire metaphor, moreover, alluded to the non-place of a generation, and their relationship to books, cinema, politics and the past. Addiction and bodily metamorphoses articulated a space between the human and the animal, between life and death. In the works of Víctor Mira, bodies appear diluted by night and cabarets, or exposed to the incursion of cannibal mysteries. Vampire metaphors also applied to the “underground of the democracy” in the work of poets such as Eduardo Haro Ibars — for instance Empalador (Impaler, 1980). The body of the Mullereta (Little Woman, 1975) in photographer Jorge Rueda’s work outlines this cross of flesh and history, literature and politics. Vampires, like drugs, consume the youths that populate the photographs of Alberto García Alix, inhabiting historical bodies which correspond to the different bites of the period. Pedro Almodóvar’s Entre tinieblas (Dark Habits, 1983) encapsulates, as a generational allegory, the paradoxical relationship that moves from the desires and practices of counterculture to face those belonging to National Catholicism, at once erased and established by democracy – like a vampire looking in the mirror.