Rachel Orton (Jarman) asked Justin Cronin:

To what extent do you think horror trends reflect the social anxieties of their time? i.e Frankenstien as a representation of the 19th century threat of scientific and technological advancement. What do you think the nature of your vampires reveal about our society today as compared to prior incarnations i.e Dracula? Embarassingly, enthusiastic over your work in The Passage series by the way.

Justin Cronin The beauty of the vampire story is that you can attach pretty much anything you want to it, in terms of personal or public worries. The 1992 movie “Bram Stoker’s Dracula,” for example, was really a movie about AIDS. The vampires of THE PASSAGE are meant to encapsulate a number of anxieties, but I’ll give you one, and it’s the one almost nobody mentions. That line: “They come from above.” Sudden death from the skies, in other words, and what I was thinking about when I wrote that line was the planes of 9/11, which came from above and pretty much rewrote our entire geopolitical reality.

flag