Vampires

The legend of the vampire has never been more popular than it is today. Millions of copies of Stephenie Meyer’s
Twilight
series have been sold, and the vampire continues to be represented in many imaginative forms on stage and screen, whether in the theatre, in film, on TV, or in the field of popular music. On the internet, entire websites are devoted to the cult of the vampire, discussing details of lifestyle, dress and beliefs. In most cases, this fascination with the myth is harmless enough: it is simply a playful and enjoyable way for us to address some of our most confusing and difficult experiences in life, such as our fear of death, our longing for immortality, and our mixed feelings about becoming sexual beings as we grow up. However, there are instances in which the figure of the vampire attracts those with more evil intent, or those who suffer from various forms of mental illness. These are the individuals who take the legend literally, and begin to act accordingly: the devotees, past or present, known and feared for their bloodthirsty ways or their bizarre ritual practices.

In this book, we will be looking at all of these manifestations of the vampire myth, from its genesis in folklore to its status today as one of the most iconic figures in popular culture. We will try to find out how this strange creature, who came into being centuries ago as a minor figure in an obscure pagan belief system, that of the ‘old religion’ of the Slavic countries, eventually managed to dominate the gothic imagination of the Victorians and beyond, in the process transforming itself from a hideous monster into the suave villain we know today.

The origins of the vampire legend go back centuries, to the dark forests of Transylvania, and the pagan beliefs of the Slavic peoples. They are shrouded in mystery, since the religious practices of these peoples were not written down, but we know that vampire folklore dominated the lives of rural peasants and priests during the Middle Ages. In particular, these communities were concerned with death and disease. At a time when medicine was in its infancy, and superstition was rife, the idea of the revenant, coming back from the grave to wreak revenge on the living, was highly potent, and struck deep fear into the largely uneducated population of the time.

Although Christianity had been introduced into these countries, peasant folk still retained their pagan beliefs. Among these was the idea that after death, the souls of those who had suffered in life, or who had committed crimes, were condemned to wander the earth for ever, alone and shunned by human society. This exclusion from love, and life, was thought to give the dead a deep resentment of the living, causing their spirits to rise from the grave as vampires. It was believed that these malign beings would make their way to villages and towns, bringing with them plagues and fatal diseases from the grave.

In the medieval imagination, the vampire was a vile, corpse-like being, swollen with blood and with its flesh rotting, whose revolting smell brought a foul pestilence into the streets where it walked at night, looking for victims. Today, this notion of the vampire as a lonely, reviled figure continues to be part of the myth. Other aspects of the medieval myth, such as the idea of the vampire as a bringer of plague from the dead, have become less important. This is perhaps because we now have access to medical science, and the process whereby the human body decomposes after death is better understood. The characteristics that so frightened the medieval peasant, such as bloating and swelling of the body, with fresh blood running out of the orifices, have been scientifically explained. In addition, the ways in which communicable diseases are spread are better understood, so that most of us no longer believe, when an epidemic breaks out, that a vampire may be responsible.

Over the centuries, the vampire myth originating from the Slavic countries began to spread throughout Europe, fuelled by tales of vampire sightings. In some cases, government officials were sent to quell panic in a remote area, only to come back with accounts of priests opening up graves to find bodies that had swelled and grown fat, with ruddy cheeks and blood running from their mouths, their hair and fingernails grown long while they sojourned underground. These sensational stories were reported in the newspapers, thrilling and horrifying the general population. In this way, the more literate classes of the eighteenth century began to become fascinated by vampires, and by the nineteenth, they had made their way into literature and art.

The vampire legend particularly appealed to the gothic taste of the Victorians, who revelled in tales of gloomy castles, northern forests, and evil ghouls lying in wait for innocent travellers. In this period, the most famous vampire of them all, Count Dracula, was born. He was the brainchild of Bram Stoker, whose refined, aristocratic bloodsucker caught the public imagination. Some cultural historians have argued that the figure of Dracula was a metaphor for the parasitic existence of the upper classes, and their dependence on poverty-stricken and brutally treated lower orders. Whether or not this was the reason for the Count’s popularity, Stoker’s novel spawned a whole host of imitators, and in the twentieth century, went on to inspire new generations of artists, writers, and film-makers.

Today’s vampire is a very different creature from the monster of the medieval imagination, or even the ghoulish aristocrat of Victorian horror stories. In modern novels and films, the status of the vampire as, on the surface, indistinguishable from ‘normal’ human beings, is emphasized. Vampires are also characterized as having human emotions, that is, falling in love, feeling the pain of separation, loss, and vilification, and, most importantly, being anguished about their predicament as ‘undead’ beings from the grave, excluded from human society and responsible for corrupting the lovers and friends with whom they form attachments. In this way, the modern vampire myth speaks to our ambiguous feelings about individuals who are, traditionally, excluded in our society: for example, drug users, people with unusual sexual orientations and the mentally ill. It also resonates with deep-seated fears, especially among young people, that passionate sexual feelings may arouse violence, and do harm to those we love.

In modern times, the vampire myth continues to be a powerful metaphor for sexual initiation, expressing fears and desires about sexual experience as part of the process of growing up. It appeals in particular to teenage girls, who now devour vampire books and films with enormous enthusiasm. There are differing arguments as to why this is so. Some psychologists have argued that the ‘biting’ aspect of the vampire myth is a form of infantile sexuality, brought into play in the teenage years so as to avoid the realities of sexual intercourse. Be that as it may, there is no doubt that the idea of the handsome young vampire (who is also hundreds of years old, and has several lifetimes’ worth of experience) is an immensely attractive figure to many young women, as the tremendous success of the
Twilight
series, both in book and film form, attests.

But what of the vampire legend worldwide? The myth is not only present in European folklore, literature, and modern media, but is also found – in different forms – all over the world. In almost all cultures of the globe, revenant stories exist, and many of them involve the central element of the vampire myth, which is the drinking of blood. From earliest times, there have been stories of vampire-like creatures such as the blood-sucking Lamia of Ancient Greece, and Lilith, the seductive storm demon of Mesapotamia who brings disease and death. The Romans believed in the Strix, an evil nocturnal bird who fed on flesh like the vampire, while the Aztecs feared the Cihuateteo, the spirits of women who had died in childbirth, who haunted crossroads, eager to seize young children and carry them off. From Africa comes the Asanbosam, a vampire-like creature believed to have iron teeth and to live in trees, swooping down to attack its victims, and from the Philippines the Aswang, a female bat-like spirit who eats the dead and steals children.

There are also contemporary vampire stories in many parts of the developing world that, in some cases, have acquired the status of urban myths. Today, in Puerto Rico and Mexico, there are communities who still believe in the Chupacabra, the goat sucker, who attacks herds of livestock and drinks their blood. Sightings of this bizarre creature – said to be the size of a small bear, with a row of spines that run along its back from head to tail – have been reported in many different parts of the Americas. Whether they are true or false it is hard to say, but what is clear is that all these vampire myths bear witness to universal human anxieties: about death, about what happens to us after we die, and how the spirits of the departed, especially those who have experienced suffering or mistreatment, may return to haunt us.

Most of us see the vampire legend as an entertaining, perhaps somewhat disturbing, form of horror fiction. However, there are certain individuals, both historical and contemporary, for whom vampirism becomes a way of life. These are the people who take the myth to an extreme, killing to satisfy their lust for blood. In the past, people who showed violent, bloodthirsty, and often severely mentally ill behaviours might be thought of as vampires. Indeed, serial killers, as we would call them today, were quite often dubbed ‘vampires’ – for example, Peter Kürten, the serial killer known as ‘The Vampire of Düsseldorf’ who murdered and tortured children, and Richard Trenton Chase, who, after killing six people in California in 1977, was nicknamed ‘The Vampire of Sacramento’ because he drank his victims’ blood and ate parts of their internal organs.

The forerunners of these serial killer ‘vampires’ are infamous historical figures such as Vlad the Impaler, Gilles de Rais, and Countess Elizabeth Bàthory. These were the serial killers of their day, men and women who loved to kill for the perverse pleasure that horrific acts of cruelty gave them. What is most shocking about these killers is that they were powerful members of the ruling class, and therefore were allowed to kill hundreds of victims more or less with impunity. The most infamous of all, perhaps, is Vlad, who had a barbarous habit of skewering people on sharpened stakes, sometimes hundreds at a time, including infants and their mothers. Gilles de Rais, another brutal military man, was a Breton knight and companion of Joan of Arc who seems to have lost his mind and become a sadistic serial killer of children. In both these cases, the day-to-day killing of human beings on the field of combat seems to have sparked off a thirst for blood that could not be quenched. And finally, there is perhaps the most shocking case of all, the viciously insane Countess Elizabeth Bàthory, who tortured and killed hundreds of young women in her remote Hungarian castle, and who has gone down in history as the most prolific female serial killer of all time.

Real vampires, then, are anything but entertaining: they show us the dark side of the myth, and the horror that may ensue when deranged individuals take it literally and act upon it. By contrast, the vampires of imagination, in popular culture through the ages, have been a staple of the horror genre, providing an endless source of inspiration for poets, writers, film-makers, and artists. Beginning with the Romantics, we find the first vampires to make their appearance in English literature, in the works of such masters as John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron, whose friend and physician John Polidori wrote the seminal story
The Vampyre
, published in 1819.

The Victorian vampire craze in literature continued with such figures as Varney the Vampire, the sympathetic hero of the ‘penny dreadfuls’, cheap serial editions of horror stories aimed at teenagers. Varney is one of the first ‘sympathetic’ literary vampires, described as essentially human, and to some degree, humane, but suffering from a horrible condition that compels him to seek blood from his victims to survive. This theme later becomes central to vampire literature, until in contemporary stories the figure of the vampire stands as a metaphor for an ordinary individual afflicted by destructive sexual drives that he or she cannot control, and that inspire self-loathing, guilt, and disgust. In this portrayal, we feel sympathy for the vampire, and are able to empathize with his or her condition.

There is an early forerunner of the lesbian vampire story in another Victorian classic, Sheridan Le Fanu’s
Carmilla
, a tale of repressed desire between two young women that thrilled Victorian readers with its combination of gothic horror, forbidden romance, and sexual innuendo. We then encounter the greatest vampire novel of all time: Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, which brings together all these strands in a narrative of drama, passion, and power. We explore some of the profound themes of the novel, such as the conflict between belief in the rational (science, medicine, and technology) and the irrational (ancient folkloric beliefs in supernatural forces such as spirits, and demons). We also find out where Stoker got his inspiration for the story, and most importantly, how he created the character of the most famous vampire in literature, Count Dracula.

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