Vampires (9 page)

Finally, in some versions of the legend, vampires are able to control the minds of nocturnal animals such as bats, mice, rats, and wolves. These animals act as slaves to their master, and they are so faithful to him that they may lay down their lives for him. Vampires may also control the weather, bringing a blanket of fog down to cover their traces, or blowing up a storm to prevent them being followed. Vampires also, by biting their victims, may create human slaves, who will do their bidding come what may.

Over the centuries, as we have discussed, the image of the vampire changed from that of a monstrous, bloated corpse stalking its victims out of revenge at having been excluded from the land of the living, into a svelte nobleman who charmed members of high society, especially rich women, with his pallid beauty, refined sensibilities, and deathly allure. By the late nineteenth century, the vampire had become largely a creature of literature and legend, and as remote rural communities began to feel the effects of modern life, there were few who genuinely still believed in the existence of real vampires. However, the myth still continued – and continues – to hold great fascination for many people in many cultures all over the world. One of the reasons for this is that it centres on the notion of immortality.

During the twentieth century, Christian belief in Europe gradually declined, and with it the conventional idea of life after death; thus the legend of the vampire, which involves the story of the ‘undead’ spirit, became an appealing way of continuing to reflect on the mysteries of the life hereafter, outside of a religious context.

Descriptions of vampires in medieval times emphasized the horror of the monster’s decomposing body, with lurid accounts of the blood running from its orifices, its swollen limbs, matted hair, long nails, and so on. As well as these less than attractive features, the medieval vampire emitted the most horrible stench, which could be smelt for miles, and could cause people to faint with disgust. Unlike his later counterpart, the sophisticated nobleman, the medieval vampire was a very realistic ‘walking dead’, in that its evil-smelling, rotting corpse was vividly described in every detail. It was also conceived of as a ‘plague bringer’; it was thought that the stench could waft into houses and infect whole families, who would fall ill merely by breathing ‘unclean’ air.

Underlying these accounts was a well-grounded fear that corpses could spread disease, and must be buried in places away from human habitation in order to stop contagious illnesses spreading. Some commentators have noted that in times of plague, bodies were often buried in mass graves, which were visited by gravediggers again and again, and might be opened many times. These workmen would see bodies in various stages of decomposition, some of them with the features that so frightened medieval people – fat, swollen limbs, rosy cheeks, a ruddy complexion, long nails and hair, dark blood running out of the mouth, ears, and nose – and bring back tales of what they had seen. Thus, an extreme anxiety developed that corpses could come back to life, and if they did, they would spread the disease that they had died of – either through the foul, pestilential stench that they brought with them, or by their bloodsucking forays, attacking innocent sleeping victims.

In these early accounts, immortality was seen as a kind of curse – ‘eternal death’, the flip side of ‘eternal life’ as promised by the Christian priests. An important aspect of the vampire was that it could only sustain itself by sucking the blood of living beings, and ultimately causing their death by doing so. It was as if the pagan images of medieval culture, and of course the peasants’ closeness to the ordinary phases of nature (including witnessing the dead and dying) combined to make a mockery of the Christian idea of ‘eternal life’ by conjuring up this monstrous being that could not die, yet lived a miserable half-life, preying on its victims at night and draining their lifeblood away from them as they slept.

The idea of drinking blood to attain eternal life is also at the heart of Christian ritual, in the celebration of mass. In the Eucharist, or Holy Communion, as it is also known, Christians who have been baptized and confirmed come up to the altar to take the bread and wine, which is conceived of as the body and blood of Christ. The priest first takes a chalice, holds it up and says: ‘Drink ye all of this; for this is my Blood of the New Testament, which is shed for you and for many for the remission of sins; Do this, as oft as ye shall drink it, in remembrance of me.’ Each communicant is then given a wafer of bread and a sip of wine from the same chalice.

Today, there is some controversy over the ritual of the Eucharist within the Christian church over the issue of what is called ‘transubstantiation’. Some sects argue that the ritual is purely symbolic, an act of faith, remembrance, and gratitude for Christ’s self-sacrifice on the cross; others, including the Roman Catholic church, maintain that during the service, the wine and the bread actually turn into Christ’s blood and body, and that communicants therefore drink his blood and eat his flesh.

Whatever the status of these beliefs, it is clear that human beings through the centuries have always shown an immense urge to overcome death through belief in an afterlife, and through various ritualistic practices, many of which have included the drinking of blood. The early vampire myth, with its roots in the Slavic ‘old religion’ of ‘undead’ spirits and demons, is part of that quest. The nineteenth century vampire, which was the start of a nobly born, wealthy individual, has other cultural references (not least, as some political commentators have pointed out, a critique of the nobility, whose decadent, privileged lifestyle ‘leeches’ the morals of society, and the lifeblood of the lower orders). However, what seems to bind them all together is the common quest for immortality.

In the twentieth and twenty-first century, the image of the vampire as a seeker of immortality – whether visualized as a horrifying monster from the grave or a well-groomed aristocrat – has tended to be obscured. The camp horror elements of the legend have attracted many talented film-makers and fiction writers, who have created tremendously entertaining fantasies for a popular market, so much so that the more serious aspects of the stories have been somewhat overlooked. However, in more recent years, building on the important themes of human sexuality, death, and the quest for immortality that have been present in fictional accounts of vampirism since the days of Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
, there has been a revival of the myth; one recent example is Stephenie Meyer’s vampire romance series
Twilight
, aimed at a teenage market. Once again, the vampire legend shows itself able to accommodate a discussion of emotional issues that appeal to contemporary youth: for example, the feelings that many teenagers experience as they hit adolescence; that they are ‘different’ from others, ‘weird’, ‘looking in from the outside’, and so on. In addition, Meyer’s books address the teenager’s perennial preoccupation with the ‘big questions’, such as love, sex, death, and the aspiration to live for ever.

As we have noted, the medieval European image of the vampire as a mouldering corpse was a far from sexually attractive one. It is only during the Regency period, with John Polidori’s
The Vampyre
, that we encounter the seductive vampire, in the person of Lord Ruthven, and then again in the Victorian period with the most famous vampire of them all, Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
. One of the many reasons for the popularity of these stories was that they touched on the connection between sex and death: women who had sexual liaisons with vampires not only risked public shame and humiliation, they also risked being transformed into seductive sirens or dying. In Stoker’s
Dracula
, the women could also become violent, even murderously so towards babies. To a repressed female readership nurtured on Victorian ideas of chastity, domesticity and selfless womanhood, these possibilities must have seemed horrifying – but in an erotic, exciting way.

Stoker drew on a deep vein of literature and folklore that conceived of the vampire as, among other incarnations, a beautiful, seductive woman who could suck the lifeblood out of a man, murder little children, and even eat them. These tales expressed deep fears about the power of female sexuality and fertility, and are present in many different cultures around the world. For example, the Ancient Greeks told of the beautiful Libyan Queen Lamia, who turned into a hideous child-eating demon, while the Mesapotamians feared Lilith, a highly seductive, serpentine evil spirit who appeared to men in erotic dreams. In more modern tales of female vampires, the sexual elements of penetration (piercing the skin), and lust (sucking the blood) are clear; thus, these stories resurrect age-old anxieties about woman’s ability to seduce and control men, and the possibility that this power may lead them to abandon their traditional roles as dutiful wives, mothers, and daughters.