I don’t believe we have really properly visited this topic thus far, barring the case study of the vampire scare in Malawi. With the Halloween drawing close, it is perhaps a fitting topic to explore, so let’s do it today. 🙂
I would wager an educated guess (and if you have other information, I would love to hear it, because I’m always interested in new legends and superstitions) that vampires of some form are possibly some of the oldest creatures to feature in superstitions. I remember that during my Uni years, doing a literally fabulous class on Cyprus archaeology (both naval and land), I was doing an essay on tombs and debated why a specific amount of bodies seemed to be laid out on the floor of the tomb deliberately rather than in the usual position. As nothing about the position seemed to suggest a live burial, either by mistake or deliberately, but simply a different position of the corpse within the tomb, and space seemed not to be of issue, the only reasoning I could still hope to apply is socio-cultural and/or religious, so the usual divide of then far from even dreamed of SCR that I created later in my work and research years, and that was being slowly nudged into early concepts then. Usually, unusual positions and placements of bodies, grave goods or damage (usually post mortem, although pre mortem must not be excluded, nor should you forget that the two can overlap quite nicely (e.g. – you go hiking and break your ankle. The day after, you are in your kitchen prepping tea – you slip and hit your head on the table and die. Your break would have barely had time to do anything. Even more importantly – in soft tissue, a stab wound may have been bad, but what really killed you was the pillow over your face.) in cases where the injury happened pre mortem but death followed, sometimes from a completely different reason, shortly after), inform of either of the two things – a personal attachment or grudge (depending on the find – bodies tell you everything, whether they are new or ancient) or an associated tradition or superstition. Around that time, the Venetian vampire find was made, with the bodies having had a brick placed between their teeth in what seems to be an attempt to prevent biting (…!… I can never be quite sure, is that sad or funny in that dark, Addams family type humour?), and it got me thinking that perhaps, this could have been the case in this odd positioning, which I included into my essay. Years and years down the line, superstitions still fascinate me, and they have been at a core of a lot of my research, because they form a lot of pathological behaviour in maladaptive humans.
In simple terms – what scares the living lights out of us, or even just makes us uncomfortable, is going to influence everything, from our perception of the environment we live in to our interpersonal interactions to the way our witness memory works and how reliable it can be.
Superstition is not dead, not even in the Western world, and while the actual belief in vampires is perhaps less actively spread (though you will still find groups and individuals who believe in them (cf. here)), it is by no means a Western belief only, and many of the myths go far back (shtriga, vrykolakas, strigoi, vampir, upir, kodlak (in some parts of Slovenia – it’s almost an odd visual mixture between a werewolf and a vampire), vetalas, pisaca, Lilitu, estries, Empusae, Lamia, striges, draugr, asanbosam, adze, impundulu, ramanga, Soucouyant, Tunda, Patasola, Peuchen, etc…).
So what IS a vampire?
The simplest explanation to give would be the following – the vampire is a creature, human or otherwise, in diverse mythologies all over the world, that feeds on human blood predominantly, though energy or soul can also come into the mix. J.K. Rowling’s Dementors possess a vampiric streak; the soul sucking rocks of New Guinea (yes, you heard right… Puts a whole new spin on the pet rock concept… 😉 ) and el chupacabra are not dissimilar.
In some myths, a vampire is dead and yet living; in others, it isn’t even human, but a bloated balloon-like thing, which can also be found in early vampire literature (Carmilla, for instance, while she has a human form, one that can be active in daylight, as the daylight thing doesn’t seem to come into some early stories, appears as a formless, shapeless balloon when she wants to suck blood), and is far from the gentleman in the evening dress that we are used to nowadays, most notably through Stoker’s Dracula, but that also appears in a preceding work by Polidori – The Vampyre. It might be interesting to note here that some characters connected to stories of vampires or vampirism (or werewolfism) indeed existed some centuries before the story was written, most notably Dracula himself, countess Bathory and Mareschal de Retz (executed after a mockery of a trial for apparent murder of small children – the case is discussed in Barring-Gould’s book on werewolfism). It is, however, difficult to tell whether or not the stories, or indeed any associated stories of potential violence or mental illness, can be considered as valid and fully contemporary (like Bathory’s bathing in virgin blood, which was a later addition, and de Retz being a model for the legend of Bluebeard, even though no wives were ever involved); firstly, superstitions quickly latch on after the fact of a trial, or may lead into one or into lynching (as we have seen in Malawi), and it must be remembered that all the admissions were always obtained by threat of torture or use of force, and that proof was scarce and poorly handled… Political and religious motives, zealot madness and simple personal grudge can all create a later seemingly watertight case, especially as in general, all of the records were conveniently destroyed by those leading the trial and no physical evidence is ever really found or had been presented then – something that the lieutenant procurer (acting as defence for the Mareschal) actually pointed out at the time.
In Serbian myth, a vampire can continue to have sexual intercourse with his wife after death, and a child born as an offspring of such a union is called a vampiric (pr. Vampirich, so little vampire or vampire’s child, if I get the words right… my Serbian is very basic) and is basically what we now know as a vampire slayer – he (I am unaware if this goes for girls too) can see, recognise and call out and kill a vampire. Similarly, an elf woman or fairy’s child by a dragon is supposed to be a hero.
That vampires would seem to be mostly nocturnal is not odd. Fear of darkness is a strong part of most religions, and it is an easy one to instil, as humans, while not utterly incapable in darkness (I speak from my own experience and observation of others who have learned to work with darkness), definitely lack the extra bonus of tapetum lucidum, making darkness perfectly navigable for cats, dogs and other predominantly nocturnal or fully nocturnal creatures. While I presume our ancestors probably knew how to navigate the dark better than we think, I can add that, with the axis shift in the last fifteen years or so, I for one definitely had a problem with the way the light had shifted, and my night sight took years to adjust, making any night walks especially through forests rather uncomfortable. Axis shifts are not uncommon – earthquakes, for one, can cause them (cf. here), and so, it is not unreasonable to assume that this change that I myself experienced in how my environment could be navigated would happen to our ancestors too. Add to that high stress due to a natural disaster, or, perhaps a few centuries or generations down the line, a nascent form of resultant religion, and you can easily understand just how this fear would become crippling and would make itself permanently at home with humans, also causing distrust towards anyone who did not share it – and distrust, in my professional experience, generally ends with shunning and violence.
Vampires share many traits with other creatures, such as demons, night mares (cf. here – while I usually don’t reference Wiki, the referencing is pretty good here and it should give options for further reading) and werewolves. I think I have mentioned before that it seems that the Greek vrykolakas shares a lot of traits with the latter.
Not only that – in Western mythology, vampires either share living space with them, or take their form themselves. This probably has roots in the bleak view of wolves (and to a certain extent dogs) in Judaic religions, with the wolf very often being portrayed as a form of the devil, to which the vampires are also associated. More recently, something referred to as a Salaawa demon has been reportedly stalking and attacking people in Cairo (cf. here), with the form of the creature being decidedly canine. But it is the 18th, 19th and 20th century’s perception of the vampire that has shaped our picture of it, and it’s an interesting study.
The earliest works on vampires are probably Carmilla (1871-72) and The Vampyre (1819), followed by Stoker’s famous Dracula (1897). Other stories do exist (e.g. The Bride of Corinth (Goethe), The Vampire (Ossenfelder)), but these are the chief tales that have shaped both history of vampires and, ironically, one another. It did not take long for vampires to take to the stage, as well as into opera (eg. Marschner’s Der Vampyr (1828), based on Ritter’s play Der Vampyr oder Die Totenbraut (1821)), and, as the film evolved, onto the screen.
Nosferatu isn’t the first one, but one of the earliest vampire films, an illegal German adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula – it was later contested by his widow (Stoker’s, not Dracula’s 😉 ) and, had the film not already been distributed to many countries, it would have been utterly destroyed…it is only though the less law-abiding lands that we even have any remaining versions of the film.
Many vampire-themed films followed (cf. here).
While Lugosi may have been the first to portray a memorable Dracula in a film adaptation, it was actually Hammer Horror’s star Christopher Lee (known very well as Saruman and Count Dookoo to the modern viewer among other roles), opposed in all versions by his very good friend (and later, ironically, Governor Tarkin in the original Star Wars film) Peter Cushing as Van Helsing that the vampire, especially Dracula, becomes moulded into the creature we know today fully. The portrayal of vampires was so typical that Pratchett, possibly one of the greatest British satirical writers of modern day and age, used the commonalities (some of which go as far back as Nosferatu) in his Carpe Jugulum (i.e. Go for the throat).
The vampires story was nowhere near complete as the Hammer Horror stories drew to a close – we have seen them revisited in the Underworld film series, numerous Dracula films (including the better known ones starring Gerard Butler (Dracula 2000) and Gary Oldman) and a revamp of vampire culture, so to speak, both in Rice’s Interview with the vampire (which made it to film with Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise as Louis and Lestat), Van Helsing and, of late, Meyer’s Twilight saga. All these are essentially based on the early Victorian portrayal of vampires.
A possibly far more intriguing shift actually happened in a far different film, still based on Dracula – Dracula: The Untold, where the humanity of the vampire is possibly researched to the greatest extent, presented very well through Luke Evans’ portrayal of the title role.
There, a striking difference is presented between Dracula himself and the follower vampires – while he retains his humanity (possibly leaning on some historic sources, which present Dracula in a far less dark a light – it is impossible, however, to determine which side was correct or even less biased), the others do not, and have, at the end of the film, an eerie, almost zombie-like quality to them, predatory and emotionless to the core.
It is, however, the vampire’s horror and sexual role that is probably most intriguing to most people. The notion of dangerous seduction (already expressed very well through Lord Ruthven) is on par with the seeming but absent humanity of the vampires, which still haunts us and attracts us today. It is probably that which inspires modern day vampire communities, which try to live a similar life to that of the legendary creatures; this, while interesting to an anthropologist, must be viewed with due caution, as the interest in this type of interaction points strongly to a pathological personality, as well as posits a very real danger of spread of blood-borne diseases.
In couple dress-up and role play, vampire is a common theme, though not common enough to make it to the regular list of French maids, pilots and flight attendants. But it does pop up with quite a few, and could probably, in this form, be counted in with mild bondage and domination fantasies (which would count as perhaps barely qualifying for the 1st stage paraphilia in vast majority of cases, if they could qualify at all, since the perception of what even counts as paraphilic changes as rigidity of society reduces).
Whatever the case, vampires are certainly intriguing as a theme. They include humans, animals, vegetables and even objects; they present a sexual side while also presenting a beastly one. They fascinate and frighten us, some more, some less, and the legends about them are still alive, both in our Western world and elsewhere.
I doubt that a Halloween goes by without at least some dressing up as vampires; so if you decide to make a vampire your Halloween party theme or costume, you will now do so with the weight of the vampire legend history to help you choose your look. 🙂