The Vampire Almanac: The Complete History

By J. Gordon Melton

Grab a stake, a fistful of garlic, a crucifix and holy water as you enter the dark, blood-curdling world of the original pain in the neck in this ultimate collection of vampire facts, fangs, and fiction!

What accounts for the undying fascination people have for vampires? How did encounters with death create centuries-old myths and folklore in virtually every culture in the world? When did the early literary vampires—as pictured by Goethe, Coleridge, Shelly, Polidori, Byron, and Nodier as the personifications of man’s darker side—transform from villains into today’s cultural rebels?

Showing how vampire-like creatures organically formed in virtually every part of the world, The Vampire Almanac: The Complete History by renowned religion expert and fearless vampire authority J. Gordon Melton, Ph.D., examines the historic, societal, and psychological role the vampire has played—and continues to play—in understanding death, man’s deepest desires, and human pathologies. It analyzes humanity’s lusts, fears, and longing for power and the forbidden!

Today, the vampire serves as a powerful symbol for the darker parts of the human condition, touching on death, immortality, forbidden sexuality, sexual power and surrender, intimacy, alienation, rebellion, violence, and a fascination with the mysterious. The vampire is often portrayed as a symbolic leader advocating an outrageous alternative to the demands of conformity. Vampires can also be tools for scapegoating such as when women are called “vamps” and bosses are described as “bloodsuckers.”

Meet all of the villains, anti-heroes, and heroes of myths, legends, books, films, and television series across cultures and today’s pop culture in The Vampire Almanac. It assembles and analyzes hundreds of vampiric characters, people, and creatures, including Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Vlad the Impaler, Edward Cullen and The Twilight Saga, Bram Stoker, Lestat De Lioncourt and The Vampire Chronicles, Lon Chaney, True Blood, Bela Lugosi, Dracula, Dark Shadows, Lilith, Vampire Weekend, Batman, Nosferatu, and so many more.

There is a lot to sink your teeth into with this deep exhumation of the undead. Quench your thirst for facts, histories, biographies, definitions, analysis, immortality, and more! This gruesomely thorough book of vampire facts also has a helpful bibliography, an extensive index, and numerous photos, adding to its usefulness.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Visible Ink Press
• Release date: Oct 1, 2021
• ISBN: 9781578597543

J. Gordon Melton

J. Gordon Melton, a nationally known author, lecturer, and scholar, is the Distinguished Professor of American Religious History at Baylor University and serves as the director of the Institute for the Study of American Religion. Dr. Melton is best known for his work on religious cults, and he is considered America's senior scholar in the field of new and unconventional religions, having studied them for more than 40 years. Simultaneously, he has emerged as a leading scholar of vampire and Dracula studies and previously served a tenure as the American president of the Transylvanian Society of Dracula, an international association of vampire and Dracula scholars. He has authored multiple books in the field, two of which received the Lord Ruthven Award as the best nonfiction book in vampire studies. He currently resides in Waco, Texas, with his wife, Suzie.

Book preview

DEDICATION

To Margaret Mannatt

PHOTO SOURCES

20th Century Fox: pp. 402, 408, 506.

20th Television: p. 534.

ABC Television: p. 378.

Accolade, Inc.: p. 570.

Act1 (Wikicommons): p. 350.

Chris Allen / Bray Film Studios: p. 418.

Alte Nationalgalerie, Berlin: p. 324 (left).

American International Pictures: p. 319.

Anime International Company: p. 16.

A. Aruninta: p. 369.

Asahi Sonorama and Asahi Shimbun Publications: p. 353.

Associazione Amici di Piero Chiara: p. 202.

Bahooka (Wikicommons): p. 531.

H. M. Bec: p. 136.

Michelle Belanger: p. 548.

Georges Biard: p. 381.

Bibliothèque Nationale de France: p. 266.

Bin im Garten (Wikicommons): p. 160.

Nicholas Brendon: p. 499.

British Broadcasting Corporation: pp. 230, 390.

British Museum: p. 305.

Dwight Burdette: p. 346.

Niccolò Caranti: p. 567.

Carnival Films: p. 233.

Cartoon Network: p. 286.

Cassell’s Universal Portrait Gallery: p. 239.

CINAR Corporation/Alphanim: p. 289.

Columbia Pictures: pp. 281, 575.

Concorde Pictures: p. 320.

Creativ Studios: p. 237.

Culeshope (Wikicommons): p. 179.

Dan Curtis Productions: pp. 298, 509, 511, 513, 525.

Daughters of Darkness: p. 84.

DC Comics: pp. 546, 555.

Antonio De Lorenzo: p. 174.

Gore De Vol: p. 520.

DiscipulusMundi (Wikicommons): p. 102.

Disney–ABC Domestic Television: p. 540.

Doubleday & McClure: p. 221.

Dynamite Entertainment: p. 607 (bottom).

Seb Eko (Wikicommons): p. 178.

Filmation: p. 473.

First Vampire in China: p. 124.

FORTEPAN: p. 385.

Fox Film Corp.: p. 593.

Fuzheado (Wikicommons): p. 343.

Gallica Digital Library: p. 88.

Gaumont Film Company: p. 185.

Samantha George: p. 95.

Gheungsberg (Wikicommons): p. 194.

M. Gillespie: p. 573.

Goethe National Museum: p. 147.

Gonzo K.K.: p. 131.

Hammer Film Productions: pp. 50, 382, 411.

Hanna-Barbera Pty. Ltd.: p. 474.

The Haunted Castle: p. 130.

Hearst’s International: p. 282.

Here! Network: p. 80.

Orval Hixon: p. 405.

Hodgehouse: p. 464.

JaSunni (Wikicommons): p. 522.

Heide Kraut: p. 526.

Kunsthistorisches Museum Wien, Gemäldegalerie: p. 58.

George Lester: p. 71.

Library of Congress: p. 324 (right).

Alan Light: p. 205.

Alex Lozupone: p. 107.

Jenniely LY (Wikicommons): p. 365.

Macwhiz (Wikicommons): p. 355.

Madman2001 (Wikicommons): p. 114.

Erling Mandelmann: p. 414.

Marvel Comics: pp. 559, 579, 591.

Lvov Maximov: p. 163.

Jim McCullars: p. 518.

J. Gordon Melton (courtesy of): pp. 19, 54, 59, 61, 62, 76, 85, 87, 94, 96, 101, 104, 217, 244, 295, 296, 334, 339, 347, 370, 372, 377, 379, 383, 389, 404, 415, 419, 421, 427, 442, 445, 467, 476, 477, 523, 536, 538, 550, 552, 572, 576, 577, 590, 606.

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer: p. 426.

Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City: p. 279.

Larry D. Moore: p. 356.

Musée Carnavalet: p. 265.

Museum of Fine Arts, Houston: p. 262.

Mutant Enemy Productions: p. 6 (left and right).

Nac1959 (Wikicommons): p. 337.

Nationaal Archief, The Hague: p. 607 (top).

National Portrait Gallery, London: pp. 273, 291, 308.

New Line Cinema: p. 563.

New York Times: p. 224.

Nimrod (Wikicommons): p. 335.

Luigi Novi: p. 558.

OmahaStar (Wikicommons): p. 344.

Ottre (Wikicommons): p. 331.

Palace of Versailles: pp. 184 (top), 199.

Panyd (Wikicommons): p. 53.

Paramount Pictures: p. 440.

Michael Pereckas: p. 348.

Pinguino K (Wikicommons): p. 360.

Power Productions: p. 112.

Prana Film: pp. 195, 400.

Producers Releasing Company: p. 387.

Angela Radulescu: p. 271.

Sara Reyes: p. 300.

Rlarrett (Wikicommons): p. 608.

Patricia Rogers: p. 312.

Xavier Romero-Frias: p. 133.

Melissa Rosenberg and Lev L. Spiro: p. 465.

Screen Gems: p. 434.

Sebb (Wikicommons): p. 206.

Georges Seguin: p. 342.

Showtime Networks: p. 533.

Shutterstock: pp. 2, 5, 8, 10, 13, 17, 21, 23, 32, 33, 37, 38, 44, 46, 66, 73, 78, 82, 121, 122, 123, 127, 129, 142, 149, 152, 154, 158, 159, 168, 175, 188, 215, 225, 242, 245, 247, 249, 354, 435, 451, 458, 459, 460, 486, 491, 493, 495, 498, 500, 501, 502, 508, 566, 582, 583, 602.

Walter William Skeat: p. 132.

Gage Skidmore: pp. 351, 557.

Sony Pictures: p. 424.

Sony Pictures Television: p. 528.

SpA Cinematografica: p. 201.

Catriona Sparks: p. 359.

Teddyfan (Wikicommons): p. 196.

Thames Television: p. 562.

Elizabeth Thor: p. 155.

Touchpaper Television: p. 484.

Touchstone Television: p. 479.

Universal Cable Productions: p. 485.

Universal-International: p. 437.

Universal Pictures: pp. 228, 235, 391, 395.

Universal Television: pp. 475, 530.

Manohara Upadhya: p. 125.

U.S. National Park Service: p. 254.

Valiant Pictures: p. 318.

Vereingte Star-Film GmbH: p. 439.

Vertigo/DC Comics: p. 586.

Danie Ware: p. 294.

Warner Bros.: pp. 412, 448, 449, 456, 480, 535.

Window & Grove: p. 259.

Work Projects Administration Federal Art Project, California: p. 257.

Wikipedia: p. 119.

Marv Wolfman: p. 612.

Joe Zattere: p. 200.

Public domain: pp. 15, 25, 27, 40, 41, 47, 49, 57, 68, 69, 93, 113, 118, 139, 143, 145, 165 (top and bottom), 171, 183, 184 (bottom), 190, 192, 219, 267, 275, 278, 293, 301, 302, 316, 322, 326, 410, 430, 444.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Photo Sources

Introduction

The Vampire Way

Origins of the Vampire

Appearance of the Vampire

Characteristics of the Vampire

Crucifix

Destroying the Vampire

Dust

Fangs

Garlic

Mirrors

Protection against Vampires

Psychic Vampirism

Suicide

Vision

History

Approaching the Vampire

Real Vampires

Christianity and Vampires

Vampires through the Centuries

Alnwick Castle, the Vampire of

Báthory, Elizabeth

Croglin Grange, the Vampire of

The Highgate Vampire

Paole (Paul), Arnold

Plogojowitz, Peter

Vlad Dracul

Vlad the Impaler

Studying the Vampire

Scholarly Perspectives of the Vampire

Explanations of Vampirism

Vampire Crime

Political/Economic Vampires

Sexuality and the Vampire

Homosexuality and the Vampire

Lesbian Vampires

The Scholars

Artenie, Crisina

Bacon, Simon

Browning, John Edgar

Calmet, Dom Augustin

Carter, Margaret Louise

Cris an, Marius-Mircea

Dalby, Richard

Eighteen-Bisang, Robert

Florescu, Radu R.

Garza, Thomas J.

George, Samantha

Hughes, William F.

McNally, Raymond T.

Miller, Elizabeth

Nevárez, Lisa

Ramsland, Katherine

Senf, Carol

Skal, David J.

Stokes, Dax

Summers, Montague

Wynne, Catherine

Scholarly Organizations

Bram Stoker Estate

Children of the Night

Lord Ruthven Assembly

Popular Culture Association, Vampire Studies

Slayage

Transylvania Society of Dracula

Vampires around the World

Vampires! They’re Everywhere!

The Americas

African American Vampires

Mexico

South America

United States

Asia and Oceana

Australia

China

India

Japan

Java (Indonesia)

Malaysia

Philippines

Central and Eastern Europe

Bulgaria

Czech Republic and Slovak Republic

Greece

Hungary

Romani People

Romania

Russia

Slavic Lands

Southern Slavic Lands

Middle East and Africa

Africa

Armenia

Babylon and Assyria

Western and Northern Europe

France

Germany

Ireland

Italy

Scandinavia

Spain

United Kingdom

Dracula

From Rural Transylvania to Ruler of the World’s Vampires

Dracula the Legend

Dracula the Novel

Stoker, Abraham Bram

Dracula’s Friends and Enemies (the Major Characters)

Brides, Vampire

Harker, Jonathan

Holmwood, Arthur

Morris, Quincey P.

Murray (Harker), Mina

Renfield, R. N.

Seward, John

Van Helsing, Abraham

Westenra, Lucy

Dracula’s Habitats

Castle Dracula

London, Dracula’s Nineteenth-Century

Whitby

The Vampire Onstage

Introducting the Dramatic Vampire

Balderston, John Lloyd

Deane, Hamilton

Dracula; or, The Un-Dead: A Play in Prologue and Five Acts

Dracula: The Vampire Play in Three Acts

Dumas, Alexandre

Kelly, Tim

Nodier, Charles

Planché, James Robinson

The Literary Vampire

From Minor Poetic Concern to Fictional Hero and Heroine

Banks, L. A.

Beloved by Toni Morrison

Bunnicula

Byron, Lord George Gordon

Carmilla

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor

Gautier, Théophile

Good-Guy Vampires

Holmes, Sherlock

Juvenile and Young Adult Literature

Keats, John

Le Fanu, Sheridan

Lee, Tanith

Matheson, Richard

Paranormal Romance Literature

Poetry, Vampires in

Polidori, John

Ruthven, Lord

Rymer, James Malcolm

Saberhagen, Fred

Saint Germain

Science Fiction, Vampires in

Southey, Robert

Tolstoy, Alexey Konstantinovitch

Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood

Wolf, Leonard

Modern Authors of the Vampire World

Adrian, Lara

Arthur, Keri

Ashley, Amanda

Bangs, Nina

Bergstrom, Elaine

Brewer, Zac (Heather)

Caine, Rachel

Cast, Kristin, and P(hyllis) C(hristine)

Collins, Nancy A.

Davidson, MaryJanice

Elrod, P. N.

Feehan, Christine

Forrest, Bella

Hamilton, Laurell K(aye)

Harkness, Deborah

Harris, Charlaine

Harrison, Kim

Holder, Nancy

Huff, Tanya

Jungman, Ann

Kalogridis, Jeanne

Kenyon, Sherrilyn

Kikuchi, Hideyuki

King, Stephen

Lumley, Brian

Mead, Richelle

Miller, Linda Lael

Neill, Chloe

Newman, Kim

Niles, Steve

Pike, Christopher

Pozzessere, Heather Graham

Sands, Lynsay

Shan, Darren

Smith, L(isa) J(ane)

Sommer-Bodenburg, Angela

Somtow, S. P.

Tan, Cecilia

Ward, J. R.

Yarbro, Chelsea Quinn

Dracula in the Cinema

Dracula on the Silver Screen

Actors

Carradine, John

Jourdan, Louis

Langella, Frank

Lee, Christopher

Lugosi, Bela

Movies

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)

Count Dracula (1977)

Dracula (1931)

Dracula (Spanish, 1931)

Dracula (1974)

Dracula (1979)

Dracula 3D (2012)

Dracula 2012 3D (India, 2013)

Horror of Dracula (1958)

Nosferatu, Eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922)

Other Cinematic Vampires

African American Vampire Films

Bara, Theda

Blacula

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (movie)

Chaney, Alonso Lon

Cushing, Peter

Dark Shadows (movie)

Dreyer, Carl Theodore

From Dusk till Dawn

Hammer Films

Hotel Transylvania

London after Midnight

Mexican and Latin American Films

Rollin, Jean

Schreck, Max

Twenty-first Century Films

Underworld

Universal Pictures

Vampyr

What We Do in the Shadows

Yorga, Count

Vampire Book-to-Film Adaptations

The Vampire Chronicles by Anne Rice

Rice, Anne

Interview with the Vampire

The Queen of the Damned

Armand

de Lioncourt, Lestate

Lestat, Prince

Twilight by Stephenie Meyer

Cullen, Edward

Meyer, Stephenie

Swan, Isabella Marie Bella

Twilight Book Series

Twilight Movie Series

Twilight

The Twilight Saga: New Moon

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn

The Vampire on TV

Being Human

Buffy the Vampire Slayer Television Series

Angel

Chase, Cordelia

Giles, Rupert

Harris, Xander

Lehane, Faith

Rosenberg, Willow

Spike

Summers, Buffy

Bunnicula

Count von Count

Dark Shadows

Dark Shadows (television series, 1966–1971, 1991)

Dark Shadows Fandom

Collins, Barnabas

Collinsport Players

Curtis, Dan

Frid, Jonathan

Forever Knight

Lost Girl

Midnight, Texas

The Munsters

NOS4A2

Penny Dreadful

The Strain

True Blood

Vampira

The Vampire Diaries / The Originals / Legacies

Vampirina

Young Dracula

Vampires in Pop Culture

Atlanta Vampire Alliance

Baron Blood

Batman

Belanger, Michelle

Blade the Vampire Slayer

Chapman, Erin

Comic Books

Dracula (Marvel Comics character)

The Dracula Society (UK)

Duckula, Count

Frost, Deacon

Games

Glut, Donald Frank

Hogg, Anthony John

The Hollywood Vampires

Humor

Jacula

Morbius

New Orleans

Preacher

Ravenloft

Riccardo, Martin V.

Sebastian, Father

The Tomb of Dracula

Vamp

Vampire Fandom

Vampire: The Eternal Struggle

Vampire: The Masquerade

Vampire Weekend (rock band)

Vampirella

Vampires Everywhere! (rock band)

Wolfman, Marv

Youngson, Jeanne Keyes

Further Reading

Index

INTRODUCTION

Having spent much of the last three decades trying to get a comprehensive, overall picture of the growing presence of a seemingly fictional entity, the vampire, in human consciousness and culture, I have been somewhat surprised at what began as simply an entertaining leisure-time pursuit in my younger years grew to become a compelling intellectual concern worthy of claiming so many of my waking hours. That concern led to my compiling The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, the most recent edition of which appeared a decade ago. This Vampire Almanac continues the desire to understand the overarching significance of the image of the vampire, the myth(s) to which it has become attached, the permeation of popular culture by that myth, and the community of people who have made that myth an important element in their lives (the vampire community).

While continuing the concern for an overview of the vampire world, The Vampire Almanac differs significantly from the editions of The Vampire Book. First, it arranges the presentation of material around the big questions in the vampire world, beginning with defining the basics about vampires, reviewing the vampire’s origin in history and folklore, and then addressing vampire scholarship; the book moves on to the important realms of its presence among us in literature, the dramatic stage, the cinema, television, and the additional segments of the popular culture. This new format has forced new decisions upon me to focus upon the most important aspects of the vampire community. Third, The Vampire Almanac has a very contemporary, twentyfirst-century emphasis, an emphasis that feels strange to someone who considers himself a historian. The vampire community has, however, passed through a distinct growth trajectory over the last two decades that has been marked by the continued permeation of the vampire into the popular consciousness, the development of blockbuster vampire movies and best-selling novels—even series of novels—and the emergence of a new generation of scholarly voices who have chosen to focus on Dracula and the vampire as a serious academic endeavor.

The Vampire Almanac has assumed a decided bias toward the present moment and has assumed some basic observations about its central concern. 1) The publication of Dracula was a notable cultural event in the English-speaking literary world. Although seen as a just another novel when published, it has joined the relatively short list of books that have remained in print since its publication and continue to be reprinted in new editions to the present. As of 2020, it has emerged as the single piece of fictional writing that has most frequently been brought to the screen (more than 40 times). 2) The vampire has shown itself to be a useful metaphor to describe unbalanced elements in human relationships, from the ability of dictatorial states to suck the life out of large groups of people, to the ability of charismatic leaders to suck the life from followers, to the ability of unscrupulous individuals to suck the life from family and friends. 3) The usefulness of the vampire to both entertain and inform our daily life is manifest in the thousands of vampire novels and feature movies, dozens of which appear annually in spite of the conclusion of many critics that the subject has been exhausted. Novelists and screenwriters continue to find new and innovative ways to approach what some have dismissed as a worn-out topic.

With these several working hypotheses, I am happy to offer The Vampire Almanac as a handy guide to those seeking to explore the vampire world and those seeking to understand how and why it has provoked such enthusiasm from its fans. It is my hope that readers can come to appreciate their friends and acquaintances who just can’t wait for the next big novel and who rearrange their lives to see the next adventure of their favorite bloodsucker.

But first we have an important task: defining exactly what we are talking about under the rubric of vampire. Fortunately, from my previous work The Vampire Book in the early 1990s, I wrote a brief article on what a vampire is, which I have reprinted below. Those who are already familiar with the different kinds of vampire can skip these next pages.

What’s a Vampire?

The common dictionary definition for vampire serves as a starting point for inquiry. A vampire is a reanimated corpse that rises from the grave to suck the blood of living people and thus retain a semblance of life. That description certainly fits Dracula, the most famous vampire, but it is only a starting point and quickly proves inadequate in approaching the realm of vampire folklore.

By no means do all vampires conform to this definition. For example, while the subject of vampires almost always leads to a discussion of death, all vampires are not resuscitated corpses. Numerous vampires are disembodied demonic spirits. In this vein are the numerous vampires and vampire-like demons of Indian mythology and the lamiai of Greece. Vampires can also appear as the disembodied spirit of a dead person that retains a substantial existence; like many reported ghosts, these vampires can be mistaken for a fully embodied, living corpse. Likewise, in the modern secular literary context, vampires sometimes emerge as a different species of intelligent life (possibly from outer space or the product of genetic mutation) or to otherwise normal human beings who have an unusual habit (such as blood-drinking) or an odd power (such as the ability to drain people emotionally). Vampire animals, from the traditional bat to the delightful children’s characters Bunnicula and Count Duckula, are by no means absent from the literature. These vampires exist in several forms, although by far the majority of them are the risen dead.

As commonly understood, the characteristics shared by all vampire entities is their need for blood, which they take from living human beings and animals. A multitude of creatures from the world’s mythology have been labeled vampires in the popular literature simply because periodic bloodsucking was among their many attributes. When the entire spectrum of vampires is considered, however, that seemingly common definition falls by the wayside, or, at the very least, must be considerably supplemented. Some vampires do not take blood—rather, they steal what is considered the life force from their victims. A person attacked by a traditional vampire suffers the loss of blood, which causes a variety of symptoms: fatigue, loss of color in the face, listlessness, depleted motivation, and weakness. For example, left unchecked, tuberculosis is a wasting disease that is similar to the traditional description of the results of a vampire’s attack.

Nineteenth-century romantic authors and occultists suggested that real vampirism involved the loss of psychic energy to the vampire, and they wrote of vampiric relationships that had little to do with the exchange of blood. Dracula himself quoted the Bible in noting that the blood is the life. Thus, it is not necessarily the blood itself that the vampire seeks but the psychic energy or life force believed to be carried by it. The metaphor of psychic vampirism can easily be extended to cover various relationships in which one party steals essential life elements from the other, such as when rulers sap the strength of the people they dominate.

On the other extreme, some modern vampires are simply blood drinkers. They do not attack and drain their victims but obtain blood in a variety of legal manners (such as locating a willing donor or a source at a blood bank). In such cases, the consumption of the blood has little to do with any more-or-less ongoing relationship to the source of the blood. It, like food, is merely consumed. Often, modern vampires even report getting a psychological or sexual high from drinking blood.

Once it is settled that the word vampire covers a wide variety of creatures, a second problem arises. As a whole, the vampires themselves are unavailable for direct examination. With a few minor exceptions, the subject matter of this volume is not vampires per se, but human belief about vampires and vampirism. That being the case, some methodology was needed for considering human belief in entities that objectively do not exist, and, indeed, for understanding my own fascination with a fictional archetype. Not a new problem, the vast literature on vampirism favors one or two basic approaches. The first offers explanations within a social context. That is to say, the existence of vampires provides people with an explanation for otherwise inexplicable events (which in the modern West we tend to explain in scientific terms). The second approach is psychological and explains the vampire as existing in the inner psychic landscape of the individual. The two approaches are not necessarily exclusive of each other.

The worldwide distribution of creatures that can properly be termed vampires or have vampire-like characteristics suggests an approach that allows some semblance of order to emerge from the chaos of data. I begin with the obvious. The vampire-like creatures around the world function quite differently in their distinct cultures and environments. Thus, the camazotz of Central America shares several characteristics with the vampire of Eastern Europe, but each plays a distinct role in its own culture’s mythology and is encountered in different situations. While a host of statues and pictures of the camazotz survived in Central America, no Eastern European peasant would think of creating such a memorial to the vampire. In each culture, the vampire takes on unique characteristics because each must be considered in its indigenous context.

Despite these cultural differences, there are common vampire types that seem to bridge cultural boundaries. For example, among the older of the Greek vampire creatures is the lamiai, which seems to have arisen in response to the variety of problems surrounding childbirth. The lamiai attacked babies and young children. It was a way to explain—and cope with—the deaths of newly or recently born infants that you could then attribute to vampires. This is similar to the function of the Indonesian langsuyar and the Jewish Lilith.

In like measure, vastly different cultures possessed vampire myths concerning primarily attacks on young women. Such vampires, which appeared repeatedly in the folklore of Eastern Europe, served a vital role in the process of social control. The stories of these young, handsome, male vampires warned maidens in their early post-pubescent years not to stray from the counsel of their elders and priests and to avoid glamorous visiting strangers who would only lead them to disaster.

Another large group of vampires grew out of encounters with death, especially the sudden, unexpected death of a loved one due to suicide, accident, or an unknown illness. People dying unexpectedly left relatives and friends behind with unfinished agendas with the deceased. Strong emotional ties and uncorrected wrongs felt by the recently deceased caused them to leave their resting place and attack family members, lovers, and neighbors against whom they might have had a grievance. If unable to reach a human target, they turned to the victim’s food supply (i.e., livestock). Stories of attacks by those recently deceased adult vampires on their relatives and neighbors or their livestock directly underlie the emergence of the modern literary and cinematic vampire.

Leaving folktales behind, the literary vampire of the nineteenth century transformed the ethnic vampire into a cosmopolitan citizen of the modern imagination. The literary vampire interacted in new ways with human society. While the early literary vampires pictured by Goethe, Coleridge, Shelly, Polidori, Byron, and Nodier were basically parasites, possessing few traits to endear them to the people they encountered, nevertheless they performed a vital function by assisting the personification of the darker side possessed by human beings. The romantic poets of the nineteenth century assigned themselves the task, among others, of exploring the dark side of the human consciousness.

In the movement to the stage and screen, the vampire was further transformed. The demonic vampire gained some degree of human feelings, and even as a villain, possessed some admirable traits that brought the likes of Bela Lugosi a large and loyal following. Lugosi brought before the public an erotic vampire that embodied the release of the sexual urges that were so suppressed by Victorian society. In the original stage and screen presentations of Dracula, the vampire’s bite substituted for the sexual activity that could not be more directly portrayed. This inherent sexuality of the vampire’s attack upon its victims became more literally portrayed in the 1960s, on the one hand through new adult-oriented, pornographic vampire movies and on the other in a series of novels and movies that centered upon a sensual, seductive vampire. Frank Langella’s Dracula (1979) and Gary Oldman’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) were outstanding examples of this latter type of seductive vampire.

The vampire’s amazing adaptability accounts for much of its popularity. It served numerous vital functions for different people during previous centuries. For enthusiasts, today’s vampire symbolizes important elements of their lives that they feel are being otherwise suppressed by the culture. The most obvious role thrust upon the contemporary vampire has been that of cultural rebel, a symbolic leader advocating outrageous alternative patterns of living in a culture demanding conformity. An extreme example of this new vampire is the vegetarian vampire, such as Bunnicula and Count Duckula, who introduces the vampire to children and who has emerged as an effective tool in teaching children tolerance of other children who are noticeably different.

A psychological approach to the vampire supplements an understanding of its social function. Twentieth-century psychotherapy discovered that modern post-Dracula vampires and vampiric relationships actively distorted their patients’ lives. Out of the experiences reported to them, particularly the classic nightmare, many psychologists called attention to the role of specific, common, human, psychological events in the creation and continual reinforcement of vampire beliefs. Psychologist Margaret Shanahan has noted the role of the vampire as a symbol of the widespread experience of inner emptiness she and her colleagues find in their clients. Such inner emptiness leads to a longing for emotional nutrients. Such longing can lead some to become food or inspire envy of those perceived to possess an abundance of nutrients (rich in the life force) and create an accompanying desire to steal that energy. In its most extreme form, such fixation can lead to various forms of blood consumption and even homicidal acts.

The various psychological approaches also explain some popular social pathologies, especially the common practice of scapegoating. Groups can be assigned characteristics of a vampire and treated accordingly with rhetoric that condemns them to the realms outside of social communion. If not checked, such rhetoric can lead to modern forms of staking and decapitation. Throughout the twentieth century, various groups have been singled out and labeled as vampires. Women became vamps, and bosses became bloodsuckers. Self-declared victims have branded a wide variety of social groups, rightly or wrongly, as their vampire oppressors.

These two approaches to the vampire seem to account for most of the phenomena of vampirism that I have encountered. Further, they suggest that the vampire (or its structural equivalent) was a universal figure in human culture, which emerged independently at many points in different societies. There is little evidence to suggest that the vampire emerged in one time and place and then diffused around the world from a primal source, a notable exception being the migration of the West African vampire to the Caribbean during the slave era.

The development of the literary vampire since its introduction into the Romantic culture of early nineteenth-century Europe, the many variations the character has shown in its myriad appearances in world cultures, and the multiple and varied fruitful approaches taken by modern scholars to address the vampire phenomenon have shown the need for some overview of the vampire and its most popular exemplar, Dracula. The continuing publication and release of vampire novels and movies in the 21st century certainly supplies the rationale for this Vampire Almanac. It makes me hopeful that it will remain a useful tool for my fellow researchers and academic colleagues for years to come.

J. Gordon Melton

Baylor University

September 2020

THE VAMPIRE WAY

In stark contrast to the other monsters that inhabited our literature in the last centuries, the vampire was distinct in its ability to live among us. It blended into human society disguised as one of us, maybe a little odd, but certainly within the bounds of normal variation in humankind. Dracula moved through London with little problem until targeted by a group seeking to confirm his vampiric nature. The vampire’s enemies must first accept the fact that vampires exist, learn the characteristics of the vampire life, and then search out and identify the particular vampires in their midst.

Origins of the Vampire

How did vampires originate? If vampires did (or do) exist, where did they come from? The answers to these questions have varied widely, as the vampire has appeared in the folklore of different countries, and various fiction writers have speculated on the nature of vampirism.

The Folkloric Vampire: The vampire figure in folklore emerged as an answer to otherwise unsolvable problems within culture. The vampire was seen as the cause of certain unexplainable evils, accounted for the appearance of some extraordinary occurrences within society, and was often cited as the end product of immoral behavior. The earliest vampires seem to have originated as an explanation of problems in childbirth. For example, the langsuyar—the primary vampire figure of Malaysia—was a beautiful, young woman who had given birth to a stillborn child. Upon hearing of her child’s fate, she clapped her hands and flew away into the trees. Henceforth, she attacked children and sucked their blood. A similar tale was told of the lamiai, the original vampire of Greece. Just as tales of vampires were inspired by childbirth problems, they also originated from unusual circumstances surrounding births. Children who were different at birth were considered to be vampire candidates. For example, among the Kashubian people of Poland, children born with a membrane cap on their heads or with two teeth were likely to become vampires unless dealt with properly while growing up.

Similarly, some vampire stories originated from problems surrounding the death of a loved one. In Eastern Europe, vampires were individuals who returned from the grave to attack their spouses, their immediate families, and possibly other acquaintances in the village. Symptoms of a vampiric attack included nightmares, apparitions of the dead, and the death of family members by a wasting disease (such as tuberculosis). Some of the symptoms point to the vampire as a product of the grieving process, especially the continued ties of the living to the dead, often taking the form of unfinished emotional business. Thus, vampires were seen as originating from the failure of the family (in a time before the existence of funeral parlors) to perform the funeral and burial rites with exacting precision. A common event that allegedly led to the creation of a vampire was allowing an animal such as a cat to jump over the body of a dead person prior to burial.

The vampire has taken many forms over the centuries, emerging in medieval folklore and morphing slowly into a hip, modern, goth form in TV and film.

Vampirism was also caused by unexpected and sudden, violent deaths either from accidents or suicides. Victims of suicides were also part of a larger class of vampires that existed as a result of the immoral behavior of the person who became a vampire. The vampire served as an instrument of social control for the moral leaders of the community. Thus, people who stepped outside of the moral and religious boundaries of the community not only jeopardized their souls but might become vampires. A potential vampire committed evil acts, among them suicide, and anyone guilty of great evil, especially of an antisocial nature, was thought likely to become a vampire after death.

In some Christian countries, notably Russia and Greece, heresy could also lead to vampirism. The heretic was one type of person who died in a state of excommunication from the church. Excommunication could be pronounced for a number of unforgiven sins from actions directly attacking the church to more common immoralities such as adultery or murder. Heresy was also associated in some cultures with witchcraft, defined as consorting with Satan and/or the working of malevolent, antisocial magic. Witches who practiced their craft in their earthly lives might become vampires after their deaths.

Vampire Contamination: After the first vampire was created, a community of vampires might soon follow. When a particular vampire figure, such as the original lamiai, took its place in the mythology of a people as a lesser deity or demon, they sometimes multiplied into a set of similar beings. Thus, Greek mythology posed the existence of numerous lamiai, a class of demonic entities. They were assumed to exist as part of the larger supernatural environment and, as such, the question of their origin was never raised. Also, such demonic entities did not create new vampires by attacking people. Their victims might suffer either physical harm or death as the result of the vampire’s assault, but they did not become vampires. Things were quite different in Eastern Europe. There, vampires were former members of the community. Vampires could draw other members of the community into their vampiric existence by contaminating former family and neighbors, usually by biting them. In the famous case of Arnold Paole, the vampiric state was passed by meat from cows that had been bitten by Paole.

In the nineteenth century, the vampire figure was wrenched from its rural social context in Eastern Europe and brought into the relatively secularized culture of Western European cities.

The Literary Vampire: In the nineteenth century, the vampire figure was wrenched from its rural social context in Eastern Europe and brought into the relatively secularized culture of Western European cities. It was introduced into the Romantic imagination of writers cut off from the mythological context in which the vampire originated. Those writers had to re create a new context from the few bits of knowledge they possessed. In examining the few vampire cases at their disposal, most prominently the Arnold Paole case, they learned that vampires were created by people being bitten by other vampires.

The imaginary vampire of nineteenth-century Romanticism was an isolated individual. Unlike the Eastern European vampire, the literary vampire did not exist in a village culture as a symbol that warned residents of the dangerous and devilish life outside the boundaries of approved village life. The imaginary vampire was a victim of irresistible supernatural attack. Against their wills, they were overwhelmed by the vampiric state and, much like drug addicts, forced to live lives built around their bloodlust. The majority of beliefs associated with the origins of vampires were irrelevant to the creators of the literary vampire, although on occasion, one element might be picked up to give a novel twist to a vampire tale.

Underlying much of the modern vampire lore was the belief that vampires attacked humans and, through that attack, drew victims into their world. Again, like drug addicts might share an addiction and turn others into addicts, so the vampire infected nonvampires with their condition. Writers have generally suggested that vampires primarily, if not exclusively, created new vampires by their bites. The radical simplification of the vampire myth can be seen in Dracula (1897), especially in its treatment on the stage and screen. Bram Stoker did not deal directly with the problem of Dracula’s origin as a vampire. In Dr. Abraham Van Helsing’s famous speech in chapter 18, where he described in some detail the nature of the vampire, he suggested that Dracula became a vampire because he had dealings with the Evil One. More importantly, however, was his ability to transform people into vampires. Dracula’s bite was a necessary part of that transmission but, of itself, not sufficient. Jonathan Harker was bitten a number of times by the three vampire women but did not become a vampire. On the other hand, following multiple bites from Dracula, Lucy Westenra did turn into a vampire, and Mina Murray was in the process of being transformed into a vampire when the men interrupted Dracula. In the key scene in chapter 21, Dracula, having previously drunk Mina’s blood, forced her to drink his. Thus, in Dracula, new vampires originated not from the bite of the vampire but by an exchange of blood.

Bram Stoker had little material to draw upon in considering this question of the vampire’s origin. The question was avoided by John Polidori in his original vampire story. Varney the Vampyre, the subject of the 1840s novel, became a vampire as punishment for accidentally killing his son, but the actual manner of transformation was not revealed. Sheridan Le Fanu was familiar with the folkloric tradition and suggested suicide as the cause of new vampires but saw the death of a person previously bitten by a vampire as the basic means of spreading vampirism. His antiheroine, Carmilla, was the product of a vampire’s bite.

Bram Stoker had little material to draw upon in considering this question of the vampire’s origin. The question was avoided by John Polidori in his original vampire story.

In the rewriting of Dracula for screen and stage, the scene from the book during which Mina consumed Dracula’s blood was deleted. It was considered too risqué, but without it, some other means had to be found to transmit the vampiric state, thus came the suggestion that merely the vampire’s bite transmitted the condition—the common assumption in most vampire novels and movies. At times, vampires required multiple bites or the bite had to take enough blood to cause the death of the victim. While most vampire books and movies have not dealt with the question of vampire origins apart from the passing of the vampiric condition through the bite of a preexisting vampire, occasionally, writers have attempted to create a vampire myth that covers the ancient origin of the original vampire(s).

Among the more intriguing of recent origin stories was that told by Anne Rice in the third of her The Vampire Chronicles series, The Queen of the Damned. Akasha and her husband Enkil ruled as queen and king of ancient Egypt. In the midst of their reign, Akasha had two witches, Maharet and Mekare, brought to her court. They allowed her to see the world of spirits, but then, one of the spirits, Amel, attacked her. Akasha turned on the two witches and, in her rage, ordered them raped publicly and then banished. How ever, both Akasha and Enkil were intrigued by the spirit world and began to explore it on their own. Meanwhile, an uprising occurred, and the rulers were seriously wounded. Akasha’s soul escaped from her body temporarily only to encounter the spirit Amel, who joined himself to her. Her soul re-entered her body and brought Amel with it. Fused with her brain and heart, the presence of Amel turned her into a vampire. She, in turn, passed the vampiric condition to Enkil and to their steward Khayman by the more traditional bite. All other vampires in the book, who originated from a vampire’s bite, have a lineage that can ultimately be traced to these three first vampires.

The Vampire Bat: In chapter 12 of Dracula, Bram Stoker suggested, but did not develop, the idea that vampire bats might ultimately be the cause of vampirism. Quincey P. Morris delivered a brief oration on his encounter with vampire bats in South America. Although vampire bats made numerous appearances in vampire lore—primarily as humans temporarily transformed into animal form—few writers developed the idea of vampirism originating with vampire bats.

Although a popular creature in vampire fiction, the vampire bat is very real indeed. Interestingly, they are native to Central and South America, not Transylvania or anywhere else in Europe.

Most prominent among the few stories in which vampirism originated with a bat was Dark Shadows. The Dark Shadows storyline took Barnabas Collins back to 1795 and his origin as a vampire. Spurning the witch Angélique’s love for him, Barnabas wound up in a fight with her and shot her. Wounded and near death, she cursed Barnabas, and a bat attacked him. He died from the bite and arose from the grave as a vampire. Subsequently, Barnabas created other vampires in the common manner: by biting them and draining their blood to the point of death.

The Science Fiction Vampire: A final option concerning the origin of vampires was derived from science fiction. As early as 1942 in his short story Asylum, A. E. van Vogt suggested that vampires were an alien race who originated in outer space. The most successful of the comic book vampires, Vampirella, was a space alien. She originated on the planet Drakulon and came to earth to escape her dying planet. Ultimately, in the Vampirella storyline, even Dracula was revealed to be an alien.

Science fiction also suggested a second origin for the vampire: disease. Not incompatible with either vampire bats or outer space aliens, disease (either in the form of germs or altered blood chemistry) provided a nonsupernatural explanation of the vampire’s existence—an opinion demanded by many secularized readers or theater-goers. Disease explained the vampire’s strange behavior from its nocturnal existence to its allergy to garlic to its bloodlust. This idea was explored most prominently in Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend. In the end, however, the science fiction space vampire was like its supernatural cousin. Whatever its origin, the vampire was the bearer—at least potentially—of its condition to anyone it attacked, and the vampire’s bite was the most common way to spread vampirism.

Most recently, the idea of vampirism being a disease was integral to the storyline of The Strain, three novels by Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan made into a four-season television series. The books pictured the coming of the vampires to America, unleashing a plague that brought an epidemiologist to the fore as the hero who must take the lead in the fight against the master and his minions, who are spreading the strain of disease.

Appearance of the Vampire

Any discussion of the appearance of the vampire must take into account the several vampire types. The contemporary vampires of the 1980s and 1990s have shown a distinct trend toward a normal appearance that allows them to completely fit in with human society and move about undetected. Such modern vampires have almost no distinguishing characteristics, with the exception of fangs (extended canine teeth), which may be retractable and show only when the vampire is feeding. As such, the contemporary vampire harks back to the vampire characters of the pre-Dracula literary vampires. Little in the appearance of Geraldine, Lord Ruthven, Varney the Vampyre, or Carmilla distinguished them from their contemporaries (though Varney had prominent fangs).

In the TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, vampires could appear normal and attractive one moment, terrifying and evil the next.

In the last generation, vampire novelists have occasionally sought some way to make the vampire’s appearance distinctive while keeping them capable of blending into society. Anne Rice describes the vampire’s skin as pale and reflective, though possibly the most notable alteration is a set of fingernails that look like they were made of glass. Stephenie Meyer, in her Twilight series, posits vampires who have a heightened, even supernatural, beauty. While Rice’s vampires are beautiful, because of the tendency of older vampires to turn humans whom they find attractive and with whom they have fallen in love, Meyer suggests that becoming a vampire enhances the level of beauty in the person who is turned. Their skin becomes flawless and takes on a texture and feel resembling marble. If exposed to sunlight, it will sparkle.

In the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spin-off Angel, the vampires usually appeared just as they had in real life. Only when aroused, angry, or about to feed do they take on a distinctive appearance. As was the case in the 1990s television series Forever Knight, the vampires in Buffy for a brief time change dramatically and horrifically. They are said to put on their game face. The eyes change color, the face distorts, and the fangs come out of hiding. They are obviously something different.

In spite of the changes introduced by Forever Knight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and the writings of Anne Rice and Stephenie Meyer, the contemporary vampire is still largely based on the dominant figure of Dracula as developed for the stage by dramatist Hamilton Deane and especially as portrayed by Bela Lugosi. Deane must be credited with the domestication of Dracula and making him an acceptable attendee at the evening activities of Victorian British society. Deane’s Dracula donned evening clothes and an opera cape with a high collar.

Bela Lugosi in the movie Dracula (1931) confirmed Deane’s image of the vampire in popular culture and added to it. He gave Dracula an Eastern European accent and a swept-back, slicked-down hairdo with a prominent widow’s peak. In Horror of Dracula (1958), Christopher Lee added the final prominent feature to Dracula’s appearance: the fangs. Prior to Lee, the vampire had no fangs, at least no visible ones. Lee, the first prominent vampire in Technicolor, also gave Dracula a set of red eyes, which, to a lesser extent, has become a standard (though by no means unanimous) aspect of the vampire’s appearance, especially in motion pictures. Since Lee, the image of the vampire in popular culture has been set. The fangs, the cape, and, to a lesser extent, the evening clothes, the red eyes, and the widow’s peak now quickly convey the idea that a person is a vampire. The use of these definitive signs of a vampire’s appearance is most evident on greeting cards and the artwork on the cover of vampire novels and comic books.

In the overwhelming number of twenty-first-century vampire novels, movies, and television shows, the vampires appear as normal human beings, at least at first sight.

This modern image of the vampire, with the exception of the extended canine teeth, varies considerably from both that of Dracula as presented in the original novel of Bram Stoker and the vampire of folklore. The latter, at least in its Eastern European incarnation, was a corpse but notable for several uncorpselike characteristics. Its body might be bloated and extended so that the skin was tight like a drum. It would have extended fingernails that had grown since its burial. It would be dressed in burial clothes. It would stink of death. The ends of its appendages might show signs of having been eaten away. In appearance, the folkloric vampire was horrible not so much because it was monstrous but because of its disgusting, semidecayed nature.

Between the folklore vampire and the contemporary vampire of popular culture lies the Dracula of Bram Stoker’s novel. He was described in some detail in the second chapter of the book: he was dressed in black clothes; his hair was profuse and his eyebrows massive and bushy; he had a heavy moustache; his skin was pale; he had hair in the palm of his hand and long, extended fingernails. Most noticeable were the brilliant, extended canines that protruded over his lower lips when the mouth was closed. His eyes were blue, though they flashed red when he was angry or upset. He was of mature years, though he got younger as the novel proceeded. John Carradine’s stage productions of Dracula in the 1950s were probably closest to Dracula as he appeared in the novel.

In the overwhelming number of twentyfirst-century vampire novels, movies, and television shows, the vampires appear as normal human beings, at least at first sight. They may be beautiful or not; they may be of any gender, race, or age; and they might inhabit any social or economic status—until they get ready to feed. Then, the fangs will appear and a more or less radical alteration in appearance occurs. This change was integral to the vampires in the Buffy the Vampire Slayer TV series. One of the more elaborate changes was integral to the plot of Robert Rodriguez’s movie trilogy From Dusk till Dawn and its subsequent TV series, in which the vampires mixed nightly with the clientele in their entertainment establishments only to take on a vicious, snakelike appearance when about to feed. Similar, if less elaborate, changes have become almost universal in vampire settings.

The major exception relative to the humanlike appearance of the vampire is Count Orlock, the name given to Dracula in the 1922 movie Nosferatu. Director F. W. Murnau, in attempting to disguise his appropriation of Dracula without paying royalties to Bram Stoker’s widow, created a version of the vampire that emphasized his rodentlike appearance. He was completely bald, with skin devoid of color and the face taking on a deathly pallor. His fingers were extended, as were the fingernails, and his fangs were close together in the front of his teeth. This ratlike appearance would be adopted by only a small minority of vampires over the succeeding century but would appear in a notable set of vampire movies, including the remake of Nosferatu in 1979, the two versions of Stephen King’s several Salem’s Lot movies, the Master in the first season of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), the vampire character Charles Manx in Joe Hill’s novel NOS4A2, Petyr in the movie What We Do in the Shadows (2014), and the Master and his fellow strigoi in the television series The Strain (2014–2017). It had also been one of the distinct appearances of Dracula in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).

Characteristics of the Vampire

Throughout history, vampires have been known by their defining characteristics. Vampires were understood to be dead humans who returned from the grave and attacked and sucked the blood of the living as a means of sustaining themselves. The idea of the vampire came to the attention of both the scholarly community and the public in the West because of reports of the manifestation of such creatures in Eastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The vampire was seen as a prominent character in the folklore of people from Greece and Turkey in the south to Germany and Russia in the north. The descriptions of vampires in these countries set the image of vampires for the debates about their existence in the eighteenth century. The descriptions of the vampire from Greece and among the southern Slavs became the basis of the development of the literary vampire of the nineteenth century. Bram Stoker, the author of Dracula (1897), drew heavily upon earlier vampire stories and the accounts of vampires in Transylvania and Romania. By the end of the nineteenth century and through the twentieth century, using a definition of the vampire drawn from European folklore and mythology, ethnographers and anthropologists began to recognize the existence of analogous beings in the folklore and mythology of other cultures around the world. While these entities from Asian, African, and other cultures rarely conformed entirely to the Eastern European vampire, they shared enough characteristics that they could rightly be termed vampires or, at least, vampire-like entities.

Vampires in modern-day tales are often portrayed as average Joes who could be like any of your neighbors, except for the fangs and their need to drink blood.

The Modern Vampire: The vampire has become an easily recognizable character in Western popular culture. As defined by recent novels and motion pictures and as pictured in comic books and on greeting cards, vampires have several key attributes. Vampires are like normal human beings in most respects and are thus able to live more or less comfortably in modern society. They are different, however, in that they possess a pair of fangs, tend to dress in formal wear with an opera cape, have a pale complexion, sleep in coffins, are associated with bats, and only come out at night. Their fangs are used to bite people on the neck and suck blood, the substance from which they are nourished. Fangs have become the single most recognizable feature of a male or female vampire, immediately identifying the vampire character to an audience and signaling immediate danger to the prospective victim.

Vampires, if seen, generally appeared to the people closest to them in their former lives.

In addition, vampires are basically creatures of the night, and during the day, they enter a comalike vampire sleep. They have red eyes and are cold to the touch. They may not be able to enter a room until invited. In addition, vampires possess some unusual supernatural attributes. They have great strength, they can fly (or at least levitate), they possess a level of hypnotic power (thus forcing the compliance of victims or causing a forgetfulness of the vampire’s presence), they have acute night vision, and they can undergo a transformation into a variety of animals (usually a bat or possibly a wolf). Vampires avoid garlic, sunlight, sacred symbols such as the cross (the crucifix) and holy water, and they may need to sleep on their native soil. They may be killed by a wooden stake thrust in their heart or by fire. While the stereotype has been challenged in recent decades, a disproportionate number of vampires were drawn from European nobility. They were suave and cultured and readily welcomed into almost any social context. The most recognizable vampire is, of course, Dracula. He was preceded by Lord Ruthven and Countess Carmilla Karnstein. More recently, Barnabas Collins, of an aristocratic American family, and Lestat de Lioncourt, born of the French lesser nobility, have reinforced popular images of the vampire.

Folkloric Vampires: The vampire was not always so described. Folkloric vampires appeared in numerous forms as demonic creatures. The Malaysian penanggalan, for example, was pictured as a severed head with entrails dangling down. The Indian goddess Kali had a hideous form and was often shown dancing on corpses with fangs protruding from her bloodied lips. However, most commonly, the vampire appeared as the corpse of a person recently deceased. Vampires could be recognized by their dress in burial clothes and could be identified by someone who had known them in life and who understood that they were deceased and should not be walking around the town. As often as not, the vampire would never be seen, but its presence would be detected by the effects of its action, usually the wasting away and dying of people from unknown causes or the unusual and unexpected deaths of livestock.

Vampires, if seen, generally appeared to the people closest to them in their former lives. In some cases, especially among the Romani people and southern Slavs, they would return to engage in sexual relations with a former spouse or lover; in most other cases, they would launch a personal attack on family members, friends, or local livestock. Often, the vampire would assume a new existence, something that approached normal life. In Malaysia, for example, the langsuyar assumed the role of a wife and could bear and raise children. She would usually be detected by some chance event during the course of her life. In Eastern Europe, primarily male vampires were reported to have ventured far from home, where they were not known, and continued their life as before their death, even to the point of marrying and fathering children.

The vampire of folklore had some supernatural attributes above and beyond the mobility one generally does not expect of the dead. It could change form and appear as a host of different animals from a wolf to a moth. Interestingly, the bat was rarely reported as a vampiric form. Some people reported vampires with flying ability, especially in Oriental cultures, but flying or levitation was not prominent among Eastern European vampires.

The original vampires, those described in the folklore and mythology of the world’s people, exist as an evil entity within a complex understanding of the world by a particular ethnic group. Thus, they would assume characteristics drawn from that group’s culture and fitting that group’s particular fears/needs. Given the variety of vampire-like creatures, both demons and revenants reported from cultures around the world, almost any characteristic reported of a vampire would be true of one or more such entities.

The Literary Vampire: At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the vampire became the focus of a set of writers, primarily in France and the United Kingdom. In their hands, the folkloric vampire, almost exclusively in its Eastern and Southern European form, was transformed into a gothic villain. While retaining many of the characteristics from the reports of vampires that had filtered into Western Europe in the previous century, writers were quite selective in their choice of acceptable attributes. In the process of creating a literary character, they also added attributes that had no correlation in the folklore literature. Lord Ruthven, the character of the original vampire story written by John Polidori, was of noble birth.

Crucifix

The crucifix, a major symbol of the Christian faith, is a Latin cross with a figure of Jesus on it. A crucifix is often attached to one end of the rosary, the string of prayer beads popular in the expression of piety among some Christians. The cross represents Jesus as he was executed on the original Good Friday. The crucifix is used primarily in the Roman Catholic Church, the several branches of the Eastern Orthodox Church, and other church bodies that follow a similar liturgical style of Christianity. In general, Protestant and free churches do not utilize the crucifix. They prefer a plain cross, sometimes thought of as an empty cross, without the corpus, a symbol of the resurrected Christ.

The Christian symbol of the crucifix is now accepted in popular culture as a tool to ward off vampires.

In the first chapter of the novel Dracula (1897), a woman in Bistritz, Transylvania, took a rosary from her neck and gave it to Jonathan Harker upon hearing that he was going to visit Count Dracula. Harker, a member of the protestantized Church of England, had been taught that such an object was a product of idolatrous thinking. However, he put it around his neck and left it there. A short time after his arrival at Castle Dracula, Dracula made a grab for Harker’s throat. Harker reported, I drew away, and his hand touched the string of beads which held the crucifix. It made an instant change in him, for the fury passed so quickly that I could hardly believe that it was ever there. Having yet to figure out what Dracula was, he wondered about the meaning of the crucifix.

The crucifix played an important role in several other scenes in the novel. One appeared again in the hands of a man aboard the Demeter, the ship that brought Dracula to England. He was found tied to the ship’s wheel with the crucifix in his hands, the beads wrapped around an arm and a wheel spoke. Later, after Lucy Westenra died and while she was experiencing life as a vampire herself, vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing locked her in her tomb for a night with a crucifix and garlic, described as things she would not like. In Van Helsing’s famous speech in chapter 18, he described the crucifix as one of the things that, like garlic, so afflicted the vampire that the creature had no power. So, when the men burst into the bedroom where Dracula was sharing blood with Mina Murray (by then Mina Harker), they advanced upon him with their crucifixes raised in front of them. Dracula retreated.

In the wake of Dracula, the crucifix became a standard element of vampire plays, movies, and novels through the twentieth century.

Through the tale Dracula, then, the crucifix entered vampire lore as a powerful tool against vampires, especially when confronting one directly. It was not mentioned in historic vampire stories, though many priests who participated in the dispatching of a vampire no doubt wore the crucifix. The emergence of the crucifix came directly from Bram Stoker’s combining some popular ideas about the magical use of sacred objects by Roman Catholics and the medieval tradition that identified vampirism with Satanism (through Emily Gerard, Stoker developed the notion that Dracula became a vampire due to his having intercourse with Satan). In addition, a significant amount of Roman Catholic piety focused around the crucifix, and among church members it could easily take on not just sacred but magical qualities. It was not just a symbol of the sacred but also the bearer of the sacred.

If, then, the vampire was of the realm of Satan, it would withdraw from a crucifix. For Stoker, the presence of the crucifix caused the vampire to lose its supernatural strength. Thus, in the case of Harker, Dracula lost his fury; Lucy could not escape her tomb; and when the men burst into Mina’s bedroom, the weakened Dracula, faced with overwhelming odds, departed quickly. In the wake of Dracula, the crucifix became a standard element of vampire plays, movies, and novels through the twentieth century. A second sacred object with similar effects as the crucifix, the eucharistic wafer, largely dropped out of the picture. However, the crucifix acquired one of the properties Stoker assigned to the wafer. It burned vampire flesh and left a mark on those tainted with the vampire’s bite. Thus, the crucifix