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The Vampire Way
Seeing the Vampires in Our Life
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 the 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 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.
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 Paul, the vampiric state was passed by meat from cows that had been bitten by Paul.
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 recreate a new context from the few bits of knowledge they possessed. In examining the few vampire cases at their disposal, most prominently the Arnold Paul 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 blood lust. 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 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 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 important, 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 accidently 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 anti-heroine, Carmilla was the product of a vampire’s bite.
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, and 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 “Vampire Chronicles,” 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 Mekere, 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. However, 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 reentered 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.
Most prominent among the few stories in which vampirism originated with a bat was Dark Shadows. The Dark Shadows story line took Barnabas Collins back to his 1795 origin as a vampire. Spurning the witch Angelique’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 story line, even Dracula was revealed to be an alien.
Science fiction 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 theatergoers. Disease explained the vampire’s strange behavior, from its nocturnal existence to the “allergy” to garlic to its blood lust. 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 story line of “The Strain,” a novel trilogy by Guillermo del Toro and Church Hogan that was adapted as 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 a 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 has 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 except for 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. There was little in the appearance of Geraldine, Lord Ruthven, Varney the Vampyre, or Carmilla to distinguish them from their contemporaries (though Varney had prominent fangs).
During 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 are the 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 into vampires, 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 spinoff, 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. Hamilton 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 the Horror of Dracula (1968), 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 to appear in Technicolor, also gave Dracula a set of red eyes, which to a lesser extent has become a standard (though by no means ubiquitous) 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.
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 a corpse notable for several uncorpselike characteristics. Its body might be bloated and extended so that the skin was tight as 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; and he had hair on the palm of his hand and long, extended fingernails. Most noticeable were the brilliant, extended canines that protruded over his lower lip 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 the closest to Dracula as he appeared in the novel.
In the overwhelming number of twenty-first century vampire novels, movies, and television shows, the vampires appear in the form of 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 Dracula in the 1922 movie Nosferatu. Director F. W. Murmau, in an attempt 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 mouth. This ratlike appearance would be adopted by only a small minority of vampires over the succeeding century, but it 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, and the Master and his fellow stigoi in the television series The Strain. It was also 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 about the manifestation of such creatures in eastern Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The vampire appeared as a prominent character in the folklore of 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. Stoker 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.
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.
In addition, vampires are basically creatures of the night, and during the day they enter a comalike 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 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 a wolf). Vampires avoid garlic, sunlight, sacred symbols such as 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 is from an aristocratic American family, and Lestat de Lioncourt, who was born into 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 life. In some cases, especially among the Romani People (Gypsies) 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 deaths, 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 Asian cultures, but flying or levitation were not prominent among eastern European vampires.
The original vampires described in the folklore and mythology of the world’s people exist as an evil entity within a complex understanding of a particular ethnic group. Thus, they would assume characteristics drawn from that group’s culture and befitting that group’s particular fears/needs. Given the variety of vampirelike creatures, both demons and revenants, reported from cultures around the world, almost any characteristic reported about 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 forms, 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.
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.
In the first chapter of the novel Dracula (1897), a woman in Bistritz, Transylvania, takes a rosary from her neck and gives 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 puts it around his neck and leaves it there. A short time after his arrival at Castle Dracula, Dracula makes a grab for Harker’s throat. Harker reports, “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 plays an important role in several other scenes in the novel. One appears 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 dies and while she was experiencing life as a vampire herself, vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing locks 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 describes 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 advance upon him with their crucifixes raised in front of them. Dracula retreats.
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 on 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 the bearer of the sacred.
