But first, on earth as Vampire sent,
Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghastly haunt thy native place,
And suck the blood of all thy race;
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corpse…
The Giaour, Lord Byron

What is a vampire? According to The Random House Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary (1998), a vampire is "a preternatural being, commonly believed to be a reanimated corpse, that is said to suck the blood of sleeping persons at night."

How long have vampires been around? Crawling from the trees of Eden and hissing through their bloody fangs, vampires staked their claim on humanity from the beginning—so much so that they are part of our collective unconscious.

The vampire legend is universal, and stories about this bloodsucking fiend have been told throughout the world for centuries, perhaps as long as tales have been told. The villagers of Uganda, Haiti, Indonesia and the Upper Amazon all have their local variety of vampire. The Native American tribes, Arctic Eskimos and many Arabian tribes know the vampire well. Many of the stories are obviously myth, but some, no doubt, have their roots in reality.

The so-called instances involving actual vampires have been chronicled by monks, ministers and virtually every form of writer. In fact, the highly respected French philosopher, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, wrote: "If there ever was in the world a warranted and proven history, it is that of vampires; nothing is lacking, official reports, testimonials of persons of standing, of surgeons, of clergymen, of judges; the judicial evidence is all-embracing."

Even at the dawn of the scientific age, scholars and members of the clergy were convinced of the vampire’s existence. This was no doubt due to the numerous publicized instances of vampirism, such as the classic case of Vincent Verzini who terrorized an Italian village from 1867 to 1871. Verzini’s method of attack was to seize a victim by the neck, bite her on the throat and then such her blood. He murdered two women and victimized others before he was apprehended. Although Verzini’s examiners found "no evidence of psychosis," there is little question that his vampirism was a deep expression of derangement. That this is clear is shown from Verzini’s own words:

I had an unspeakable delight in strangling women, experiencing during the act erections and real sexual pleasure…. I took great delight in drinking…blood…. It never occurred to me to touch or look at the [women’s] genitals…. It satisfied me to seize the women by the neck and suck their blood.

When we begin to examine the elements of truth behind the legend of the vampire, we soon discover that the myth disguises a very real morbid reality. "Today," writes Brad Steiger in The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings (Visible Ink, 1999), "medical science recognizes a vampire psychosis wherein troubled individuals may become convinced that their life depends upon drawing fresh blood from human victims. The persons suffering from such a psychosis may, in extreme cases, actually believe themselves to be dead."

Then there are the increasing numbers of actual cases of vampires that continue to surface. For example, take the case of 17-year-old Rod Ferrell, a self-professed vampire who was the leader of a coven of vampires. Ferrell, who pled guilty to the murders of Richard and Naomi Ruth Wendorf on November 25, 1996, said he had initiated the Wendorfs’ daughter into the cult with a blood-drinking ritual in a graveyard. Ferrell’s mother was also a member of a vampire cult and pled guilty in 1997 to attempting to seduce a 14-year-old boy as part of a vampire ritual.

In appearance, the traditional vampire is a grotesque, demonic presence—perhaps best captured cinematically in the film Nosferatu (1922). In other words, it is a monster. However, as Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) became popular and was successfully translated to theater and film, the image of the vampire changed. He went from being a hideous demon to a suave, sophisticated, handsome, well-dressed man who would fit in anywhere there was a social event or a party. And now the vampire, along with his beautiful, sensuous sisters of the night, is primarily portrayed as an attractive, seductive presence—an emissary, so to speak, of the alluring dark side.

Much of the legend surrounding vampires encompasses the figure of Dracula. Dracula, of course, was a very real person. His name was Vlad Dracul (also known as the little Dracul, or Dracula), and he lived in the mid-1400s and was the ruler of Wallachia in Transylvania. The Romanian word dracul means dragon. Thus, he was called little dragon (dracula being the diminutive of dragon).

To make a long story short, Vlad Dracula is better known as Vlad Tepes, meaning Vlad the Impaler, a nickname assigned to him because of his favorite method of execution. In fact, there is a 1499 woodcut portrait of Dracula showing him presiding calmly over his wooden table, which is covered with a fine white linen cloth and set with a pitcher (presumably filled with wine), a glass and a plate laden with meat and a hunk of bread. He is wearing a fringed cloak and scrunched hat befitting a gentleman of his time. He is bearded, almost impassive, with a hint of a smile on his face. Dracula’s eyes are turned to the horrific scene to his left—"a writhing mass of impaled men and women," write Anna Szigethy and Anne Graves in Vampires: From Vlad Drakul to the Vampire Lestat (Key Porter, 2001), "their eyes bulging, their mouths gaping open. Most have been run through from front to back, some through their spines. In front of Dracula there is a man in tunic and hat, dismembering a body. Dracula is gesturing toward this spectacle, as if giving instruction. Heads and arms lie all around, causing speculation as to what kind of meat he is dining on."

The text above the scene is in German and reads: "Here begins the very cruel and frightening story about a wild bloodthirsty man, voivod Dracula. How he impaled people, roasted them and boiled them in a kettle, and how he skinned them and hacked them into pieces. He also roasted the children and their mothers had to eat their children themselves. And many other horrible things are written in this tract and also in which land he had ruled."

Dracula went on to impale thousands of his own countrymen (some have put the number as high as 100,000). He also impaled and roasted alive many more of his archenemy Turks. Later captured, released to domesticity and finally having his head severed in battle, Vlad Dracula served, with other tales of gore, as a model of sorts for Stoker’s Dracula.

Because of the influence of the Catholic Church, dracul (that is, dragon) later became synonymous with the Devil, the fallen Satan. In Christian tradition, Satan is often represented as a dragon—although dragons were flying over Transylvania long before Christians converted the people. Back then, however, not all dragons were thought to be evil.

Thus, myth, legend, fact and Christian theology have intermixed to give us our modern conception of the vampire. Over time, as inherited from eastern European thinking, the vampire was either Satan or Satan’s demonic forces. The suggestion of a vampire’s connection to Satan is found in Stoker’s Dracula, where Stoker has his spokesperson, Dr. Abraham Van Helsing, offer the following reflection upon his vampire adversary:

The Draculas were, says Arminius, a great and noble race, though now and again were scions who were held by their coevals to have dealings with the Evil One. They learned his secrets in the Scholomance, amongst the mountains over Lake Hermannstadt, where the devil claims the tenth scholar as his due.

This helps to explain the use of the cross and holy water to repel vampires. In fact, a focus of Roman Catholic piety is the crucifix, which is seen not merely as a symbol of the sacred but as the bearer of the sacred (and, thus, its effectiveness against those of the dark). Moreover, Satan, like the vampire, was a deceiver and one who seeks to steal the soul—one who creeps about in dark places waiting to prey on the innocent.

However, as humanity has slid into more secular times, the way in which we view evil and confront its manifestations—that is, vampires—has changed. In fact, as the Church has lost its dominance, the challenge to the effectiveness of Christian relics in some modern vampire novels and films symbolizes a larger challenge to the role of the supernatural in modern life. "It also includes a protest," writes J. Gordon Melton in The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (Visible Ink, 1994), "against the authority of any particular religion and its claims of truth in a religiously pluralistic world."

The Hollywood, theater and literature mills have all nevertheless adopted many of the older practices and have added sex, fear, danger and gore to weave an irresistible symbol of the underdog vampire who fights and fights again but can never win against the forces of God and men. And now the vampire, in a sense, is so tightly interwoven into our cultural matrix that it seems at times as if the vampire’s torn and ripped spirit is one with us.

Indeed, vampires are special, in part, because of something in their character that is reflective of us all. The image of the vampire is forever shifting and changing, reflecting not himself but our own fears and secret longings. The vampire casts no reflection in the mirror. He doesn’t have to—it’s our faces we see when we gaze into the vampire’s eyes. As Bob Madison writes in Dracula: The First Hundred Years (Midnight Marquee Press, 1997):

For Stoker, Dracula was Darwinism run amuck, a foul, smelly mixture of man and beast, complete with fangs and hairy palms. He was man’s prehistoric nature, crawling from regions beyond England’s empire, to challenge a rational and modern scientific world.

To Germany of the 1920s, still reeling from the devastation of the First World War, the Dracula seen in F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu was pestilence incarnate: a hideous force of nature that implacably plodded forward, like war, disease, and grim death.

And so on. Dracula in the 1920s and 1930s was an undead lounge lizard, a soulless alien who wore an aristocrat’s face. To Americans in the 1940s, as the world slipped into the most catastrophic war in human history, Dracula and his vampiric horde represented the bloodthirsty foreigner. As the 1950s and 1960s brought greater freedom of expression to the media, the sex and violence implicit in Stoker’s narrative became explicit, with liberal amounts of both in a new series of color films.

Dracula’s redemption started in the warm and fuzzy 1970s, and he returned to the fold of brooding, doomed, sympathetic vampires that were in vogue before Stoker’s masterwork. It is this complex Dracula, both predator and victim, that is still with us today in the current atmosphere of New Ageism, recovery programs, and cloudy morality.

Much of our modern-day conception of the vampire comes from the image that has been formulated in movies. And, of course, the vampire films are legion—over 600 have addressed vampires, figuratively or otherwise. Unfortunately, some of the more recent ones have not been the best. But there have been classics and some very fine modern-day spin-offs. The following are some of my favorite vampire films and television shows. And I’m sure there’s a new vampire film or television show in someone’s mind at this moment, which will soon be available. Thus, one thing is certain: although he may change, the vampire is not going anywhere.

FILMS

Sources

Radu R. Florescu and Raymond T. McNally, Dracula: Prince Of Many Faces (Back Bay,

1989).

Bob Madison, ed., Dracula: The First Hundred Years (Midnight Marquee Press, 1997).

J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (Visible Ink, 1994).

J. Gordon Melton, Vampires On Video (Visible Ink, 1997).

David Skal, ed. Vampires: Encounters With The Undead (Black Dog and Leventhal, 2001).

Brad Steiger, The Werewolf Book: The Encyclopedia of Shape-Shifting Beings (Visible Ink, 1999).

Anna Szigethy and Anne Graves, Vampires: From Vlad Drakul To The Vampire Lestat (Key Porter, 2001).