‘Yes, yes folklore vampires and explanations are all good and well old man, but what about the real vampires! The Lestats, the Edward Cullens and the Bill Comptons?’
Spike, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, played by James Marsters. Could not find a reliable image credit for this one unfortunately
Bram Stokers novel ‘Dracula’ from 1897 set up the rules for the modern vampires, but it borrowed its name from one aristocrat 400 years earlier. Vlad (III) Dracula was a Wallachian count/prince that after his death was given the somewhat less flattering epithet ‘the impaler’ or ‘Tepes’ in Romanian. The ‘Dracula’ in his name was a recognition of his membership in ‘The order of the dragon’ an order founded to protect christianity in eastern Europe. Vlad is today in the region reverred as a national hero for saving present Bulgaria and Romania from invasion by the ottomans. In Western Europe it is however said that he roasted babies and had them fed to their mothers and impaled somewhere between 40 000 and 100 000 of his enemies. One particular anecdote tells the story of Mehmet II the Ottoman ruler who came to Vlads capital Targoviste, only to return home, sickened by the sight of 20 000 corpses impaled outside the city.
Do these tales seem almost a little cartoonish, a little too evil to be true? It’s because there’s a distinct possibility that they are. The image of Vlad as a bloodthirsty monster is almost exclusively prevalent in sources of germanic, hungarian and saxon descent, all of which had an interest in/or a history of falsifying testimony about Vlad. The Saxon living in Transylvania at the time were persecuted throughout the reign of Vlad and Mattias Corvinus, the then king of Hungary, has spread false information about Vlad collaborating with the Ottomans. I’m fairly convinced that this is a case where there’s two sides of the story and a little ‘winner-writes-the-history’ thrown in at the side.
Bram Stokers Dracula was by no means the first work of vampire fiction, the vampires had been established as stock figures in horror in the early 1800s. What was it though that made Bram Stokers book into the vampire bible? I think it comes down to a mix of a number of things. Dracula was full of those cautionary pointers that made fables live on through oral tradition. ‘If you’re a woman, don’t socialise with swarthy men’ ‘Don’t go out at night’ ‘Don’t engage in lustful behaviour’, making it useful as a tool for supressing female behaviour. It had a certain tantalising eroticism to it. And finally it was a pretty interesting allegory for widespread deadly diseases in London at the time, that weren’t always obvious at first sight, such as Syphilis and Tubercelosis.
The fictional vampires, as opposed to the folklore ones, have a distinct set of rules that we all know. No reflection in a mirror, can turn into a bat, a wolf or just plain mist, doesn’t like sunlight, must feed on human blood, can make new vampires and a particular disdain of garlic. Some of these, however, are skirted or ignored completely in modern day vampire fiction. Often the vampire in question jokingly dismiss them as ‘superstition’ or ‘deliberate misinformation’. These steps towards making the modern vampire more relatable and for lack of a better term ‘good’, I think comes from our increased ability to imagine people in our surroundings as more than just ‘hero’ or ‘monster’. The monster isn’t a very interesting villain anymore, because we feel that it’s a caricature. The villain that also is capable good makes for a deeper and more interesting character, and at least in my opinion, a scarier one. Would you be more insecure around someone that you can always rely on to make the evil choice each and every time, or the one that is sometimes affectionate, reasonable and loving and sometimes a complete maniac? And which of them feels like someone that could exist in your very proximity, living in your apartment complex or in your neatly arranged suburb?
I’ll be over here in my neatly arranged suburb, in my apartment complex, in your very proximity, sharpening my knives… or… I mean… writing about witches for tomorrow!
