Vampire  

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"The ideas about vampires are identical among the Greeks and Slavonians, the name for a vampire being one of the very few words of Slavonic origin in Modem Greek."--History of Fiction (1814) by John Colin Dunlop


"The old centuries have powers of their own which mere “modernity” cannot kill [...] Is there fate amongst us still, sent down from the pagan world of old, that such things must be, and in such way?"--Dracula (1897) by Bram Stoker


"For a fetus is a benign tumor, a vampire who steals in order to live."--Sexual Personae (1990) by Camille Paglia


"Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) has been the definitive description of the vampire in popular fiction for the last century. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease (contagious demonic possession), with its undertones of sex, blood, and death, struck a chord in a Victorian Britain where tuberculosis and syphilis were common."--Sholem Stein

Stryge (1853) by Charles Méryon
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Stryge (1853) by Charles Méryon

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A vampire is a creature from folklore that subsists by feeding on the vital essence (generally in the form of blood) of the living. In European folklore, vampires are undead creatures that often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighbourhoods they inhabited while they were alive. They wore shrouds and were often described as bloated and of ruddy or dark countenance, markedly different from today's gaunt, pale vampire which dates from the early 19th century.

Vampiric entities have been recorded in cultures around the world; the term vampire was popularized in Western Europe after reports of an 18th-century mass hysteria of a pre-existing folk belief in the Balkans and Eastern Europe that in some cases resulted in corpses being staked and people being accused of vampirism.

In modern times, the vampire is generally held to be a fictitious entity, although belief in similar vampiric creatures such as the chupacabra still persists in some cultures. Early folk belief in vampires has sometimes been ascribed to the ignorance of the body's process of decomposition after death and how people in pre-industrial societies tried to rationalize this, creating the figure of the vampire to explain the mysteries of death. Porphyria was linked with legends of vampirism in 1985 and received much media exposure, but has since been largely discredited.

The charismatic and sophisticated vampire of modern fiction was born in 1819 with the publication of "The Vampyre" by the English writer John Polidori; the story was highly successful and arguably the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century. Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and provided the basis of the modern vampire legend, even though it was published after fellow Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's 1872 novel Carmilla. The success of this book spawned a distinctive vampire genre, still popular in the 21st century, with books, films, television shows, and video games. The vampire has since become a dominant figure in the horror genre.

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Vampire literature

Vampire literature covers the spectrum of literary work concerned principally with the subject of vampires. The literary vampire first appeared in 18th-century poetry, before becoming one of the stock figures of gothic fiction with the publication of Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), which was inspired by the life and legend of Lord Byron. Later influential works include the penny dreadful Varney the Vampire (1847); Sheridan Le Fanu's tale of a lesbian vampire, Carmilla (1872), and the most well known: Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Some authors created a more "sympathetic vampire", with Varney being the first, and Anne Rice's 1976 novel Interview with the Vampire as a more recent example.

History

18th century

Vampire fiction is rooted in the "vampire craze" of the 1720s and 1730s, which culminated in the somewhat bizarre official exhumations of suspected vampires Petar Blagojevich and Arnold Paole in Serbia under the Habsburg Monarchy. One of the first works of art to touch upon the subject is the short German poem The Vampire (1748) by Heinrich August Ossenfelder, where the theme already has strong erotic overtones: a man whose love is rejected by a respectable and pious maiden threatens to pay her a nightly visit, drink her blood by giving her the seductive kiss of the vampire and thus prove to her that his teaching is better than her mother's Christianity. Furthermore, there have been a number of tales about a dead person returning from the grave to visit his/her beloved or spouse and bring them death in one way or another, the narrative poem Lenore (1773) by Gottfried August Bürger being a notable 18th-century example (though the apparently returned lover is actually revealed to be death himself in disguise). One of its lines, Denn die Todten reiten schnell ("For the dead ride fast"), was to be quoted in Bram Stoker's classic Dracula. A later German poem exploring the same subject with a prominent vampiric element was The Bride of Corinth (1797) by Goethe, a story about a young woman who returns from the grave to seek her betrothed:

From my grave to wander I am forced
Still to seek the God's long sever'd link,
Still to love the bridegroom I have lost,
And the lifeblood of his heart to drink.

The story is turned into an expression of the conflict between Heathendom and Christianity: the family of the dead girl are Christians, while the young man and his relatives are still pagans. It turns out that it was the girl's Christian mother who broke off her engagement and forced her to become a nun, eventually driving her to her death. The motive behind the girl's return as a "spectre" is that "e'en Earth can never cool down love". Goethe had been inspired by the story of Philinnion by Phlegon of Tralles, a tale from classical Greece. However, in that tale, the youth is not the girl's betrothed, no religious conflict is present, no actual sucking of blood occurs, and the girl's return from the dead is said to be sanctioned by the gods of the Underworld. She relapses into death upon being exposed, and the issue is settled by burning her body outside of the city walls and making an apotropaic sacrifice to the deities involved.

19th century

The first mention of vampires in English literature appears in Robert Southey's monumental oriental epic poem Thalaba the Destroyer (1801), where the main character Thalaba's deceased beloved Oneiza turns into a vampire, although that occurrence is actually marginal to the story. It has been argued that Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem Christabel (written between 1797 and 1801, but not published until 1816) has influenced the development of vampire fiction: the heroine Christabel is seduced by a female supernatural being called Geraldine who tricks her way into her residence. Though Coleridge never finished the poem, some argue that his intended plot had Geraldine eventually trying to marry Christabel after having assumed the appearance of Christabel's absent lover. The story bears a remarkable resemblance to the overtly vampiric story of Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu (1872).

In a passage in his epic poem The Giaour (1813), Lord Byron alludes to the traditional folkloric conception of the vampire as a being damned to suck the blood and destroy the life of its nearest relations:

But first, on earth as vampire sent,
Thy corpse shall from its tomb be rent:
Then ghostly 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:
Thy victims ere they yet expire
Shall know thy demon for their sire,
As cursing thee, thou cursing them,
Thy flowers are withered on the stem.

Byron also composed an enigmatic fragmentary story, published as "A Fragment" in 1819 as part of the Mazeppa collection, concerning the mysterious fate of an aristocrat named Augustus Darvell whilst journeying in the Orient—as his contribution to the famous ghost story competition at the Villa Diodati by Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, between him, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Shelley and John William Polidori (who was Byron's personal physician). This story provided the basis for The Vampyre (1819) by Polidori. Byron's own wild life became the model for Polidori's undead protagonist Lord Ruthven. According to A. Asbjorn Jon, "the choice of name [for Polidori's Lord Ruthven] is presumably linked to Lady Caroline Lamb's earlier novel Glenarvon, where it was used for a rather ill disguised Byronesque character".

An unauthorized sequel to Polidori's tale by Cyprien Bérard called Lord Ruthwen ou les Vampires (1820) was attributed to Charles Nodier. Nodier himself adapted "The Vampyre" into the first vampire stage melodrama, Le Vampire. Unlike Polidori's original story, Nodier's play was set in Scotland. This, in turn, was adapted by the English melodramatist James Planché as The Vampire; or, the Bride of the Isles (1820) at the Lyceum (then called the English Opera House), also set in Scotland. Planché introduced the "vampire trap" as a way for the title fiend to appear in a dream at the beginning and then to vanish into the earth at his destruction. Nodier's play was also the basis of an opera called Der Vampyr by the German composer Heinrich Marschner, who set the story in a more plausible Wallachia. Planché in turn translated the libretto of this opera into English in 1827, where it was performed at the Lyceum also. Alexandre Dumas, père later redramatized the story in a play also entitled Le Vampire (1851). Another theatrical vampire of this period was "Sir Alan Raby", who is the lead character of The Vampire (1852), a play by Dion Boucicault. Boucicault himself played the lead role to great effect, though the play itself had mixed reviews. Queen Victoria, who saw the play, described it in her diary as "very trashy".

An important later example of 19th-century vampire fiction is the penny dreadful epic Varney the Vampire (1847), featuring Sir Francis Varney as the vampire. In this story, we have the first example of the standard trope in which the vampire comes through the window at night and attacks a maiden as she lies sleeping. Heathcliff in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) is suspected of being a vampire by his housekeeper at one point, which he immediately laughs off as "absurd nonsense".

Fascinating erotic fixations are evident in Sheridan Le Fanu's classic novella Carmilla (1872), which features a female vampire with lesbian inclinations who seduces the heroine Laura while draining her of her vital fluids. Le Fanu's story is set in the Duchy of Styria. Such central European locations became a standard feature of vampire fiction.

Another important example of the development of vampire fiction can be found in three seminal novels by Paul Féval: Le Chevalier Ténèbre (1860), La Vampire (1865) and La Ville Vampire (1874). Marie Nizet's Le Capitaine Vampire (1879) features a Russian officer, Boris Liatoukine, who is a vampire.

In German literature, one of the most popular novels was Hans Wachenhusen's Der Vampyr – Novelle aus Bulgarien (1878), which, on account of the author's first-hand experience of Ottoman society, includes a detailed description of the multicultural society of Bulgaria, and which contains an atmosphere that is "in some parts comparable to Dracula".

The most famous Serbian vampire was Sava Savanović from a folklore-inspired novel Ninety Years Later by Milovan Glišić, first published in 1880. Serbian vampires - abeit depicted first in French (1839) and then Russian (1884) also appear in Count Tolstoy's novella The Family of the Vourdalak.

Dracula

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) has been the definitive description of the vampire in popular fiction for the last century. Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease (contagious demonic possession), with its undertones of sex, blood, and death, struck a chord in a Victorian Britain where tuberculosis and syphilis were common.

Although it has been claimed that the character of Count Dracula is based upon Vlad Dracula III (Vlad the Impaler), also known as Vlad Ţepeş', a notorious 15th-century Wallachian (Romanian) warlord, or Voivode, this has been debunked by multiple scholars. Unlike the historical personage, however, Stoker located his Count Dracula in a castle near the Borgo Pass in Transylvania, and ascribed to that area the supernatural aura it retains to this day in the popular imagination.

Stoker likely drew inspiration from Irish myths of blood-sucking creatures. He was also influenced by Le Fanu's Carmilla. Le Fanu was Stoker's editor when Stoker was a theater critic in Dublin, Ireland. Like Le Fanu, Stoker created compelling female vampire characters such as Lucy Westenra and the Brides of Dracula.

Stoker's vampire hunter Abraham Van Helsing was a strong influence on subsequent vampire literature.

20th century

Though Stoker's Count Dracula remained an iconic figure, especially in the new medium of cinema, as in the film Nosferatu, 20th-century vampire fiction went beyond traditional Gothic horror and explored new genres such as science fiction. An early example of this is Gustave Le Rouge's Le prisonnier de la planète Mars (1908) and its sequel La guerre des vampires (1909), in which a native race of bat-winged, blood-drinking humanoids is found on Mars. In the 1920 novella La Jeune Vampire (The Young Vampire), by J.-H. Rosny aîné, vampirism is explained as a form of possession by souls originating in another universe known simply as the Beyond.

Possibly the most influential example of modern vampire science fiction is Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954). The novel is set in a future Los Angeles overrun with undead cannibalistic/bloodsucking beings. The protagonist is the sole survivor of a pandemic of a bacterium that causes vampirism. He must fight to survive attacks from the hordes of nocturnal creatures, discover the secrets of their biology, and develop effective countermeasures. The novel was adapted into three movies: The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price in 1964, The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston in 1971, and I am Legend (film) starring Will Smith in 2007.

The latter part of the 20th century saw the rise of multi-volume vampire epics. This formula was followed in the popular Vampire Chronicles (1976–) series of novels by Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's massive Saint-Germain series (1978–). Ross, Rice and Yarbro set the trend for multi-volume vampire sagas which are now a stock feature of mass-market fiction (see below for list). Rice's work also saw the beginning of the convergence of traditional Gothic ideas with the modern Gothic subculture and a more explicit exploration of the transgressive sexualities which had always been implicit in vampire fiction.

The 1981 novel The Hunger (adapted as a film in 1983) continued the theme of open sexuality and examined the biology of vampires, suggesting that their special abilities were the result of physical properties of their blood. The novel suggested that not all vampires were undead humans, but some were a separate species that had evolved alongside humans. This interpretation of vampires has since then been used in several science-fiction stories dealing with vampires, most famously the Blade movie series. The 1982 novel Fevre Dream by notable author George R. R. Martin tells the tale of a race of living vampires, extremely human-like but obligate predators on humans, set in the Mississippi Riverboat era, where one of them has developed a dietary supplement to "cure" them, and is fighting for the right and opportunity to distribute it.

Kim Newman's Anno Dracula series (1992–) returns to Stoker's Count Dracula, looking at an alternate world where Dracula defeated Van Helsing's group and conquered Britain, and gives the genre a somewhat postmodern spin. The television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, created and largely written by Joss Whedon, also explored vampire folklore in the light of postmodern and feminist theory, defining the 'condition' as humans who were made to drink vampire blood after the vampire drinks from them, with turned vampires being essentially demons possessing human corpses; Buffy and its spin-off, Angel, also feature the character of Angel in a prominent role, with Angel being a vampire who was cursed with his soul, restoring his capacity for compassion, but also forcing him to live with the guilt of what he did as a regular vampire.

Post-Colonial perspectives on the vampire legend are provided in Nalo Hopkinson's novel Brown Girl In The Ring (1998), which features the Soucouyant, a vampire of Caribbean folklore, and in Tananarive Due's My Soul to Keep (1995) and its sequel The Living Blood (2001).

One of the more traditional vampire works of the 20th century is Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot (1975), which re-imagines the archetypal Dracula-type story in a modern American small town setting. King acknowledged the influence of Dracula on the work, as well as the violent, pre-Comics Code vampires portrayed in horror comics such as those released by E.C. Comics.

In 1989, a comprehensive bibliography of vampire literature was published - Margaret L Carter's The Vampire in Literature. A Critical Bibliography (Ann Arbor, Michigan, U.S.A.: Umi Research Press).


Vampire films

"From her first leading role as "the Vampire" in the 1915 movie A Fool There Was, Theda Bara had been typecast as a vamp or femme fatale who seduced and ruined innocent men.

These roles did not portray the undead vampires featured in later vampire films. The term "vampire" for a seductive woman was derived from the 1897 painting by Jones and poem by Kipling of the same title." --Sholem Stein

Vampire films have been a staple since the silent days, so much so that the depiction of vampires in popular culture is strongly based upon their depiction in movies throughout the years. The most popular cinematic adaptation of vampire fiction has been from Bram Stoker's Dracula, with over 200 versions to date. Running a distant second are adaptations of Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu. The legend of Elizabeth Báthory, the "Blood Countess" has also been an influence. By 2005, Dracula had been the subject of more films than any other fictional character.

History

The earliest cinematic vampires in such films as The Vampire (1913), directed by Robert G. Vignola, were in reality 'vamps' or femme fatales deriving inspiration from a poem by Rudyard Kipling called "The Vampire", composed in 1897. This poem was written as kind of commentary on a painting of a female vampire by Philip Burne-Jones exhibited in the same year. Lyrics from Kipling's poem: A fool there was . . . , describing a seduced man, were used as the title of the film A Fool There Was (1915) starring Theda Bara as the 'vamp' in question and the poem was used in the publicity for the film.

A genuine supernatural vampire features in the landmark Nosferatu (1922 Germany, directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau). This was an unlicensed version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, based so closely on the novel that the estate sued and won, with all copies ordered to be destroyed. It would be painstakingly restored in 1994 by a team of European scholars from the five surviving prints that had escaped destruction.

The next classic treatment of the vampire legend was in Universal's Dracula (1931) starring Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula. Five years after the release of the film, Universal released Dracula's Daughter (1936), a direct sequel that starts immediately after the end of the first film. A second sequel, Son of Dracula, starring Lon Chaney, Jr. followed in 1943. Despite his apparent death in the 1931 film, the Count returned to life in three more Universal films of the mid-1940s: House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945) both starring John Carradine and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948). While Lugosi had played a vampire in two other movies during the 1930s and 40's, it was only in this final film that he played Count Dracula onscreen for the second (and last) time.

A link between the Universal tradition and the later Hammer style is the 1957 Mexican movie El Vampiro that actually showed the vampire fangs (Lugosi did not) and introduced other now common cliches (like the backwards spelling of the name as a vampire's way to hide its identity).

Dracula was reincarnated for a new generation in the celebrated Hammer Horror series of films, starring Christopher Lee as the Count. The first of these films Dracula (1958) was followed by seven sequels. Lee returned as Dracula in all but two of these.

A more faithful adaptation of Stoker's novel appeared as Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) directed by Francis Ford Coppola though also identifying Count Dracula with the notorious medieval Balkan ruler Vlad the Impaler

A distinct sub-genre of vampire films, ultimately inspired by Le Fanu's Carmilla explored the topic of the lesbian vampire. The first of these was Blood and Roses (1960) by Roger Vadim. More explicit lesbian content was provided in Hammer Studios Karnstein trilogy. The first of these, The Vampire Lovers, (1970), starring Ingrid Pitt and Madeleine Smith, was a relatively straightforward re-telling of LeFanu's novella, but with more overt violence and sexuality. Later films in this sub-genre such as Vampyres (1974) became even more explicit in their depiction of sex, nudity and violence.

Beginning with the absurd Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948) the vampire film has often been the subject of comedy. The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967) by Academy Award winner Roman Polanski was a notable parody of the genre. Other comedic treatments, of variable quality, include Old Dracula (1974) featuring David Niven as a lovelorn Dracula, Love at First Bite (1979 USA) featuring George Hamilton and Dracula: Dead and Loving It (1995 USA, directed by Mel Brooks) with Canadian Leslie Nielsen giving it a comic twist.

Another development in some vampire films has been a change from supernatural horror to science fictional explanations of vampirism. The Last Man on Earth (Italy 1964, directed by Ubaldo Ragona) and The Omega Man (1971 USA, directed by Boris Sagal), both based on Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend, are two examples. Vampirism is explained as a kind of virus in David Cronenberg's Rabid (1976 Canada) and Red-Blooded American Girl (1990 Canada, directed by David Blyth).

Race has been another theme, as exemplified by the blaxploitation picture Blacula (1972) and several sequels.

Since the time of Bela Lugosi's Dracula (1931) the vampire, male or female, has usually been portrayed as an alluring sex symbol. Christopher Lee, Delphine Seyrig, Frank Langella, and Lauren Hutton are just a few examples of actors who brought great sex-appeal into their portrayal of the vampire. Latterly the implicit sexual themes of vampire film have become much more overt, culminating in such films as Gayracula (1983) and The Vampire of Budapest, (1995), two pornographic all-male vampire movies, and Lust For Dracula (2005), a pornographic all-lesbian adaptation of Bram Stoker's classic.

There is, however, a very small sub-genre, pioneered in Murnau's seminal Nosferatu (1922) in which the portrayal of the vampire is similar to the hideous creature of European folklore. Max Schrek's disturbing portrayal of this role in Murnau's film was copied by Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's remake Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979). In Shadow of the Vampire (2000, directed by E. Elias Merhige), Willem Dafoe plays Max Schrek, himself, though portrayed here as an actual vampire. Dafoe's character is the ugly, disgusting creature of the original Nosferatu. Stephen King's Salem's Lot (1979), notably depicts vampires as terrifying, simple-minded creatures, without erotism, and with the only desire to feed on the blood of others. This type of vampire is also featured in the film 30 Days of Night.

A major character in most vampire films is the vampire hunter, of which Stoker's Abraham Van Helsing is a prototype. However, killing vampires has changed. Where Van Helsing relied on a stake through the heart, in Vampires 1998 USA, directed by John Carpenter, Jack Crow (James Woods) has a heavily-armed squad of vampire hunters, and in Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992 USA, directed by Fran Rubel Kuzui), writer Joss Whedon (who created TV's Buffy the Vampire Slayer and spinoff Angel) attached The Slayer, Buffy Summers (Kristy Swanson in the film, Sarah Michelle Gellar in the TV series), to a network of Watchers and mystically endowed her with superhuman powers.

Dracula and his legacy

By far, the most well-known and popular vampire in the movies is Count Dracula. An amazing number of movies have been filmed over the years depicting the evil count, some of which are ranked among the greatest depictions of vampires on film. Dracula has over 160 film representations making him the most frequently portrayed character in horror films; he has the second-highest number of movie appearances overall, following only Sherlock Holmes.

See also




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