The Psychology of Vampires

David Cohen

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9781351675116
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psicologia
• Subtopic: Storia e teoria della psicologia

Why have vampires become such a feature of modern culture? Can vampire-like conditions be explained by medical research? Is there a connection between vampirism and Freud?

The Psychology of Vampires presents a captivating look at the origins of vampires in myth and history, and the psychological theories which try to explain why they fascinate us. It traces the development of vampires from the first ever vampire tale, written by John Polidori in 1819, to their modern cultural legacy. Together with historical detail about Polidori's eventful life, the book also examines the characteristics of vampires, and explores how and why people might identify as vampires today.

From sanguinarians who drink blood, to psychic vampires who suck the energy from those around them, The Psychology of Vampires explores the absorbing connections between vampirism and psychology, theology, medicine and culture.

1
Poor Polidori and the Human Jam

Francis Ford Coppola directed Bram Stoker’s Dracula. One wonders if after the horrors of Apocalypse Now – and Marlon Brando had some of the characteristics of a psychic vampire – Coppola wanted to have some simple fun. His Dracula careers between innocent romance and sex and gore orgies in Transylvania. My favourite postmodern blood sucker, however, is a version, Dracula: Dead and Loving It, dripping irony. Leslie Nielsen, the brilliant comic actor of Police Squad and Naked Gun, stars.

The author of the first vampire tale in 1816, John Polidori had little sense of irony. He desperately wanted to be a famous writer. The famous and prolific romantic poet who wrote Don Juan, Lord Byron had hired Polidori as his personal physician. As a result, Polidori also spent time with Madame de Stael, the publisher John Murray, the author Harriet Martineau – Queen Victoria was a fan of hers – and many others.

Polidori wrote some fair enough poems and some dreadful plays, but the only reason he is remembered now is that he wrote The Vampyre. A plaque in Soho at 37 Great Pulteney Street marks the house where ‘poor Polidori’, as many called him, lived and died. Byron’s friend, John Hobhouse, mocked him as ‘PollyDolly’. No called him Jolly Polly.

The Vampyre was born at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. On June 16, 1816, the weather was so rough Byron, Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, Polidori and Claire Claremont, one of the many women to have the hots for Byron, could not row on Lake Geneva. Cooped up inside, Byron suggested they write ghost stories. Polidori started The Vampyre and Mary Shelley Frankenstein, two key texts of modern pop and not-so-pop culture. Any relics of that night are valuable. Byron’s copy of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was valued at over £350,000 when it came up for auction in 2012. None of them would have foreseen that two centuries on, many of the themes they conjured up would be the foundation of the new field of vampirology, which is a potpourri of psychology, studies of myth and of the occult.

There is a thesis to be written on how vampire literature has boomed as belief in the afterlife has waned. Lewis Gregory, who wrote the successful gothic novel, The Monk, joined Byron and his friends in the Villa Diodati, and they debated the question of whether one could believe in vampires if one did not believe in God. Gregory doubted it, and the statistics on faith, we shall see, suggest he was right.

Polidori was 26 when he died. In 1821, at the inquest into his death, the tactful coroner attributed it to natural causes, almost certainly knowing he was lying. He wanted to spare the family pain, although the evidence showed Polidori committed suicide with prussic acid. He had been in despair for some years. Psychiatrists today would suggest he suffered from extreme depression, as the nickname ‘poor Polidori’ suggests. If he left a suicide note explaining his reasons, it was either not found or destroyed. He was one of many artists of the time who died young.

Even before Polidori was buried, The Vampyre became what we would now call a multimedia hit. In June 1820, Le Vampire: mélodrame en trois actes opened at the Théâtre de la Porte-Saint-Martin. Its author, James Robinson Planché, ‘improved’ on Polidori, with a romantic opening where the sleeping heroine, Lady Margaret, has a frightening dream about her future husband, inevitably a vampire. Two spirits, Ariel and Unda, guard Lady Margaret and chant;

Ariel, Ariel, attend

Listen to our magic spell

Hither come as virtue’s fiend

And the clouds of guilt dispel.

If Lady Margaret would only heed their vision, she would never marry the toothy bloodsucker.

To spice the spooky action up even more, Planché added songs. In one, young ladies at a wedding are warned against ‘angels of hell’ whose “sweet voices hypnotize you.” Hypnotism is a part of vampire history, as is explained in Chapter 3.

The vampire has to get a dose of blood before night falls, or he will lose his fiendish powers. It could not be said that Planché’s version is subtle; the vampire’s henchman is called Swill. The vampiric Lord Ruthven does not keep his haughty appearance for long. When he approaches Lady Margaret, he changes from “a young and handsome man” into a less attractive “spectre… frightfully distorted.” He is so upset by that, he sinks into his tomb again. Vampires have their vanities.

Both Lord Ruthven and Lady Margaret also often lapse into trances. She wants to run away from her ghastly, and ghostly, future husband but cannot: “an invisible hand seemed to prevent my flight. I could not even turn mine eyes from this apparition.” At the end, as her neck is bitten, Margaret shrieks ‘a phantom’. She never says anything else.

The play’s success set off what some critics call ‘the French vampire craze’ of the 1820s. Two months after Planché’s play was packing them in Paris, a loose adaptation opened in London’s English Opera House. Again, audiences flocked to see it.

Polidori’s work even inspired an opera, Vincenzo Bellini and Felice Romani’s three-act La Sonnambula. The sleepwalking heroine, Amina, is chastised for her wanderings, but it ends happily. Before she gets bitten or stabs herself like Lady Macbeth, she is declared innocent, so she can marry the noble Elvino, which makes the Swiss villagers where she lives yodel with joy.

Polidori was buried in St Pancras Old Cemetery. In the 1820s, the Old St Pancras cemetery offered grave robbers rich pickings, as medical schools needed cadavers for dissection. The Anatomy Act of 1832 finally made it possible for the schools to obtain bodies legally. The dead were not allowed to rest in peace for long, however, as they had to make way for St Pancras Station. Graves were dug up; coffins removed; headstones jammed higgledy-piggledy against an ash tree. One can still see them today.

In 1862, the assistant architect in charge of the process was the young Thomas Hardy. Even though he gave up architecture, he remained friends with the architect in charge, Arthur Blomfield. Fifteen years after they dug up the graves, they met, and Blomfield reminded him of the time they had supervised the removal of hundreds of jumbled coffins.

Their memories soon turned macabre. “Do you remember,” said Blomfield, “how we found the man with two heads at St Pancras?”

Meeting Blomfield led Hardy to write a fine poem. The Levelled Churchyard is a reminder of our mortality.

“O passenger, pray list and catch

Our sighs and piteous groans,

Half stifled in this jumbled patch

Of wrenched memorial stones!”

“We late-lamented, resting here,

Are mixed to human jam,

And each to each exclaims in fear,

‘I know not which I am!’”

“The wicked people have annexed

The verses on the good;

A roaring drunkard sports the text

Teetotal Tommy should!”

“Where we are huddled none can trace,

And if our names remain,

They pave some path or porch or place

Where we have never lain!”

“There’s not a modest maiden elf

But dreads the final Trumpet,

Lest half of her should rise herself,

And half some local strumpet!”

“From restorations of Thy fane,

From smoothings of Thy sward,

From zealous Churchmen’s pick and plane

Deliver us O Lord! Amen!”

The final version included a shocking couplet. To rhyme the ‘final trumpet’ (the signal of the Last Judgement) with ‘sturdy strumpet’ is perhaps not what either Queen Victoria or her bishops would have approved of.

Whatever his problems when he was alive, ‘poor Polidori’ has had a glorious posthumous career. His vampire has inspired hundreds of novels, including Bram Stoker’s Dracula, not to mention films, comics, high art, low art and no art. His legacy also includes vampire-splattered computer games with names to curdle your spine, like Bloodlust, Tales of the Raving Dead and The Twisted Tales of Spike McFang.

Twilight has also been a huge hit. The heroine, Bella Swan (the name surely suggests a lovely neck) falls in love with the handsome but tortured Edward Cullen. The boy does not want to be a vampire. One of the developments of vampire fiction is that the simple villain – put him in a brain scanner and you would not find a decent neuron – Byron and Polidori created now needs therapy. That is largely due to the work of Anne Rice.

In 1973, after the death of her daughter, Rice wrote the bestselling Interview with the Vampire. She based her vampires on Gloria Holden’s character in Dracula’s Daughter: “It established to me what vampires were – these elegant, tragic, sensitive people. I was really just going with that feeling when writing Interview with the Vampire. I didn’t do a lot of research.” Soon after writing her novel, she developed obsessive-compulsive disorder and believed she contaminated everything she touched. She said, “What you see when you’re in that state is every single flaw in our hygiene and you can’t control it and you go crazy.”

Rice has sold over 100 million copies of her books. Her Interview with a Vampire allowed vampires to look in the mirror and see themselves. They then had to reflect on their reflection. And to reflect on the couch. And reflect on their unnatural status.

Life is like a light switch. On or off. We are dead or alive. The lure for us, but the problem for them, is that vampires are not really alive, but not really dead either. The moment Anne Rice let them see themselves in the mirror, vampires were bound to have identity issues. For us mere mortals, with vampires being undead, the idea that they are partly living raises the possibility that there is some afterlife. Freud would have called that a wish fulfilment. He argued in The Future of an Illusion that human beings cling to a belief in God partly because it offers hope – he never shared it – that we do not quite die. We persist with some afterlife.

Freud’s illusion turned out to have some future, according to modern surveys. Though less than 10% of British adults go to church, about a third believe in ‘a God’; nearly 40% believe in a higher power but not a God (20%) or don’t know what they believe (14%). Younger Britons tend towards non-belief. Only 25% of 18–24-year-olds believe in a God, and 46% deny the existence of any greater spiritual power whatsoever. America is God-saturated by comparison.

Americans tend to believe in Heaven, Hell and life after death. The numbers are a little odd, but statistics often are. The question “do you believe in life after death?” gets lower positive responses than the question “do you believe in heaven?” Belief in heaven has stayed at over 8 in 10 since the late 1960s, while belief in life after death remains roughly in the range of 7 in 10. Most American Christians are sure they will live on after death, though they cannot look forward to the ecstasy of 72 virgins in Paradise, as devout Muslims can. The Church of England believes in the resurrection of the body, and so one must ask, will the vampire be resurrected as the normal human being he or she once was or in the undead state? Every culture has versions of the afterlife, though few accounts of it are as splendid as Dante’s Inferno, the fourteenth-century epic poem where Dante is led through the circles of Hell by the Roman poet Virgil. They see the torments sinners who have indulged in lust, gluttony and heresy suffer. Polidori read the Inferno as a child, and it clearly made a lasting impression on him. Exploring the link between belief in God and afterlife (fading in cynical Western Europe) and interest in vampires is complex. In the USA, for example, interest remains strong both in vampires and in religion.

One of the most telling examples of the fact that faith and faith in vampires can co-exist comes from Anne Rice. In 2004, well into her vampire chronicles, she announced a trilogy of novels about Jesus. The first Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt, a novel about Jesus’ life at age 7 won the award for the best spiritual book of the year. “This book means more to me than anything I’ve ever done,” Rice told Christianity Today. “I’m not offering agnostic explanations. He is real. He worked miracles. He is the Son of God! And there is so much more to write.”

The vampire offers hope. He or she is undead, not the ideal state, but much better than being stone cold dead. As long as the creature is topped up with blood and avoids vigilante Christians wandering about armed with crucifixes and a stake, the undead can go on half-living for a long time. The novelist Elisabeth Kostova believes the fascination with Dracula stems from a primitive desire to understand whether death is permanent. The Orthodox church forbids the exhumation of bodies, she discovered.

The vampire can also time travel.

It’s worth reflecting on the differences between vampires and vamps. Unlike the vampire, the vamp is seductive and amusing. If you were to kiss one you would not fear for your soul. The worse that could happen is that when you got to the bedroom door, she’d smile and say, “I’ve got another date.”

The origin of the word ‘vamp’, however, has nothing to do with vampires. It comes from the mediaeval French avant-pied, literally “before the foot,” in particular the part of hose or stockings below the ankle. It became corrupted in English to vampe, said as two syllables, and then vamp.

Seductive and never quite giving up the ghost, it is no wonder the vampire has a powerful hold on both ...