A History of the Vampire in Popular Culture

Love at First Bite

Violet Fenn

• Publisher: Pen & Sword History
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781526776631
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Popular Culture
• Index: Social Sciences

An exploration of the continuing appeal of vampires in cultural and social history. Our enduring love of vampires—the bad boys (and girls) of paranormal fantasy—has persisted for centuries. Despite being bloodthirsty, heartless killers, vampire stories commonly carry erotic overtones that are missing from other paranormal or horror stories. Even when monstrous teeth are sinking into pale, helpless throats—especially then—vampires are sexy. But why? In A History Of The Vampire In Popular Culture, author Violet Fenn takes the reader through the history of vampires in "fact" and fiction, their origins in mythology and literature, and their enduring appeal on TV and film. We'll delve into the sexuality--and sexism--of vampire lore, as well as how modern audiences still hunger for a pair of sharp fangs in the middle of the night.

Chapter One

On the Origin of Vampires

For the life of the flesh is in the blood – Leviticus, 17:11

Prior to the nineteenth century, vampires didn’t exist – or at least, not in the form we would recognise today. Before the advent of gothic literature, those creatures we would describe as ‘vampires’ were not only universally feared and loathed, they were often also physically ugly. The etymology of the word ‘vampire’ is itself uncertain, but is widely assumed to have come from the Hungarian vampir, itself rooted in the Old Church Slavonik opiri. The name certainly appears to be Slavic in origin, so it comes as no surprise that the vast majority of ‘old’ vampire stories originate in Eastern Europe.

Different cultures have had varying ideas of what constitutes a ‘life-sucking’ creature over the centuries. Ancient Greek mythology tells of Zeus’s wife Hera discovering his infidelity with Lamia and killing all of Lamia’s children (or possibly compelling Lamia to kill them herself); she compounded Lamia’s agony by inflicting her with insomnia. In order that she might get some peace, Zeus – ever the caring boyfriend – gave Lamia the ability to remove her eyes. The erstwhile mistress got her twisted revenge on humanity by sucking the blood of young children while they slept. Over the centuries, the concept of a ‘Lamia’ shifted and in many tales became a deadly seductress who enticed and devoured young men, to all intents and purposes a succubus – a female demon who seduces men in their sleep.

A Jewish story from Sefer Hasidim – the Book of the Pious, written around the turn of the thirteenth century – talks of Astryiah, an elderly female vampire who sucks victims’ blood through her hair (rather unhelpfully, there is no further detail as to how this might work). The assumption is that Astryiah was an ‘estrie’, a creature that can fly and assume different forms in order to catch and suck the blood of their victims. And should you ever be unfortunate enough to fall victim to the bite of an estrie, the (rather unusual) antidote is to eat her bread and salt.

Interestingly, the same collection of writings include a method for killing witches which sounds rather similar to that believed to have been used against vampires:

Know too that there was a witch, an estrie, who once was caught by a man. He said to her, Do not [try to] escape from my grasp, as you have caused numerous deaths in the world. What can I do to you so that after your death you will not consume [people’s flesh]?

She said to him, If you find [an estrie] in the grave with her mouth open, there is no remedy, for her spirit will attack the living. And there is no remedy unless a spike is hammered into her mouth and into the earth. Then she will attack no more. And for this reason, one should fill her mouth with stones.

From the Sefer Hasidim, trans.

Rabbi Eli D. Clark, 2011

The impundulu of Africa’s eastern Cape was a vampire who took the role of a witch’s familiar. Usually appearing as the large black and white ‘lightning bird’ (possibly based on the hamerkop wading bird, which is native to the area), the witch had to be careful to keep her impundulu well fed, or risk it turning on her. Most often believed to be a small bird that lived off human blood, it is sometimes portrayed as a beautiful young man. An impundulu would be passed down from the witch to her daughter (assuming he hadn’t eaten her first).

It is noticeable that many of the oldest ‘vampire’ stories tell of women killing babies and children. It’s possible that this may have arisen from cases of what we would today call ‘sudden infant death syndrome’ (SIDS), or ‘cot death’. Infant mortality was very high in most cultures up until relatively recently and the further back we go into history, the less background knowledge people had of the reasons for their unexpected and tragic losses. There was also less awareness of what constituted a healthy diet – and certainly less scope for providing it, even if dietary requirements were understood – with infants put at risk of becoming malnourished without anyone even realising what was happening. A child could quite easily be put to bed at night seemingly hale and hearty, only for its parents to discover it lifeless the next day. In those times when religion played more of a part in the education of the populace than science, bereaved parents would all too often conclude that it had been caused by something not of this world.

Remember, also, that throughout history the majority of babies have been breastfed, whether by its own mother or a wet nurse. If anything then happened to the child, the blame was likely to be laid on the woman who had care of it at the time. That said, mortality rates were often such that losing a child was, during some periods of history, considered par for the course. Given that contraception and other family planning was all but non-existent, dead babies were, at times, merely collateral damage – the ‘lost ones’ dotted among their siblings who survived.

The 1800s were a more credulous and curious time. This was an era during which Arthur Conan Doyle genuinely believed there were fairies at the bottom of the garden and spiritualism led even the most pragmatic members of society to take part in seances in the hope that it would bring them closer to God. Society was moving and adapting at high speed, the second Industrial Revolution bringing with it changes in technology that on occasions must have appeared to be, quite literally, magical. Across the globe society was changing, for better or worse. Many found themselves turning to different forms of spirituality in order to keep some form of stability, or clung to old beliefs as a safety net as everything changed around them. Author Gill Hoffs describes the delicately balanced dichotomy of the Victorian intellect in her book, The Sinking of RMS Tayleur:

Victorian Britain was a strange cultural mix of glory and guilt, prim delicacy and delight in the macabre. The world was changing at a frightening rate […] a time of industrial development and discovery, yet […] newspapers reported incidents of witchcraft as fact.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, what’s sometimes referred to as the ‘vampire panic’ took hold in New England in the United States. Tuberculosis was running riot across the region and in the absence of medical understanding it was often believed that the disease was being spread by the dead returning to steal the life force of their surviving relatives. Widely known as ‘consumption’ for the way it appeared to consume its victim’s health, TB was, and is, highly contagious, spreading rapidly through households in an era of lower hygiene standards. It’s perhaps not surprising that theories developed which suggested that the first victim of the disease drained the life force of others in the house as they struggled to survive.

Lena ‘Mercy’ Brown was the 19-year-old daughter of George and Mary Brown, who lived in the town of Exeter, Rhode Island. Mary died of tuberculosis in 1883, followed by eldest daughter Mary Olive in 1886. Mercy and Edwin, George’s remaining children, contracted the disease in 1891, with Mercy dying in January 1892. By this time, friends and neighbours were beginning to suspect foul play of the supernatural kind. They persuaded a rather reluctant George to disinter his loved ones’ bodies in order to check for undead goings-on, in the hope of saving the still-ailing Edwin.

The bodies of both Mary and Mary Olive were discovered to be at stages of decomposition consistent with the length of time they had been buried, but Mercy’s corpse appeared to be ‘fresh’, apparently showing no sign of decomposition. A local doctor raised objections, pointing out that Mercy had been dead for less than two months during the coldest time of year (her coffin had in fact been kept in a crypt for some time, as the frozen ground was too hard to dig a grave), and a lack of decay was therefore to be expected. He even removed the dead girl’s lungs, insisting that they showed signs of tuberculosis (the disease, already acknowledged for centuries, had been formally recognised by the medical profession since the early 1800s). It was to no avail. His protests were ignored in favour of superstition and Mercy’s heart and lungs were cut out in order to be burned on a pyre constructed on nearby rocks.

In the hope of saving Edwin’s life, the ashes of his sister’s vital organs were mixed with water and given to him as a medicinal concoction. Unsurprisingly, this rather unpleasant ‘cure’ failed utterly, and despite the extreme efforts, Edwin died on 2 May, 1892.

In the days before scientific knowledge of diseases such as tuberculosis, a spate of deaths for apparently no reason would have been terrifying for most people. There was no way of knowing who would be next, or why some people died and not others. Humans have, for almost all their existence, taken refuge in folk tales. Winding fear into superstition gives us a semblance of control, no matter how elusive that control might actually be. There is little more terrifying than impotence in the face of disaster – better to create a target upon which to vent one’s anger and to use as a focus for the un-channelled fear.

Fear of the undead has led to mass accusations in the past. In the early 1700s there was a spate of apparent sightings in eastern Europe, resulting in the hunting and staking of supposed vampires. In what is sometimes known as ‘the eighteenth-century vampire craze’, entire villages became convinced they were being invaded by vamps, digging up suspect corpses in order to stake them.

In 1731, thirteen deaths occurred in one Serbian village in close enough succession to unnerve the local population, and a doctor specialising in infectious diseases was sent to the village to find out what was going on. His verdict that the deaths were almost certainly due to malnutrition was too simple an explanation for the residents, who insisted that the deaths were in fact due to attacks by vampires. The doctor was persuaded to exhume the suspect corpses. Much to his surprise he discovered that not only did the bodies not appear to have decomposed, their mouths appeared to contain what he believed to be fresh blood.

Disbelieving officials in Vienna sent respected military surgeon Johann Flückinger to check on the doctor’s findings, along with other doctors and army officers as witnesses. Not only did Flückinger and his companions find no major decomposition on many of the bodies, they also agreed that if anything, the bodies had taken on a ‘plump’ appearance.

Thanks to Flückinger’s report, the Serbian vampire epidemic was the first to be fully documented. He goes into extensive detail for many of the victims and has clearly accepted that vampirism can be the only logical explanation for such strangeness.

A woman by the name of Stana, 20 years old, who had died in childbirth two months ago, after a three-day illness, and who had herself said, before her death, that she had painted herself with the blood of a vampire, wherefore both she and her child – which had died right after birth and because of a careless burial had been half eaten by the dogs- must also become vampires. She was quite complete and undecayed. After the opening of the body there was found in the cavitate pectoris a quantity of fresh extravascular blood. The vessels of the arteries and veins, like the ventriculis ortis, were not, as is usual, filled with coagulated blood, and the whole viscera, that is, the lung, liver, stomach, spleen, and intestines were quite fresh as they would be in a healthy person.

[…]The skin on her hands and feet, along with the old nails, fell away on their own, but on the other hand completely new nails were evident, along with a fresh and vivid skin. […] There was an eight-day-old child which had lain in the grave for ninety days and was similarly in a condition of vampirism.

From the report of Johan Flückinger, 1732

Not wanting to risk a reoccurrence of the incident, Flückinger and his men cut the heads off the vampire corpses before reburying them.

This was not the first incident of deadly vampiric outbreaks in the area. In 1726, a Serbian hadjuk (which roughly translates as a member of an irregular peasant infantry) by the name of Arnold Paole died after falling from a hay wagon and breaking his neck in the village of Trstenik, on the banks of the West Moravia River in central Serbia.

Prior to his death, Paole had complained of being ‘plagued’ by a vampire some years before, probably in the area we would now know as Kosovo. He had only escaped, he claimed, by eating soil from the vampire’s grave and covering himself with blood (one can only wonder quite how smearing oneself with blood could protect against blood-drinking vampires). So when villagers began to fall ill not long after Paole’s death, the conclusion was simple. The Kosovo vampire must have infected Paole – and the hadjuk was now taking his turn as a murderous creature of the night.

Paole’s body was disinterred, the horrified villagers discovering that his corpse showed no signs of decomposition. Indeed it was claimed that, similarly to examples in Flückinger’s report, the nails on his hands and feet had fallen off and been replaced by freshly grown replacements. Not only that – it was said that when Paole’s body was staked, he shrieked and bled from the entry wound. Clearly feeling that it was better to be safe than sorry, Paole’s erstwhile neighbours decided to take the safest option and cremated his remains.

Such stories were gruesomely fascinating enough to be taken up by the press of the time, with even London newspapers reporting on how, in dim and distant European lands, the undead would rise from the grave and suck the blood of the living. The idea of the vampire took hold enough that in the mid-eighteenth century, the Earl of Sandwich named one of his racehorses ‘Vampire’, clearly already recognising its potential as a glamorous and powerful description, as well as an intimidating one.

Another tale from Serbia made the news in the latter part of the nineteenth century. On 24 July 1870, a story appeared on page four of the Daily Alta California newspaper in San Francisco, titled rather alarmingly,

VAMPIRES: Gibbering Ghosts in Germany––A Flesh-Creeping Narrative of Vampirism––Truth Stranger Than Fiction

It was an almost direct reprinting of an article from The New York World, whose reporter had, apparently, suffered a terrifying experience while travelling in Hungary. Waking in the early hours in a panicking cold sweat, the reporter found himself pinned to the bed by ‘some horrible thing, cold as death, that lay upon my breast, pinioning my arms to my sides and trying to fasten its clammy mouth upon my throat.’ Having been disturbed by others alerted by the man’s screams, the monster of the night escaped through a window. The World’s reporter was, he tells us, inspected by his landlord for signs of a vampire attack and was most relieved to discover that ‘there was no trace of puncture there’.

Being a responsible journalist, our man from the World decided to investigate the landlord’s claims that this was far from being the first attack of its kind. In fact, only the previous night three villagers had died having had ‘their blood sucked from their bodies’ by no less than the Devil himself.

Heading to the local churchyard, the reporter found a group of local men preparing to open the grave of one Peter Dickowitz. Dickowitz had, his erstwhile neighbours claimed, been harassing residents of the village – despite having died three weeks previously. Having claimed in life to have survived a vampire attack in his youth, Dickowitz had clearly, according to the villagers, finally succumbed to the inevitable. The only way to stop the murderous rampage of the resident vampire and his victims, they insisted, was to disinter any suspect corpses and stake them through the heart.

The newspaperman didn’t hold back any details in his lurid report. As three coffins were opened, he apparently leaned forward to get a closer look, noting that, ‘the men within them were not dead; but horrible beyond expression, deadly in their ghastliness, yet alive, they lay there. Their bodies were swimming in blood, and a horrible leer was on their mouths, and anguished fate within their staring eyes.’

Not one for descriptive subtlety, our man continues, ‘Loathsome beyond thought, deadly beyond nightmare dream, they were the living dead.’ He goes on to describe how the corpses were pulled from their coffins and staked, whereupon, ‘there came from each such a wailing sob and cry as never did I dream even in nightmare.’ Having witnessed the terrible creatures meeting their even more te...