Vampire

Origins

Vampire legends exist in almost every known culture across the world, from Al Gul of Arabia (from which we derive the word ghoul) to the Slavic Obyri, to the Hungarian Vampir, to the Brahmaparush of India, to the vampiric demons of Japan, or Babylonia, of the Hebrews, and the Americas.

Vampires in Popular Culture

In English, there is a recent arc that flows from Lord Ruthven, through Varney the Vampire, through Carmilla, to Dracula and beyond, much of which uses the figure of the vampire as a punishment for females who succumb to sexual seduction.

• The Vampyre, by John William Polidori was published in 1819 as a gothic romance. Interestingly, it originated among the literary friends of Lord Byron, on the same holiday session which produced Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the Modern Prometheus.
• Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood, by James Malcolm Rymer (Thomas Preskett Prest), was published in 1845
• Carmilla, A Vampyre Tale, by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu was published in 1872 as an archetypical lesbian vampire story of that period.
• Dracula, by Bram Stoker, was published in 1897 containing several themes, the sexual punishment of "loose" women, the threat of 'foreign' cultural values supplanting 'proper' British rectitude, and the typical supernatural 'horror' thems so popular in gothic novels at the fin de siecle. Although Dracula is by far the mos well-known of the Ninteenth Century Gothis tales, it was relatively unknown at the time, lost in a sea of similar literature.

The vampire gothic always had a certain ambivalence regarding vampirism; although male readers could see the vampire as a pure threat to the family and the established order, female readers received mixed messages. On the one hand, the vampire gothic was a cautionary tale, but on a deeper level they were liberating.

Lucy Westenra dies after her sexual extravagance, but Mina Harker has her cake and eats it too; she has the adventure with the ultimate bad boy yet is also saved, presumably with a lifetime's worth of secret memories, and is all set to settle into normal (and boring) married life.

But we never see this. The ending is actually ambiguous. Dracula 'seems' to disappear but is he really dead forever? Or is his venishing just a trick? The possibility exists for Dracula to rise again, and perhaps Mina knows this.

And in fact this possibility is the mechanism whereby countless Dracula sequels are made plausible, including the novel, The Letters of Mina Harker, by Dodie Bellamy (1994), like Dracula itself an epistoltory novel which has Mina living on into the Twentieth Century as a vampiress. Elaine Bergstrom's Mina (2000) has a roughly similar premise, and in both the heroine doesn't subsume herself to her role as helpmeet to her husband's authority. but remains sexually liberated and sensual into an unknown future.

Vampires on TV

The mother of all modern vampire romance is surely Dark Shadows, the TV series cum book series spinoff from the 60's. This was a vampire soap opera starring the undying Barnabas Collins and a cast of tens, returning as reincarnations of themselves in different eras.

Spinoffs incudied a series of Dark Shadows comic books, thirty-three Dark Shadows pulp novels, many by Dan Ross writing as Marilyn Ross, starting with The Mystery of Collinwood by Marilyn Ross (1968), and dolls, action figures, and other show paraphernalia.

Cashing in on the renaissance of the vampire craze in the late Eighties and early Nineties was another TV series, Forever Knight, which featured Nick Knight, a vampire detective working for the Toronto police department on the night shift, of course. This series started as a made for TV movie, Nick Night, with a different lead actor.

and long preceded by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla, A Vampyre Tale (1872) (reprinted in 2000) in which Carmilla is delicately revealed to be a lesbian with the power to cloud women's minds... (The shock! The horror!)

Bram Stoker's female vampires in Dracula are directly descended from Carmilla, although they seem there to be bisexual. Even Dracula is portrayed as a thinly-veiled sexual seducer of women, and the history of semi-orgasmic reactions to his penetrating bite on the part of his female victims is very long indeed.

St.Germaine first appeared in 1978, long after Barabas had loved and lost and gone into reruns, eventually to DVD.

Not to mention the incredible and tragicaly hip Sonja Blue series:

Sunglasses After Dark (1989) In the Blood Paint it Black Dead Roses for a Blue lady Darkest Heart

and Karen Marie Christa Minns' Virago (1990), a lesbian vampire story.

Embracing the Dark (1990) Daughters of Darkness: Lesbian Vampire Stories ( 1993) followed by: Dark Angels: Lesbian Vampire Stories Vampires & Violets: Lesbians in Film

     by Andrea Weiss (1993)

Anita Blake is a later incarnation of Sonja Blue, who took names and kicked butt, as the saying goes, just like Anita and her countless avatars.

Guilty Pleasures (1993) etc........

And then there was Meredith Ann Pierce's YA Darkangel series:

The Darkangel (1992) A Gathering of Gargoyles The Pearl of the Soul of the World

Love in Vein: Twenty Original Tales of Vampiric Erotica by Poppy Z. Brite (1994)

and a series of erotic vampire short stories from the Nineties, including Hottest Blood (1996)

Carmilla: The Return by Kyle Martin (1998)

Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995)

> Also discussed Tanya Huff's series --

Blood Pact
Blood Debt
Blood Lines
Blood Price
Blood Trail

and last, but not least, 
The Last Days of Christ the Vampire
by J.G. Eccarius (1998)