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 staring, as the vampyre, Lord Ruthven. 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. It's notable especially as the source of the seductive female vampires seen in Stoker's later take on the tale of the vampire.
- 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 expected role as subject and handmaiden to her husband's authority. but remains sexually liberated and sensual into an unknown future.
Vampires in Film
The first vampire film was Nosfertu, directed by W. Friendrich Murnau in 1922. Murnau's vampire was notable for his freakish deformity, and the sense of pathos that surrounded him. Count Orlok was never the cliche that countless other films have made Count Dracula. Orlok is a man, or what used to be a man, suffering beyond human comprehension, twisted and scarred by the humiliating bestiality of his deviant cravings. Stoker's estate had refused to allow Murnau to use the name Dracula, yet Muranu's film made Stoker's Dracula famous, even without mentionig the name, and spawned hundreds of imitations, some less dreadful than others.
Unlike most of the others, Murnau's Orlok was neither funny nor frightening, but instead induces in us the sort of uncomfortable disgust that the pedophilic Humbert Humbert inspires in Vladimir Nabokov's 1954 film, Lolita. Unlike his imitators, Murnau leaves us with an unambiguus message, vampires are loathsome and pathetic creatures that we should regard with the same revulsion we display toward rats, lice, and decaying flesh. Orlock is destroyed not by heroic duels by men with wooden stakes, or gangs of villagers with firey brands, but by one brave woman who simply distracts him until his filthy presence is cleased from the world by simple sunlight. Murnau might just as well have had his heroine attack the monster with a bucket of sudsy water and a bit of Lysol.
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 (1992-1996), 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 (1989), with a different lead actor.
Both of these early vampire series became cult classics, and have a devoted following to this day.
And then there's Buffy.
Buffy the Vapire Slayer started life as a movie, playing in theaters across North America and eventually the world. It was reborn as a long-runnng TV series (1997-2003) with a spinoff, Angel (1999-2004), that lasted five seasons in its own right. Buffy too is eventually enraptured by the dark sensuality of the vampire, and her relationships with Angel, and with Spike, tested the patience of her companions and advisors and created endless plot complications. She has a sexual relationship with Angel and right away he loses the soul he'd been cursed with and becomes a murderous villain again. Talk about your date from Hell! Her relationship with Spike is more understated, but Spike actually falls in love with Buffy and undergoes torments and trails to regain his soul, all to prove himself a man in Buffy's eyes.
Vampires in Books
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)