Vampire

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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.

The habits of vampires, or vampiric demons, are those which arouse a natural feelings of horror — they either drink human blood or eat human flesh; they prey upon the unwary or weak, especially those who seem most vulnerable. like infants, small children, and women.

So La Llorona, the Weeping Woman, a vampiric figure well-known throughout Mexico and the American Southwest, drags children down into a watery grave if they chance upon her by any sort of water. The Mayan use of cenotes, deep natural wells, as the site of human sacrifice where living victims were hurled down into the water to drown, may have contributed to the aura of menace associated with all such wells and precipices over water.

La Llorona has murderous sisters all over the world:

  • The Mayan Civateteo, beautiful young women who attack and drink the blood of children, and lure men to sexual intercourse and certain death, with vampiric offspring resulting from the ensuing pregnancies.
  • The Greek Empusa, always female, a shapeshifter who alternates between the shape of a beautiful young woman and an ancient hag; she lures men to their deaths through spiritual seduction, extracting their souls through sexual intercourse. They are closely related to the succubus, a spirit with similar habits.
  • The Greek Lamia, always female, who eats the flesh of her victim as well as drinking their blood.
  • The Brazilian Jaracara, a serpent who drinks both the blood and milk of women.
  • The Scottish Baobhan Sidhe (Banshee or Faery woman) entices unwary young men to dance with them until exhausted and then drinks their blood, killing them.

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 Thomas Preskett Prest (possibly a pseudonym of James Malcolm Rymer), was published in 1845.
  • Carmilla, 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' themes so popular in gothic novels at the fin de siecle. Although Dracula is by far the mos well-known of the Nineteenth Century Gothic 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 to stay within the bonds of matrimony, but on a deeper level they were liberating and subversive.

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 epistolary 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 rôle 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 mentioning 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 unambiguous 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 in a heroic duel with a man wielding a wooden stake, or gangs of villagers with fiery brands, but by one brave woman who simply distracts him until his filthy presence is cleansed 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, then hang him out to dry.

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 included 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 Vampire Slayer started life as a movie, playing in theaters across North America and eventually the world. It was reborn as a long-running 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 trials to regain his soul, all to prove himself a man in Buffy's eyes.

Vampires in Books

The treatment of vampires as sexual predators has increased greatly from the coy hints of the earliest works in English, so that their amatory prowess is just another of their superhuman abilities in many treatments.

In Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872) (reprinted in 2000) Carmilla is delicately revealed to be a lesbian with the power to cloud women's minds... (The shock! The horror!) but the dreadful details are mercifully kept from us.

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, despite the veiled references to his malign (for those times) influence on the behavior of women.

But times have changed and the history of semi-orgasmic reactions to his penetrating bite on the part of his female victims is very long indeed, and the typical vampire romance nowadays contains scenes of graphic sexual congress with careful attention paid to the vampiric advantage over mortal men.

Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Count St. Germaine first appeared in 1978, long after Barabas had loved and lost and gone into reruns, eventually to DVD. Since then he's been a perenneial feature on the recent releases racks, with a Olivia and a new Brides of Dracula trilogy added to the bloody mix.

  • Hotel Transylvania (1978)
  • The Palace (1978)
  • Blood Games (1980)
  • Path of the Eclipse (1981)
  • Tempting Fate (1982)
  • The Saint-Germain Chronicles (1983)
  • Out of the House of Life (1990)
  • Darker Jewels (1993)
  • Better in the Dark (1993)
  • Mansions of Darkness (1996)
  • Writ in Blood (1997)
  • Blood Roses (1998)
  • Communion Blood (1999)
  • Come Twilight (2000)
  • A Feast in Exile (2001)
  • Night Blooming (2002)
  • Midnight Harvest (2003)
  • Dark of the Sun (2004)
  • States of Grace (2005)

St. Germaine / Olivia:

  • A Flame in Byzantium (1987)
  • Crusader's Torch (1988)
  • A Candle For D'Artagnan (1989)

Brides of Dracula Trilogy:

  • Kelene: The Angry Angel (1998)
  • Fenice: The Soul of an Angel (1999)
  • Sisters of the Night (Not yet published)

Not to mention the incredible and tragicaly hip Sonja Blue series by Nancy A. Collins, among the first powerful (but sympathetic) female vampires:

  • Sunglasses After Dark (1989)
  • In the Blood (1991)
  • Paint it Black (1995)
  • Darkest Heart (2002)
  • Dead Roses for a Blue lady (2003)

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

Selected Exemplars:

  • 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)

Laurell K Hamilton's Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter, 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)
  • The Laughing Corpse (1994)
  • Circus of the Damned (1995)
  • The Lunatic Cafe (1996)
  • Bloody Bones (1996)
  • Club Vampyre (omnibus) (1997)
  • The Killing Dance (1997)
  • The Midnight Cafe (omnibus) (1997)
  • Black Moon Inn (omnibus) (1998)
  • Burnt Offerings (1998)
  • Blue Moon (1998)
  • Obsidian Butterfly (2000)
  • Narcissus in Chains (2001)
  • Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter Set (omnibus) (2003)
  • Cerulean Sins (2003)
  • Incubus Dreams (2004)
  • Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter Omnibus (omnibus) (2005)
  • Nightshade Tavern (omnibus) (2005)
  • Micah (2006)
  • Danse Macabre (2006)

Her Merry Gentry series has vampyric denizens of Faery:

  • A Kiss of Shadows (2000)
  • A Caress of Twilight (2002)
  • Seduced By Moonlight (2004)
  • A Stroke of Midnight (2005)
  • Mistral's Kiss (2006)

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

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

Poppy Z. Brite's vampire erotica:

  • 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)

A sequel to Carmilla appeared in 1998:

  • Carmilla: The Return by Kyle Martin (1998)
  • Nina Auerbach, Our Vampires, Ourselves (1995)

Tanya Huff's Blood series

  • Blood Price (1991)
  • Blood Lines (1992)
  • Blood Trail (1992)
  • Blood Pact (1993)
  • Blood Debt (1997)

Susan Sizemore's Laws of the Blood series

  • The Hunt (1999)
  • Partners (2000)
  • Companions (2001)
  • Deceptions (2002)
  • Heroes (2003)

Other works:

  • 'I Thirst for You
  • I Burn for You
  • I Hunger for You

and last, but not least,

  • The Last Days of Christ the Vampire by J.G. Eccarius (1998)

Vampires and Feminism

The vampire novel, especially, has largely escaped the cuationary tale imposed by patriarchic voices. The modern genre more often than not celebrates female embrace of vampiric sexuality and, instead of being punished by eternal damnation, the women who make this leap of faith are rewarded with psychic powers, more or less etarnal life, and a mate who is magically guaranteed to be forever faithful to his marriage vows, a good husband and devoted father, and very, very rich.

External Links

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