How Cold-Blooded Creatures Became Hot: The Literary History of the Vampire

October 25, 2024

Literature

Nesha Ruther

Writer at Bond & Grace

Amongst the creatures of legend that we pull out come October and forget after the 31st: ghosts and ghouls, witches, wizards, zombies, and more, one has stood out as a singular cultural fixation: The Vampire. Vampires have taken up enormous space in our collective imagination, long outside of the appropriate Halloween-themed window of September to October.

From the early 2000s Twilight insanity spurred by Stephenie Meyer’s sparkly hunk Edward Cullen to the more traditional vampires seen in Stephen King’s Salem’s Lot to TV shows such as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Vampire Diaries, or the hilarious mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, we remain obsessed with imagining and reimagining these blood-sucking beasts. Whether we love them or hate them, hunt them, or *cough* hug them, we never seem to get enough of vampire stories. But where did these mysterious creatures come from?

More importantly, what do vampires represent? Scholar, Noel Carroll defines monsters as an “extraordinary creature who participates in cultural taboo.” Through analyzing the evolution of literature’s favorite monster, we can see how cultural anxieties have shifted throughout the centuries.

Vampires, like most of our popular monsters, emerged from European folklore. The origin of vampire fear is thought to have begun in 18th-century Serbia, with rural villagers reporting nocturnal visits from deceased friends and relatives. The villagers claimed their loved ones came to them at night and strangled or attempted to strangle them. Those who were visited reportedly died days later.

Bodies were occasionally exhumed to search for signs of vampirism, such as hair and nails that continued growing, blood in the mouth, and lack of decomposition. All of these, unbeknownst to the poor villagers, have fairly reasonable explanations. After death, the skin can recede making fingernails and hair look longer than it is, hemorrhaging during death can leave blood in the mouth, and cold weather slows decomposition.

This early vampire mythology is noticeably different from the rich, suave, blood-sucking vampires we know today. These stories took place in rural villages, not gothic castles. Also, the villagers reported strangulation, not neck-biting. Perhaps most importantly, the vampires in question were their former friends and family, people they knew and loved. While this folklore may have been the origins of vampire legend, it reveals a far more communal portrait of grief and loss than what we associate with vampires today.

A much more recognizable picture of vampirism came in 1748 with the German poet Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s poem “Der Vampire”. Which describes a sensual scene in which a vampire feeds upon a young maiden:

“And as softly thou art sleeping

To thee shall I come creeping

And thy life’s blood drain away.

And so shalt thou be trembling

For thus shall I be kissing

And death’s threshold thou’ it be crossing”

Ossenfelder’s poem signifies an important shift in vampire lore: the relationship between vampire and victim is no longer intimate in the sense of communal ties, but intimate in the sense that it is overtly sexual. If the stories we tell about vampirism embody our anxieties and fears, we can see here a clear transition: before, vampirism was something you worried about after someone died. Now, vampirism is the cause of death, particularly death as a result of sex.

This theme continues with an 1801 poem by Robert Southey, called “Thalaba the Destroyer”. In Southey’s poem, the protagonist Thalaba is visited by his recently deceased bride Oneiza, who is identified as a vampire. Oneiza is arguably the first female vampire, and while we largely associate vampirism with men, she would not be the last.

The biggest shift in vampire literature came only 15 years later. In the summer of 1816, the doctor John Polidori traveled to Geneva with his patient, the famed poet Lord Byron. There, they met up with an equally illustrious crew: Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, and Mary’s half-sister Claire Clairmont.

Perhaps you already know this story: the weather that summer was awful, and the group was shut up inside Villa Diodati where they were all staying. Byron suggested the group have a ghost story writing competition. It was from this competition that Mary Shelley would singlehandedly alter the literary canon with her revolutionary work of science fiction, Frankenstein. But it was also from this competition that John Polidori would grant us the archetype of the modern vampire.

In order to understand Polidori’s contribution, we need to understand his relationship with Lord Byron. Byron was famous, handsome, and endlessly rich. Women threw themselves at him constantly. Polidori was his nobody doctor, he was no threat to Byron, and yet Byron needlessly humiliated him. For example, Polidori was enamored with Mary Shelley, and Byron convinced him it would impress Mary if he jumped off the balcony of the villa, he did and broke his ankle! It goes without saying that Mary was unimpressed.

Polidori’s short story The Vampyre follows a young man named Aubrey and his friendship with the nobleman Lord Ruthven. Ruthven is handsome, debonair, and wealthy. The friendship is short-lived (Aubrey finds Lord Ruthven snacking on his sister) and Ruthven escapes, never facing the consequences of his actions.

If you think Ruthven sounds remarkably like Lord Byron, you’re right. To add salt to poor Polidori’s wound, when he published the short story a few years later people thought Byron had written it! The humiliation was unending! Polidori channeled the pent-up frustration of living in Byron’s shadow into a story about a wealthy, powerful man who treats the people around him with careless disregard, sucking them dry before eventually discarding them.

The Vampyre was a huge success and inspired sequels and play adaptations. In 1872 author Sheridan Le Fanu applied Polidori’s portrait of a wealthy and mysterious vampire but changed the gender, with his novel Carmilla. Carmilla follows a young woman named Laura and her friendship with the mysterious Carmilla, who arrives at Laura’s family castle after a carriage accident. Carmilla is beautiful and compelling, and preys on girls who she befriends and eventually murders.

In 1897, Bram Stoker published his seminal novel, Dracula. And while Stoker would become the most recognizable vampire writer, Dracula is essentially a tidy amalgamation of Polidori’s The Vampyre and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. Stoker solidified the legacy of vampires as harbingers of doom in a cool, sexy package, as defilers of women’s virtue, and a predator disguised as a nobleman.

Yet in all these iterations, one key trait was missing. They had the wealth and the sex appeal, but they were missing soul. Indeed, across all these stories vampires only present themselves as good, while at their core being unequivocally bad. It wasn’t until Anne Rice’s 1976 Interview With The Vampire, that vampires were given any kind of moral complexity, the ability to choose between good or evil.

From there on, it was a short leap to stories like Twilight. Vampires had been sexy all the way back to Ossenfelder’s “Der Vampire” but it was danger disguised as sex appeal. With Twilight, a new type of vampire story was born: sex appeal disguised as danger, a predator turned protector.