Vampires have always represented the human fear of death. The imprint this mythical figure has left in our collective imagination can be traced centuries back to the Middle East and the Southern regions of Asia. In the Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh, to be precise in the sixth tablet dedicated to the Goddess Ishtar, they describe a creature “capable of taking the life of others to perpetrate its own”. Moreover, there were ancient Greek rural legends about men and women who drank blood to keep themselves young, as well as wandering spirits that consumed large amounts of blood from the living to regain their human form.
Vampires and the Plague
The symbolic charge of this proto-vampire remained almost intact in Europe as it was devastated by the plague. The growing number of deaths forced gravediggers to reopen the pits to throw more corpses. The tombs and public ossuaries were created so fast, that in many towns death became an everyday experience. Despite the Church’s threats and reprimands, and more importantly, medical warnings, people would often keep watch of their deceased friends’ or relatives’ graves to make sure corpses didn’t come back as demonic beings. During those long nights of mourning, people told stories about corpses coming back to life or evil creatures emerging from tombs to feed on the living.
Of course, these stories prove how death was misunderstood at the time. By the constant opening of graves, the bodies suffered different processes of decay. The clear changes on the bodies –ranging from rigor mortis to the physical aspect– only encouraged people to believe all the rumors about the dead coming to life. That distorted perception of the decomposition of bodies gave rise to the idea of the vampire and collective rituals to defeat it. From tar baths –consisting on throwing burning layers of this substance on the corpses– to the classic stake on the heart, the transition from pseudoscientific practices to a religious belief about this creature was popular in the late Middle Ages. By the end of the sixteenth century, all these stories were widely known throughout Europe.
The Vampire as We Know It
What turned a European folktale into the iconic figure of literature and films we all know? It’s hard to analyze the historical and cultural evolution of the vampire as an allegory of evil, violence, and lust. Its origins are lost in hundreds of branches of similar myths. With the passing of time, this blood drinker came to embody not only evil, but also temptation. The grim image of this immortal being is its embodiment of our fear of aging, physical decay, and death. It’s a monster capable of synthesizing all of our fears.
Aleksei Tolstoi –Leo’s cousin– wrote one of the first narratives that encapsulate the features of modern vampires: The Family of the Vourdalak. With an enigmatic, violent, and nearly seductive manner, this text endowed the vampire with a personality that later would be stuck in popular imagery. Then came The Vampire by British writer John William Polidori, who gave him an odd humanity to the behavior of this creature with an indescribable appetite and evil. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu also provided these characteristics in his novella Carmilla, where he added the erotic and lethal charge that later on became an essential element of vampire stories. This triad not only gave this creature a new face, but also an eerie symbolic depth.
In May 26, 1897, Bram Stoker published the ultimate vampire novel, Dracula. All of a sudden, the mysterious creature from folk myths and rural legends took the shape of an enigmatic nobleman who arrives at London to ravish the virtue of helpless young women. In the same way as Le Fanu did in his story, Stoker knew how to play with the image of blood as a metaphor for desire. Thus he created a thrilling story where he subtly criticizes the rigid morals of his time. Through his horror narrative, Stoker created a new kind of evil, one as misunderstood as uncomfortable for the readers of his time. Of course, the book was the protagonist of a huge literary controversy.
The image of the vampire has been shaped and rebuilt by history. The Medieval vampire that emerged from mass graves –but above all, from the imagination of scared people– is quite different to the modern vampire of pure evil facing death. The first vampire descriptions show peasants being attacked and infected by an incomprehensible ailment. They would die in a matter of days and would return from death to infect their families. This type of vampire is not a sophisticated being. Early descriptions insisted on its hideousness, violence, and above all, its animalistic nature. Also, they didn’t drink blood exclusively. In Slavic traditions, for instance, vampires devoured crops and the guts of farm animals, and then they wandered during the night as terrifying specters.
No matter the real origin of the vampire, there’s something very important about this mythical creature. Its elegant figure –created from the idealization of death and the search for an answer to its uncertainty– is still an invincible, powerful, and disrupted vision human beings have about their own frailty and their inability to give sense to their fears.