Oct

8

Children Of The Night.

Posted by Christopher Waldrop

October 8, 2007 |

Unlike zombies, vampires have a powerful hold on our consciousness because, while, like zombies, they must feed off the living and are forever shut out of “normal” society, they have an appealing mystique. Thanks to the influence of Bram Stoker vampires have become figures of romance. They are as seductive as they are frightening, although in most pre-Stoker vampire stories the revenants are neither seductive nor do they, with a few exceptions, walk among the living, pretending to be one of us. In a great deal of Central and East European folklore a person could become a vampire if their spirit were unsettled in some way, which could be caused by a cat crossing over their grave, their body being carried out feet first, if they are born with a red caul, if they are born with teeth, if they commit suicide, of if they were criminals. Methods of disposing of vampires usually involved unearthing the corpse of the person with the unsettled spirit and boiling their heart in wine, filling their intestines with seed, cutting off their head and putting it under their feet (so they can’t reach it!), putting garlic or a lemon in their mouths, or, of course, driving a wooden stake through their heart.

A new book about vampires, The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires From Nosferatu To Count Chocula, by Eric Nuzum, who drank his own blood as part of his research, tracks our vampire obsession from Romania to Las Vegas, and points out that there are six-hundred and five vampire films. Is that all?

For those who are more interested in the vampire from a scholar’s perspective, there’s Vampires, Burial, And Death: Folklore And Reality by Paul Barber. Barber’s book is a fascinating combination of folklore and forensics as he puts forward a novel theory for the origins of vampires. They are, Barber suggests, products of peoples’ poor understanding of the processes of death. The same misunderstanding that leads to the widespread belief that the hair and nails continue to grow after we die or that claw marks on the inside of coffins prove that people have been buried alive led people to ascribe natural occurrences to supernatural creatures. As Barber explains, the body loses water rapidly after death causing the skin to shrink so the hair and nails appear to grow, and, as it decomposes, a body can move quite vigorously, even to the point that it claws a coffin. As for vampires, they are, according to Barber, most prevalent in places where people are close to their dead.

It’s an intriguing theory, but folklorist Alan Dundes, who edited a collection of essays titled The Vampire: A Casebook, doesn’t buy it, although his collection includes an essay by Barber. Dundes’ book opens with an essay by Katharina M. Wilson on the origins of the term “vampire” and ends with an essay by Dundes, The Vampire As Bloodthirsty Revenant: A Psychoanalytic Post Mortem.

Vampires have been around a very long time and, thanks to ongoing scholarship and our fascination with them, aren’t going anywhere. In the lore vampires feed on us, but the truth seems to be that we are the ones who feed on them.


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