Why Do We Fear Vampires?

The first vampires were female. This may come as a bit of a shock to those of us immersed in the 21st century legends.

For us, Dracula changed the rules. Our default vampire is a male nobleman, with any vampiress generally relegated to a cameo role.  Women are the victims, not the monster.

It wasn't like that in antiquity.  Then the likes of Lilitu, Lamia, Lilith and the Empusae reigned supreme.  The Goddess Kali surpassed them all.  She was no mere nightmare in the shadows, but an actual deity.

They all had one thing in common. They fed off the living. They stole into homes and took the children. They snacked on babies.

It was all a terrible inversion of the tradition roles of women, as nurturers and carers. Real world women gave birth to babies. They provided the hope for the future of the species.  But those preternatural vampire women hated them for it. They would destroy all of humankind, starting with the youngest and weakest.

In part, these vampires were all about fear of the end of our kind. But mostly they triggered a much more personal fear.  Infant mortality was always high in the ancient world.  New parents could provide all they could to ensure the well-being of their young, but babies and young children still died.

Nor did these terrible creatures stop at children. They could feast upon anyone in the household, if no easy pickings were to hand. Life was their antithesis. They would destroy it wherever they found it. There was nothing sexy about this. It was heart-break and powerlessness in the face of death.  It was horror in its purest form.

Forget all that you know about seductive, sparkling vampires. Those depictions were all developed by writers over the past couple of centuries.

Before then, your average vampire was a much more terrible prospect. It rose from graves in all stages of decomposition; it returned home to its family and killed them.

The classic tale, during the vampire hysteria of the 17th and 18th centuries, involved a household receiving a knock on the door. The visitor would be known to all.  It would be their deceased mother, father, sibling or child. It either wouldn't speak at all, or would demand sustenance.

The horrified family would provide bread or broth.  But that wasn't what the animated corpse was after.

Soon members of the family would be discovered drained of all blood and quite dead.  Or else they would fade slowly, awaking each morning appearing more pale and wan than before.  Eventually they too would die and be buried.  Then the family would await their return, knowing that it was practically inevitable.

These stories tended to escalate during times of plague or outbreaks of tuberculosis. It's easy to see it as a metaphor for the epidemics themselves, which often took out whole families one by one. But there was much more to it than that.

Fearing actual vampires, bodies would be exhumed. With little knowledge of the stages of decay, the vampire hunters would be confronted with bloated corpses, or some which seemed remarkably well preserved. They would have nails and hair, which appeared to have grown in the grave. Red fluid dripped from various orifices.

All of these things are quite natural. But for those viewing it first hand, there was no way of knowing that.  All they saw was evidence that this corpse was in momentary slumber, after having risen in the night to gorge on its own surviving family.

A variation on this theme occurred in the 1980s, when the spread of AIDS. sparked a parallel outbreak of vampire novels. Those all concentrated upon the blood aspects, though the creatures themselves were now steeped in the glamor of the post-Dracula genre.

During the latter part of the 19th century and throughout the 20th century, the Balkans were viewed as the 'powder keg' of Europe.

It was the region where Christendom and Islam clashed, as the Ottoman Empire ran up against the imperial concerns of Britain, Russia, Austria and Germany. 

It was also the place where the great schism between Catholicism and the Eastern Orthodox Church could be found. It ran as a fault-line between Croatia and Serbia for a start.

It was here that the First World War erupted with the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand. As the imperial superpowers rushed into the void, the Balkans also formed the friction lines between Capitalism and Communism.

Queen Victoria bemoaned the fact that the Balkans was causing her endless trouble.  A century later, the world watched as Yugoslavia was systematically destroyed.

But on the bright side, at least it was all happening over there. At least it was right up until people like Bram Stoker brought the Balkan menace right into the heart of dear ol' Blighty. Dracula came from Transylvania (part of modern day Romania) and now he was in England.

Those Victorian readers would have grasped the link immediately. If the novel was written today, then Dracula would have hailed from Iran or Afghanistan. Perhaps Syria, because it sounds that little more exotic and mysterious, and has a touch of sibilance.

Dracula was horrific, because its central character represented a war that was no longer happening out of sight, but right here. Right in the middle of civilization. That would never do.  Keep war over in the east where we can't see it and the victims don't matter as much as our own people do.

When considered like that, it reveals a horror even more terrible than any Eastern Europe vampire could elicit. It's the dark underbelly of the Western consciousness exposed. Unsettling on so many different levels.

The horror of the Balkans wars invading only really worked in Western Europe. For those in the New World (particularly in the USA), there was an even more terrible aspect to the likes of Dracula.

Let's run with his full title here.  He is Dracula, Count of the Székelys, descended from Attila the Hun, and absolute ruler of his province of Transylvania. 

Count Dracula represented a return to that medieval world of nobles and serfs.  He wasn't elected. He didn't lobby the Houses for blood tithe. He just took it. He would enslave them all and consider it his blood-right to do so.

Bela Lugosi had a Hungarian accent, because Dracula was Romanian. (Who in Hollywood could point to these places on a map anyway?  It's all Europe!)  It was also for all the same reasons that US movie baddies tend to have British and German accents today. It's the Old World pursuing those who dared to flee into the American Dream.

The United States of America is filled with the descendants of those who survived the likes of Count Dracula. They fought a War of Independence to ensure that European tyrants could no longer leech the life-blood from the Land of the Brave.

Then one of them appears in their midst. He's quite literally sucking their blood. He must be staked into oblivion.

An article in Cracked high-lighted a strange and faintly amusing pattern in American horror pop culture.

It seemed that whenever a Republican president was in power, then the inevitable result was an explosion of zombie literature and movies. Romero's classic Living Dead series reached its zenith under Nixon. The internet worried about the Zombie Apocalypse under George W Bush.

But before the Democrats start smirking too much, it should also be pointed out that their presidents inspire an infestation of vampires. Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles had their heyday while Clinton was in the White House. The Twilight franchise ran and ran during Obama's first term.

Of course, the link isn't very precise. Zombies don't shuffle away for Democrat presidents, nor do vampires retire to their coffins for the Republicans. But the general trend's there.

Cracked interpreted the fears of the right as being three-fold, at least as represented by the vampire.  

The first is that vampires are lawless and prone to licentious sexual behavior. They don't get married, have 2.4 children and keep pets. At least not in any acceptable form. They deny religion too. Worst of all, they could tempt one's children into following suit. They make non-conformity and chaos look attractive!

The second is that vampires are parasites. They target fine, upstanding human beings and drink their blood. They don't contribute anything to society. They don't have jobs! Just like people on welfare really.

The third is that vampires are foreign invaders. They're minority immigrants. They come here, with their alien accents and leech off good, right-thinking Americans. They should all be sent home with a stake through their hearts, as a warning to other foreigners not to come here.

It's already been touched upon, but by the 21st century this was probably the greatest lure of the vampires. It deserves its own section.

Vampires can do anything. They are powerful and they live outside the law.  The usual rules and mores of society mean nothing to them. They make their own rules and enjoy it immensely.

You can see it in what legends and attributes cleave to the vampire. For example, no modern creature can see its reflection in a mirror. That came from Bram Stoker's imagination. Previously one of the folkloric methods of trapping a vampire was to give it a mirror. It was so narcissistic, it would get distracted staring at itself. Then the hunter could get close enough to kill it.

Bram Stoker took the reflection away as a metaphor for the loss of soul.  It's there for the same reason that medieval priests swore that crosses and holy water could destroy the monster. Nothing to do with God at all. The Almighty may be omnipotent, but this is something Other. But never fear, God will help you kill it!  And all that.

There is something deeply sexual about the modern vampire.  Early vampires always had fangs.  The 20th and 21st century vampires have canines which only extend when they see someone that they fancy.  It doesn't take a genius to join the dots between that and other parts of the male anatomy.

The original vampires were in filthy, rotting shrouds.  Their counterparts today dress in sexy, revealing, glamorous attire. They are style personified. They wear the kind of things which the rest of us wish we could get away with.

Moreover, they aren't picky about who they seduce. Forget about all moralistic ravings about the evils of homosexuality.  Just about every vampire in the last four decades has been bisexual. Bestiality and necrophilia have been implied since Dracula.  You can even get away with hints of pedophilia, if the child in question is actually a centuries old vampire.  In short, if a vampire chooses an age appropriate member of the opposite sex, then it's usually just one liaison in many.

It's enough to make middle-class fathers everywhere reach for the nearest stake.

Nor is this a modern reaction.  That's precisely what Bram Stoker was telling those Victorian fathers too. Gone were their daughter's corsets and floor length skirts.  In were sexually aware vampire maidens running around in their underwear and nighties; and they got away with it!

No wonder it caught on.