Vampires. Nosferatu. Blood Suckers. Cool.

The origins of vampires predate Bram Stoker's book by many years. Wikipedia has some great articles detailing the various myths and legends that our modern movie vampire grew out of. Stephen Harrigan and Christopher Beam over at Slate.com have both written articles about vampires breaking rules. I know I am not covering much in the way of new ground here, but I have been wanting to put my thoughts to paper (or on magnetic bits) on this subject for a while. For our purposes Vlad the Impaler and Elizabeth Bathory are the two influences that will be most commonly recognized. Both of these are actual people with particularly nasty habits that seemed to follow vampire lore. Bathory thought bathing in the blood of virgins would keep her young and Vlad was a singularly nasty warlord who delighted in staking captured soldiers. Buffy the Vampire Slayer also like to stake her enemies, but Vlad took this to extremes by impaling his victims on large pointed stakes. While I doubt the blood bath did any good for Bathory, I suspect that Vlad's horrific execution of his enemies made it hard to raise an army to fight against him. Even in those days, reputation counted. At any rate, even without the historical figures, the name Dracula translates to son of the dragon or son of the devil. Vlad's dad was a member of the Order of the Dragon. The latin word for dragon is Dracul and young Vlad got the surname Dracula. The word dracul would later come to mean devil. Ironically the Order of the Dragon was meant to protect the Holy Roman Empire from the muslims.

On a side note, I recently read Nick Redfern's "Memoirs of a Monster Hunter". My thought process was that I would read about someone who was exploring new myths and see how they moved from obscure local stories to national legends. To say that the book left me dumbfounded would be an understatement. Redfern has found that he can make a damn good living playing up to the faction of our society that believes in UFOs, Bigfoot and Area 51. Chapter after chapter of his book will provide great detail of the events leading up to one of his snipe hunts which always turn up empty. We end up with lots of information on who went along on the trip, where they went, usually there will be a couple different variations of the local legend, but once he gets to the actual location the creature is supposed to inhabit, nothing. To a cynical person (that would be me), this is clearly an attempt to "baffle 'em with bullshit". To make matters worse, there are several instances in the book where he makes fun of the very people who buy his books! As much as it saddens me, the fact is that as long as there are people who think their snakes are squeaky, there will be someone to sell them snake oil. Still as depressing as the book was, it did provide an insight on how a local old wife's tale can blossom into a major myth. Seems all it takes it a common thread and the right publicity.

The only item I might add to vampire lore is why some of the themes were persistent over the years. The bite of a vampire commonly causes weakness, paleness, loss of appetite. Many of the same symptoms that you would see for diseases such as cancer and diabetes or even infections. Frequently these disease have a rapid progression once they become symptomatic. A child with diabetes will be quite normal until their Isles of Langerhans fail and their bodies stop producing insulin. Death follows quickly once the disease makes itself known. Cancer can behave similarly, in the early stages it is not much of a burden but once it has metastasized throughout the body the decline is very fast. Envisioning an evil spirit that sucks the life out of its victims is not a big leap here. Consider two of the limitations of vampires. First is running water. Running water is usually safer to drink that stagnant water and perhaps the myth holds a small lesson there. A second item that wards off vampires is garlic which is a natural antibiotic (albeit a very, very weak antibiotic). This would not be much use against cancer or diabetes, of course, but it could have an effect on some diseases and infections. In a time when there were no doctors, giving someone who is ill fresh water and garlic would damn near be practicing medicine. And while you're at it, some sunshine is not a bad idea either. Helps the body produce vitamin D.

Nosferatu was one of the earliest movie vampires and this guy was a freak, which film audiences caught on to right away but no one in the movie seemed to notice. Perhaps the English are much more polite but really the guy was grotesque I think I would be more than a bit hesitant to stay at his castle. As movies got more sophisticated, so did vampires. By 1931 Bela Lugosi was playing an aristocratic vampire with a suggestion of royalty. This theme was common through the next 20 years until the multitude of cheap B movies of the 50's and 60's. All kinds of strengths and weaknesses were given to vampires depending on what the script called for. Hammer Studios seemed to want to create a series of linear vampire stories with one movie picking up where the last had ended. The created a problem as they had to kill the vampire at the end of each movie which called for some creative rewriting of vampire lore to bring him back to life for the next movie. Other movie writers and producers did much worse though.

A big part of the problem for vampires is that they are just so easy to portray on film. A cape and some false teeth and hello Nosferatu! Werewolves require extensive makeup, Frankenstein requires a physically large actor wearing a big costume, and the Japanese have cornered the market on oversized reptiles. But take a fairly normal looking actor and you can easily create a monster movie. As an extra bonus you get your pick of all kinds of vices to go with it. The neck biting is usually a stand in for sex in most of these movies, though there are plenty of movies where the vampire and victim have sex first and then a little bloodletting. Vampires' preferred snacks are typically young, virginal girls. Once the girls come back to animation, they are really into blood sucking and becomes slaves to the guy who first drank their blood. Oh, yeah and the girls are most commonly attacked in their bedrooms while in their nightgowns. My, those Victorian writers were so subtle.

But it is not just sex. The story can portray vampirism as drug addiction as well. Occasionally you will see a movie ("The Addiction") where the vampire displays withdrawal symptoms and may even attempt to wean themselves. Or perhaps you would like some racism with your vampirism, ("Blackula"). There have been a few female vampires who oddly enough also prefer young virgin girls, but if the movie title is "Vampiros Lesbos" I guess that isn't so odd. There was also "Dracula: The dirty old man" which was sort of like a comedy with a fair number of tied up naked women. Hmm, maybe it is just sex.

Well at any rate the fact that there are just so many different types of vampires in some many different types of movies that the myth has become diffuse. Sunlight will kill some vampires in an immediate fireball while others walk around with sunblock and Raybans. A stake through the heart is not extremely effective anymore. Garlic is typically still a deterrent but Holy Water is not very dependable. Sometimes the ashes of a vampire can be collected and reanimated with a bit of blood, other times the dust just coalesces on its own. "Captain Kronos" (which itself was an attempt to recreate the vampire legend) makes fun of this in a scene where one of the good guys is infected but consents to torture to help define what type of vampire they are fighting. After server attempts to kill the guy, it turns out that you need to use a silver sword. George Romero's "Martin" offers up yet another type of vampire. We suspect that Martin is not really a vampire but dies with a stake through his heart anyway.

Which brings us to vampire hunters. Starting with Van Helsing there has always been someone to fight vampires. Interestingly these initially started out as educated men. Perhaps this is a indication that the cure to old superstitions was knowledge. The Church's relative inability to deal with vampirism supports this belief as well. At any rate after the original Van Helsing would come sons and grandsons and granddaughters who would fight the good fight. But another type of hunter would arise. Sometimes called Damphyr but more commonly Daywalkers, these creatures were part vampire/ part human. They had the same abilities as a vampire but were good instead of evil. Don "the dragon" Wilson portrays one in "Night Hunter" and of course there is Wesley Snipes' "Blade". It is even hinted that Captain Kornos himself was not entirely human. There is always some loophole in the "vampires can't conceive" rule. Sometimes it is a pregnant women is bitten by a vamp, or the woman will conceive before she is fully a vamp or a vamp who has not completely turned will impregnate a woman. Sometimes vampires will try to create a Daywalkers on purpose which frequently leads to a scene where the baby claws its way out of mom. I would imagine that this kind of thing would result in years of therapy but then again Damphyrs don't have what you would called "repressed" anger. With the coming of professional vampire hunters, it follows that there should be a lot of vampires. This is usually addressed as either a conspiracy thing (John Carpenter's "Vampires") or as a cultural thing where vampires have learned to live just below the radar. This is another reason why you should never apply logic to a movie. The hunters are always grossly outnumbered and they have no problem at all finding vampires to kill. If you really want to save the world, round up a couple vamps and bring them into the light of the media. Get some help. Don't try to save the world solo. It will take too long and lots of innocent people will die.

Vampires have made a few forays into television over the years, usually in shows with the word "night" in them. "Dark Shadows" was a soap opera that featured vampires and witches and "Dark Knight' was about a vampire cop but it was not until Joss Whedon rewrote the "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" movie for a TV series that vamps really got a foot hold on prime time. Fortunately for Buffy wooden stakes would dependably dispatch vamps, at least until the later shows when she starting fighting older more powerful vamps and had to get more creative. Not to be outdone, cable TV jumped on the bandwagon with "True Blood" and "Twilight" which I have not seen but I am willing to bet are going to continue the teen angst theme. Perhaps someone will create a series called "Party of Five Vampires" soon. The Buffy series remains the most interesting because it was the best defined universe but lots of wiggle room for story lines. Episodes would sometimes be mostly played for laughs, sometimes would contribute to the overall story line and sometimes not. In on memorable episode a demon shows up that causes people to sing and dance.

In movies where the vampire is not the main character we get to see even more variations. Remember the vampire bats in "Beastmaster"? How about the Nina in "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen"? The vampires made by science in "The Omega Man"? When vamps are secondary they are aren't often fleshed out in terms of what they can or can't do. Often the enter the movie, kill a minor character or two and then the movie moves on leaving them behind. In Nina's case she is part of an ensemble cast, so while she is in the movie for its duration, she does not get much exposition time. Although she turns into a whole flock of bats instead of just a single bat. The way this is portrayed in the movie gives her a much more elemental feel which is kind of cool.

As I try to bring this essay to a close and tie up all the loose threads that I have meandered through, I realize that I have missed numerous entries into vampire mythology. I suppose I could go on a few more paragraphs and discuss "The littlest Vampire" or perhaps some Chinese Hopping Vampires or the vampire hookers in "Dusk till Dawn", but I think I've covered enough different types of vamps to make my point. In all likeliness you are sitting there wondering why I missed this or that vampire type. Which proves my point. There are far too many vamps out there to have any expectations of what will happen once they appear on the screen. Just because a stake through the heart is lethal to one vamp does not mean that it will work on the next one, not even in the same movie. Holy water and crosses have been known to backfire big time, though crosses made out of silver fare reasonably well (especially the ones that double as swords), but again you don't want to depend on these. No other monster even comes close to vamps for film appearances. Often this is because of how easy it is to portray vampires, but also because they are such a catchall for evil. Frequently when a monster has a lot of screen appearances it starts to become a good guy. Perhaps it was because Godzilla had a better agent, but poor old Dracula is still everyone's whipping boy. Every embodiment of pure evil has to have an Achilles' heel or there would not be any way to defeat it and would make for some really short movies. While "vamp gets girl, kills hero" might be more realistic it lacks a little something. Frequently finding the vamps weakness is the fun part of the movie. Seeing the good guy's dawning realization that the vampire is not bothered by the cross is often good for a quick gasp or laugh. Still it is important that there is always a way to kill vamps because who wants to see a movie where evil wins?

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