APPENDIX A


"Vampires" entry from the Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural

Vampires are mythical bloodsucking creatures possessing supernatural powers and a variey of natural forms, both animal and human. Although the term vampire comes from the Hungarian vampir and the German vampyr, the concept involves one of the most universal and wide-ranging horror myths, which reaches from ancient folklore to contemporary books and films such as 'Salem's Lot, The Hunger, and Interview with the Vampire. Skulking their way through both Eastern and Western culture, vampires give and astonishingly universal frisson, whether they are taken literally as demonic forces of darkness or metaphorically for the spread of disease, the threat of sexulaity and other forms of intimacy, the fear of the dead, the longing for immortality, or the seductiveness of evil.

The profound ambiguity of vampires -- their simultaneous repulsiveness and glamour, especially in contemporary portrayals -- makes them a fascinating subject for poetry and pathology. They have entranced terrified believers and skeptics alike. In ancient Greece they were celebrated as demonic female bloodsuckers; in the medieval period they were the subject of censorious laws and were recommended for excommunication by the Catholic Church; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries they invaded the Gothic Romance and the ghost story; in our own period they have been psychoanalyzed by Freudian critics, domesticated for family entertainment by Broadway producers, and thrust into chic high society circles by writers like Anne Rice and Whitley Strieber.

Vampires have inspired everyone from the Marquis de Sade to the chroniclers of the lives of the saints, but in gaining cultural visibility they have lost some of their shock value. Ironically, they have, like their victims, been drained of their original energies, becoming a grotesque parody of what they once were. On the other hand, as the sexual fears and taboos that spawned them have relaxed, vampires have begun to take on new, more subtle forms.

The beginnings of the vampire muth stretch back to antiquity. In ancient Greece vampires were alluring women who seduced and drained the blood of travelers. These Empusae were incubae, children of Hecate who, in the words of Robert Graves, were "greedily seductive female demons." Like later embodiments of the myth, they had the power to transform themselves into animals (bitches and cows rather than bats or wolves) or salacious women. Unlike later versions, however, they were equally at home attacking during midday slumber as at night. Accompanying the Empusae in their bloodlusting attacks was Lamia, daughter of Belus, on whom as Graves put it, Zeus "bestowed the singular power of plucking out and relacing her eyes at will." A hideous, hungry, lecherous creature, Lamia specialized in child killing; her face was a Gorgon mask, replete with blazing eyes, a frightful scowl, and a snakelike tongue protruding from bared fangs.

The Greeks may well have imported this ghastly myth from Palestine, where in the ample Jewish tradition of horror Lilith, first wife of Adam, was a Canaanite Hecate who attacked newborn infants and sucked the blood of men in their sleep. The ravages of Lilith were continued by the Lilim (children of Lilith), and her powers were so feared that the Jews used magical means to protect themselves from her murderous prowlings as late as the Middle Ages.

Virtually every culture has some variation on the vampire myth. The Assyrian demoness, the Lilitu, resembled Lilith, boasting scabrous wings and long tangled hair. The lives of the saints are spiked with necrophilia-tinged accounts of bedroom encounters with beautiful female temptresses who turn out to be vampiric corpses. Some of the more colorful and grotesque variants in Eastern and Western folklore include the Chinese Kian-si, a nocturnal demon sporting long fingernails; the American Indian vampire, a creature with a trumpet-shaped mouth adept at sucking the sleeping victim's brains through his ears; and the Hindu vampire, who has a fetish for drunk or insane women. A spectacularly gruesome myth, also from India, involves Kali, the Dark mother, who has such an insatiable bloodlust that if she can't find a victim she is likely, according to Sir Richard Burton, to slash her own throat and catch the rush of blood in her mouth.

In our culture the most popular version of the vampire, which has spawned a multi-million-dollar movie industry, is the Romanian nosferatu, a blood-crazed living corpse that turns its victims into new vampires and can be combated with an odd, elaborate mixture of pagan and Christian remedies, including garlic, holy water, decapitation, a cross, a wooden stake driven through the heart, and (one of the more amusing and less exploited methods) tying the vampire up in his coffin with complicated knots. In Eastern European and other Christian cultures, vampires tend to be outcasts who die in a state of sin, including suicides, heretics, excommunicants, and those who happen to die soon after breaking Lent with wine or tobacco. Despite the mystique associated with vampires, it apparently doesn't take much to become one.

The idea of vampirism derives not only from folklore and superstition but also from secular sources. The word vampire has also come to refer to sadistic tyrants throughout history who have lusted for blood and power. Countess Elizabeth Bathory, a notorious example, drained dozens of young girls of their blood in a gruesome attempt to extend her life. A dabbler in the occult, Elizabeth the Blood Countess became obsessed with the notion that literally bathing herself in vats of blood would impart freshness and youth to her skin. Upon being discovered when one of her victims escaped, she was walled up alive in her bedchamber in 1610 by the king of Hungary, a fittingly Gothic finale to her grisly story. The saga of the Blood Countess becomes even more weirdly compelling when, thanks to the research of Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu (In Search of Dracula, 1972), we realize that she had real ties to the historic Count Dracula: she was born on the edge of the Carpathian Mountains, and Prince Stephen Bathory helped Dracula regain his throne. Another ugly specimen of a "real" vampire was Gilles de Rais who fought with Joan of Arc. This human monster derived sexual pleasure from torturing, raping, and disemboweling children.

The most famous and most viciously ambitious "vampire" was Vlad IV, the original Count Dracula, a fifteenth-century Transylvanian ruler who was fond of impaling his victims on stakes and torturing them to death as he dined with his court. Credited by some historians with the impalement of some 30,000 victims, Vlad was a connoisseur to other forms of torture as well, some of them virtually unimaginable in their cruelty. His victims frequently included women, children, and animals. In the literary versions of the vampire, the victims are at least offered eternal life, and many of them cleary enjoy their bloody embrace with their victimizer. Stripped of this sexual ambiguity, the historical version reveals only the human animal's seemingly endless capacity for cruelty.

Nevertheless, Vlad's castle, located in the mountains of what is now Romania, was the model for the vampire's castle in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the first of the blockbuster vampire novels to explore the more subtle sexual aspects of vampirism. It was Stoker's stroke of genius to fuse the historical bruality of Vlad IV, described in his British Museum sources as "a bloodthirsty monster," with the Transylvanian legend of the nosferatu, creating a novel that interweaves history with fantasy.

Although Dracula is the most famous vampire novel, it was by no means the first. It is rather the culmination of vampire motifs in Gothic romances, Romantic poetry, and Victorian ghost stories. The poetry of vampirism is extensive: Goethe's Gothic ballad Die Braut von Korinth (The Bride of Korinth, 1798) relates a sexual affair between a man and a woman who turns out to be a vampire; Coleridge's Death in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner hints of vampirism, and the unfinished "Christabel" suggests a vampiric lesbian relationship.

On a legendary evening in June 1816 Lord Byron read "Christabel" aloud to Mary Shelley; her husband, Percy Shelley; and Byron's physician, John Polidori, inspiring not only Shelley's Frankenstein but Polidori's The Vampyre, a piece of lurid hackwork that nonetheless has the distinction of being the first vampire tale in English fiction. In the same crude tradition was the wonderfully titled Varney the Vampire; or, the Feast of Blood, an anonymous Victorian potboiler, 220 chapters long, featuring Sir Francis Varney, a satanic ladies' man who, at least in his physical appearance (fiery eyes, taloned hands, savage teeth), anticipates Dracula.

Of far greater literary worth is Sheridan Le Fanu's novella Carmilla (1870), the first vampiric tale to sustain a consistent atmosphere of menace. A lesbian vampire who can transform into a gigantic cat, Carmilla, in her diabolical charm and sexual allure, resembles the female vampires in Stoker's Dracula. The similarity is not surprising; Carmilla moved Stoker to begin research on his own vampire tale.

Le Fanu, like Stoker, was careful to recapitulate the actual folklore of vaampirism -- including the bite on the neck, the stake through the heart, and many other "authentic" trappings -- but the real interest in his tale is its sexiness. As George Stade, Leonard Woolf, and numerous other Freudian commentators have noted, the Victorian vampire tale is virtually a textbook case of sexual repression emerging as horror. The bite on the neck, usually in the victim's bedchamber, is a carnal gesture, signaling a simultaneous horror and fascination with the sexual act. Bloodsucking becomes a perverse metaphor for sexual embrace, just as the losing and gaining of blood represents the losing and gaining of sexual power. When Carmilla pants "You are mine forever" over her young victim, she articulates a fantasy of unending pleasure and domination.

The large incidence of homosexuality in vampire stories -- not only in Carmilla but in several sections of Dracula -- has led some critics to claim that these works are really about fear of homosexuality. It would be more accurate, however, to regard vampires as bisexual: Dracula and his minions swing either way, with no decided preference.

The treatment of women in vampire lore has fascinating sexual ramifications. In Carmilla, as in the legend of the Empusae, beautiful women are deadly and demonic; in Dracula, which goes a step further, women become sexually attractive only after they have been infected with vampirism. They then proceed to ravage the countryside, draining their men of vital fluids, in actions that imply, as critics have noted, interchageability between blood and semen. Clearly Stoker was suggesting that female sexuality is threatening and evil, and the theme of an emerging female sexuality that men cannot handle is one of the richest sources of tension and terror in his novel. This theme appears elsewhere as well, from the image of woman as vampire projected in Edvard Munch's expressionistic painting "The Vampire" to early films such as Robert Wiene's Genuine, which presents the vampire as vamp.

Predatory lady vampires have always prowled the cinema, especially in recent years, in lurid films such as Brides of Dracula (1960), which unleashes a horde of female blood-suckers in a ladies' boarding school, and the Vampire Lovers (1970), a cinematic version of Carmilla. Male vampires in movies tend to be sexual predators too. Although Bela Lugosi, with his sardonic grin and campy Eastern European accent, will probably forever remain the definitive image of Dracula in the popular imagination, it was Christopher Lee who was the first actor to represent the King Vampire as the sexy, aristocratic, yet thoroughly evil villain that was forecast in Stoker's novel. A cultivated, intelligent man, Lee complained in the early 1970s that after making numerous Dracula films he was tired of being sloshed with holy water and having crucifixes stick in his face. Yet what audiences focused on was not the religious paraphernalia but Lee's portrayal of Dracula as a suave, brutal ladies' man surrounded by voluptuous women. In Horror of Dracula (1958), one of the tightest and most chilling of all vampire films, Lee captured Dracula's blazing sexual energy as no one else had, setting a standard not so much for his later, progressively weaker films as for films featuring such elegant Draculas as Louis Jourdan, Jack Palance, and Frank Langella.

These stars are notable for capturing yet another ambiguity in the vampire myth, at least as presented by Stoker and Le Fanu -- the notion of the vampire as a tragic hero who longs for the release of death but cannot attain it. In Carmilla the vampire is as much a victim and a monster; Carmilla, in fact, was once an innocent young girl who was bitten in her sleep by another vampire; she did not choose her ghastly fate any more than Lucy (or indeed Dracula himself) does in Dracula. This concept of vampirism as something that simply happens to people -- without volition or even knowledge -- is connected to several fears exploited by the myth, not the least of which is fear of disease. A large part of the imagery of terror that Stoker drew upon came from stories of the Sligo cholera epidemic told to him as a child by his mother. In Stoker's version, as in many others, vampirism is a supernatural explanation for the spread of any mysterious, horrible disease that can erupt without warning. Stoker's Van Helsing, Le Fanu's Con Cordenberg, and Stephen King's vampire hunters in 'Salem's Lot are powerful doctors who "cure" the disease through a formidible combination of science, superstition, orthodox Christianity, and pagan black magic. Max Schreck, the first and ugliest film vampire (Nosferatu, 1922), looks more like a scabrous rat, a spreader of disease, than anything human; more recent films, such as Tobe Hooper's television version of 'Salem's Lot, present vampirism as a contagion that engulfs an entire community.

Ultimately this fear of disease is a fear of death. Capable of living forever, but in a distinctly unpleasant form, the vampire expresses both a desire for and a fear of immortality, as well as a fear of the dead themselves and the horrible suspicion that they may not lie still at all.

Since fear of the dead is also conjured by ghouls, zombies, and various other unsavory species of undead, the question remains whether the vampire myth uniquely expresses anything other than sexual symbolism. The issues is important because the vampire tale as sexual allegory has begun to play itself out. At heart the Stoker version of vampirism is dated and deeply puritanical, a Victorian vision of sex as the source of evil. Despite increasingly explicit sex scenes, contemporary versions based on this model find themselves in a cul-de-sac, and it is no accident that most novels such as Anne Rice's Interview With the Vampire and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Hotel Transylvania -- are period pieces. As David Pirie points out in A Heritage of Horror (1973), many of the British Hammer films, whic are often credited with sexual adventurousness and explicitness, actually project a "vividly moralistic attitude towards sex." As the cultural equation of horror with sex fades, the Lugosi/Lee vampire loses its seductive power.

Yet as Christopher Lee himself has argued, there is more to the vampire myth than sexual paranoia: "Vampirism can take place in all walks of life. In large soulless companies, in marriages where one partner wants complete domination over the other. These are everyday examples. You can kill a person spiritually by sucking the life and vitality out of them." Many modern writers have chosen to work in this larger context. To Algernon Blackwood ("The Transfer"), Walter de La Mare ("Seaton's Aunt"), Oliver Onions ("The Beckoning Fair One"), G. S. Viereck (The House of the Vampire), W. F. Harvey ("Miss Avenal"), and Hanns Heinz Ewers (Vampire), "vampires" are in fact egomaniacs who love power, live to dominate, and, in any number of ways, drain those around them. Blackwood calls this modern type the "psychic" vampire. The modern vampire tale transcends its creaky grand guignol machinery to inspire fears that are all too commonplace.

In this larger, post-Gothic context, many of the most clever contemporary horror inventions -- Invasion of the Body Snatchers, David Cronenberg's Rabid and They Came from Within -- are modern variations on the theme of vampirism. In each case an alien or supernatural force takes over someone's soul or psyche -- frequently the hero's loved one -- and turns him or her into a predatory caricature, a baleful, glassy-eyed "new" version of the vampire resembling the tansformed Lucy in Dracula. It is here that the contemporary frisson of the vampire myth reveals itself, for beyond the horror of sex and the religious obsession with immortality lies a still-potent terror of intimacy, whether sexual or not, the chilling question of whether we can trust a loved one. This terror is so intense that it frequently blurs the distinction between the supernatural and the psychological: in de la Mare's "Seaton's Aunt," perhaps the most subtle vampiric tale in the literature, we never know whether the pathetic young hero is killed by a "real" vampire or simply by a hateful mother -- and it scarcely matters.

But even supernatual vampires can be at home in the modern world. Contemporary urban life is especially felicitous for the vampire, offering him or her a huge selection of unchaperoned young victims, chic all-night parties after which everyone sleeps through the dreaded sunlight, and fashions that confer a welcome cloak of invisibility. As Tony Scott's film version of The Hunger (1983) makes clear, vampires can go to a New Wave disco for a pickup and look pretty much like everybody else. Because sex, so easily available, is no longer a major kick, vampires are free to seek out new, more dangerous thrills -- heroin, for example, the addiction to which is clearly the "hunger" suggested by Whitley Strieber. We may no longer be frightened by Lamia's protruding tongue or Dracula's flapping cape, but the vampire myth continues to bite at the very quick of our lives.