1. Vampires

2. David Punter https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CjWa-hHxobM

3. A Vampire: *a creature that essentially drains the life force from its victims, most often in the form of blood drinking. Historically, they have taken one of two forms:  A supernatural, inhuman being, like a demon/monster  A revenant – a human who returns to the world of the living after death

4. The history of vampires Vampiric creatures have existed for centuries – Mesopotamia, Ancient Egypt, Ancient Greece, and Ancient Rome all had vampire-ish creatures…ones that fed on life forces/blood from victims. In the end, it all comes down to FEAR. FEAR of the dead coming back to life…fear of the unknown. In Roman times – the criminals/outcasts/deviants were buried at crossroads. They also had the Lamia As Christianity took hold, and evil became personified as The Devil, he was given minions and demons – lesser supernatural beings that were aligned with him and did his dirty work…the belief that there had to be evil to balance out the good that there was in the world due to God.

5. Christianity As Christianity took hold, and evil became personified as The Devil, he was given minions and demons – lesser supernatural beings that were aligned with him and did his dirty work…the belief that there had to be evil to balance out the good that there was in the world due to God. And then there’s blood. There’s an almost universal belief that blood is necessary for life, and for revivification – or the bringing of one who is dead back to life.

7. Some cultures even believed that it wasn’t simply revenants that could become vampires…but animals, and even certain vegetables. Seriously. Esp. pumpkins and watermelons

8. Eastern European vampires – middle ages + The Slavic Vampire: The Slavic people including most east Europeans from Russia to Bulgaria, Serbia to Poland, have the richest vampire folklore and legends in the world. Causes of vampirism included: being born with a caul, teeth, or tail, being conceived on certain days, irregular death, excommunication, improper burial rituals etc. Preventative measures included: placing a crucifix in the coffin, or blocks under the chin to prevent the body from eating the shroud, nailing clothes to coffin walls for the same reason, placing millet or poppy seeds in the grave because vampires had a fascination with counting, or piercing the body with thorns or stakes. Evidence that a vampire was at work in the neighbourhood included: death of cattle, sheep, relatives, neighbours, exhumed bodies being in a lifelike state with new growth of the fingernails or hair, or if the body was swelled up like a drum, or there was blood on the mouth and if the corpse had a ruddy complexion. Vampires could be destroyed by staking, decapitation (the Kashubs placed the head between the feet), burning, repeating the funeral service, holy water on the grave, exorcism.

9. Transylvania

10. Then there’s the Romanian vampiric monsters: The strigoi: a troubled soul rising from the dead who could be invisible, resemble a loved one, or take a monstrous form. They are able to drain life force through blood. They were believed to have red hair, indigo eyes, and two hearts in their natural state. They were blamed for disease and pestilence and famine. Living humans could be strigoi if they had magical powers.

11. Others… Seven years after the death, the baby soul will turn in the grave and cries three times: “Baptism! Baptism! Baptism!”, as it can’t go to Heaven and must roam the Earth suffering forever even though it was innocent. If the mother kills the baby, the revenge will take mythical proportions. The baby’s soul bursts from the grave in a column of light and will torment and torture the mother every night. In some regions of Romania it is believed they can only steal milk and food from animals, while in others they are either evil sorcerers, as powerful as a Strigoi, in some cases even the child of one. But while they have the same vampiric traits, a Strigoi is always more powerful, in fact it can even control the Moroi. The Moroi While the Strigoi can be found in other Balkan cultures, the Moroi is an exclusive Romanian monster. It is the soul of the child of a pure mother that was buried alive, killed or died before being baptized.

12. According the the Romanians, Pricolici are werewolves in life and after they die, return as vampires. This also gives rise to the legend of vampires that can turn into animals such as wolves, dogs, or owls and bats. The common theme of all these animals being that they are nocturnal hunters much like vampires.

13. Vlad Dracul – Vlad the Impaler (1431 – 1476ish) Here’s the person you probably picture, whether you know it or not, when you think of vampires. Vlad Draculya. Technically Vlad III of Wallachia (in modern day Romania) He was named Vlad the Impaler after his death, on account of his, um, rampant enthusiasm for this particularly brutal form of execution. Dracul means “dragon” and “yla” is son of, so his name literally means “son of the dragon” --- while his name is synonymous with vampires now, he was never even accused of it during his lifetime…it had more to do with the bloodlust. Of which there was a LOT. He essentially laid waste to many Ottoman Turks – he was hailed as a hero in his own country, but has gone down in history as a terrible villain.

14. Here’s a really famous illustration of him eating amongst the impaled.

15. He is a fitting namesake for the vampire in Bram Stoker’s novel…and since its publication, he’s consistently been assumed to be the source of the myth. In this, and many other adaptations, he’s shown as turning into the vampire. Dracula - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb3O46ZEJmI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb3O46ZEJmI

16. Archeologists in Bulgaria haved uncovered a 13th century staked "vampire.” The remains once belonged to a man who was likely in his 40s. An iron rod had been hammered through his chest "to keep the corpse from rising from the dead and disturbing the living, and his left leg had also been removed and placed beside the corpse. Vampire hysteria commonly took hold of Slavic villages, with corpse- stakings occurring frequently. Around the region, archeologists have unearthed over 100 graves in which remains have been pinned down with such vampire-deterring methods. **Vampire mythology persists TODAY in Eastern Europe, with sightings and accusations and beliefs.

17. That being said, the current story about vampires…with the standard mythology YOU are used to really started in the 18th century Decomposition Rabies/Diseases Folktales Fear of foreigners Changing sexual mores

18. The word vampire entered the English language in 1732 from the German, based on the case of Arnold Paole – at this time, parts of Serbia and Wallachia were being integrated into Austria – a more Western country, and soldiers were hearing stories of dead bodies being dug up and “re-killed.” Paole confessed to his new young wife that he had had an encounter with a vampire in Greece. He died a few weeks after this confession – and there were soon reports of sightings of him in the village, and many unexplainable deaths. They exhumed him and discovered blood around his mouth. Upon further investigation of the body, he emitted a “scream” and lots of blood. Gross.

20. The Enlightenment – mid to late 18 th century Science attempts to disprove the existence of vampires, but local beliefs and techniques persist. Voltaire: “What! Vampires in our 18 th century? Yes…In Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria, and Lorraine…there was no talk of vampires in London or even Paris. The true bloodsuckers did not live in cemeteries, they preferred great palaces...” Basically, in Europe, the vampire craze died down. For a bit…

21. The 19 th century…the vampire returns to the cultural landscape…through literature

22. The Vampyre Remember that story contest that summer in 1816 that Mary Shelley essentially won? Well, she wasn’t the only one who wrote anything of note in Switzerland…Byron’s friend and doctor (I know, right?), John William Polidori wrote The Vampyre, or stared it at least. It was published in 1819, and is the story of a young Englishman named Aubrey who meets a mysterious Lord from unknown background who has penetrated London society. They have an awkward and unlikely friendship…the Lord seduces women he shouldn’t, and then kind of dies, after making Aubrey promise to keep quiet about the nature of his “death” for a year and a day. Then he shows back up in Aubrey’s life, reminds him of his oath, and seduces his sister, all while Aubrey remains silent. Needless to say, it doesn’t end well…….

23. THIS story, though not as popular as Frankenstein, changed the face of monsters in popular culture…Polidori recast the vampire as a creature that was one half predator, one half romantic seducer. That’s the characterization that has stuck:

24. Quick background on vampires and popular culture: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OdwR6sskHv0

25. The Victorians Human societies are bound together by a system of norms and values understood and shared by the majority of the population, creating stability in the social world. These codes organize gender, sexuality, class, economics, and all other components of culture, the vehicle whereby one makes sense of the world. Though not static, they occasionally undergo more rapid and disorienting shifts, causing widespread alienation and anxiety within a population. At the end of the 19 th century in Britain, owing to the collapse of the colonial empire, technological innovations, scientific discoveries, and demographic patterns, forces of social change were producing a bewildering new cultural landscape. Foremost among these changes was the role of the New Woman, or “fin-de-siècle feminist [whose] outspoken, independent, and … masculine behaviours made her … a monster.” (Hurley 199). Victorians’ sense of gender roles and sexuality was “bourgeois, oppressively heterosexual and patriarchal, and terrified by any deviations from this supposedly universal standard” (Mighall 211), and deviations were becoming more common as the century drew to a close.

26. It was then that the vampire returned with a new vehemence to the novel. An undeniably sexual creature (Roth 412), it represented a new social animal, with new gender politics. While often examined in a homoerotic sense, the characters in these Gothic novels symbolize a more far-reaching threat to the existing social order: the woman who not only acts like a man, but who actively attacks the patriarchal system from within. The vampiric creature represents this fin-de-siècle anxiety that the dividing forces that separated males from females were in fact of human, not natural, construction. In late 19 th century Gothic fiction, this monster, free from the social boundaries of gender, is attractive and repulsive, familiar, and foreign. It is the personification of this fear, and this possibility.

27. One of the more rigid set of behaviour codes in Victorian Britain was that of the gender divide. Traditionally strict, it consistently grouped men and women into separate and distinct social spheres. The Victorian woman was characterized by a “childlike innocence … selflessness, and a moral purity,” and was often seen as “asexual” with a mind that was neither “rational nor intellectual” (Hurley 199). By the fin-de-siècle, many feared that “the traditional gender roles were becoming undone” (Hurley 200). The dangerous New Woman was seeking a sort of gender equality that had never been attempted before. She wanted the “right to move freely in the public sphere,” and was described as “acting like a man” (Hurley 201).

28. At the 19 th century’s end, the “vampire myth emerged as an exemplary format for the treatment of taboo subjects” (Thomas 44), especially shifting gender roles. The vampire, or vampiric creature, is a perfect choice: this monster used to be human, and then experienced a violent change. While vampire origin myths vary, most concur that the monster is created through the transgression of a major social or cultural taboo, often suicide, murder, or blood drinking. The vampire is a dual figure, “neither dead nor alive, but somehow both.”(Craft 449), making it much like the fearful creature of the fin-de-siècle: the woman who can act like a man. It “obey[s] internal commands” (Twitchell 8), and is free from the social order, a terrifying prospect for Victorians.

29. Gothic fiction has a “fascination with social transgression” (Hurley 191), and no monster was more Victorian than the vampire. It hid in plain sight, using the social structure to blend in, and yet displayed an uncanny ability to move fluidly between the rigid rules. It is not simply the behaviour and origins of the vampire that make it an appropriate model for the androgynous creature freed from the oppression of sex-role stereotypes, but its physiology. While the vampire might appear from a distance to resemble the man or woman it used to be, a horrific transformation has occurred, merging sexual features. The vampire’s mouth is “a primary site of gender transgression because it fuses a masculine ability to penetrate with an orifice that is receptive to penetration” (Thomas 42). The vampire, then, represents “Victorian anxiety over the potential fluidity of gender roles” (Craft 448).

30. Varney the Vampire and the Penny Dreadful A serialized story (over 800 pages) that took the Polidori Vampire figure and ran with it, adapting to to be modern and urban, but with more traditional elements. Instead of the sexy vampire, this one was “gaunt…with a hand which seemed utterly destitute of flesh” Shock horror – aimed at young men

31. Carmilla

32. The Female Vampire as a bit of a gender - bender. Many scholars have argued that Carmilla’s story is that of lesbian vampirism. I’m not sure it’s as simple as that. Carmilla is certainly a story about a woman who uses her wiles to influence, infiltrate, penetrate, overtake another girl, but the allegory of it being sexual is a bit too easily reached…it has much more to do with transgression of the sex and gender roles of that particular social world.

33. The Victorian Vampire… -Sex -Seduction -Transgression -Dangerous liasons -Gender fluidity - Social expectations - The body

34. Bram Stoker’s Dracula

35. Oh, we’ll get to this… Dracula is a wildly complex novel, dealing not only with sexual transgressions of socially constructed gender roles, but issues regarding capitalism, immigration, industrialization, science and technology, and the early stages of what we now call globalization. This novel, published in 1899, remains the quintessential vampire novel. It has been adapted countless times.

36. Nosferatu 1922 An early film adaptation of Stoker’s novel. 97% on Rotten Tomatoes, btw….

37. Bela Lugosi - 1931

38. Christopher Lee - 1972

39. Bram Stoker’s Dracula – 1992

40. The 80s and 90s

41. Contemporary Vampires

42. Parodies “The Count” Sesame Street Count Duckula “The Count” Sesame Street Dark Dark Shadows