The Evolution of the Modern Vampire

Some might argue that the telephone effect (or whisper down the lane, depending on your place of origin) is the best part of storytelling. Someone heard it from a friend, who heard it from their uncle whose father was for sure one of the survivors.

But do you even need a reliable witness when stories of the undead, blood-sucking creature span time and geography? Arguably not.

The term vampire first appeared in the Oxford English Dictionary in 1736, following the very real vampire panic that spread across Eastern Europe in the eighteenth century, leading to exhumations and anti-vampire rituals.

Thanks to a mixture of superstition and a desire to provide an answer to loss of entire crops or instances of plagues, the ancient lore of revenants, or human corpses reanimated, surfaced as a potential cause—one that incited action. If the recently deceased were coming back with evil intent to poach upon a people or its resources, a course of action must be taken.

As villages rallied to explain mysterious deaths and misfortunes, graves were unearthed to provide answers. What they found further supported their supernatural theories—a body that appeared to still have life. Blood coming out of the corners of the mouth, elongated fingernails and hair shocked the reverent gravediggers.

Science would later dispel this theory, uncovering more about the natural process of decomposition and post-mortem decay. Today we know that a well-sealed coffin in the winter would delay any decomposition, and, as the skin loses moisture, nail and hair growth occur. Finally, as the intestines begin to decompose, the bloating forces blood (and other body fluids) out of the mouth.

But superstition is a strong force. Villagers, keen to stop the advances of evil, would pin suspected vampires’ corpses to the earth with a wooden stake; they’d often decapitate the suspected evil and stuff the severed head with garlic—rituals that, in a future when vampires are much more beloved, will shadow the bloodsucking monsters well into the future.

Despite huge gaps between time and cultures, the singular defining characteristic of a vampire is a being that subsists off of the life force of the living—usually blood. This universal definition characterizes an entire race, whether born of this earth and deceased or an entity of the supernatural.

The enduring myth of vampires evolved from superstition around death and purification of the soul to a more glittery paranormal entity. While ancient civilizations’ depictions of vampire-like beings such as Lilitu, a mystical being who lived off of the blood of babies, and Estries, who pillaged cities, eating unsuspecting men, both of Assyria; and the Greek and Roman Empousai, demigoddesses who also feed on men, have served as a vanguard for later incarnations, since leaving the cave, portrayals of vampirism from folklore to film share more characteristics—like an aversion to garlic—than not.

In modern stories, the beginning is always the same. A road is dark save for a few streetlights casting oblong shadows across the pavement. The hour, presumably, is late, and only the most committed to a good time remain to bear witness to the night’s secrets. As a dense fog begins to settle, the lingering merrymakers lose their former jaunt and begin their slow stumble home—if they make it that far.

A woman screams, shrill vibrations skipping into the night like a deftly tossed stone over water. Night swallows one man, and then another, like low hanging fruit, leaving the rest of the pack in a confused panic. The woman screams again, visible now under dancing light as she flees some violent scene, her clothing ripped to the level of exposure proportionate to standards of the time. In the aftermath, someone suggests  vampirism, a condition dripping with superstition and misfortune, and repeats it, but none of them are reliable witnesses.

Although his wasn’t the first, Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula provided much of the basis of the modern vampire legend and popularized the garlic phenomenon. And, historically, this adds up. Vampirism was seen as a disease, and for time immemorial garlic has served many cultures with its curative properties.

Garlic is, and was, valued as a strong anti-bacterial and recognized for its service in prevention and treatment of different diseases. Because it was believed that a vampire's blood was tainted and carried “evil humors”—moods and behaviors determined by an imbalance in body fluid composition—using garlic as a natural cleansing and purifying agent and apotropaic (evil-deterrent) served to connect the known with the unknown.

During early civilizations and into the vampire hysteria during the time of the plague and tuberculosis outbreaks, people believed that the doorways and windows of buildings were particularly vulnerable to the entry or passage of evil. Social concerns, limited knowledge about the stages of decomposition, fear of disease and death caused entire groups of people— oftentimes guided by the Catholic Church—cling to the supernatural. Especially when everyone is dropping dead.

Clusters of death and related vampire scares dominated a period in Europe, but how, exactly, they got to the Americas, is less clear. There is one documented case of vampire hysteria in Exeter, Rhode Island, when Great New England Vampire Panic stirred up accusations akin to the Salem Witch Trials two centuries prior, but the rest comes from the great penholders of our time who keep the obsession alive, like Anne Rice, author of Interview with a Vampire.

Anne Rice brought vampires to the south, and Hollywood built them a castle. Marita Woywod Crandle, author and owner of Boutique du Vampyre in New Orleans, will be the first to tell you that her store is a gift shop and not to be confused with some of the more occult bodegas rumored to be housed within back alleys and bayou shanties. Her store caters to the well-trodden path of haunted tourism, and her book, New Orleans Vampires: History and Legend, serves as a well-researched text version of the popular haunted excursions. Her book, written for History Press, focuses on three main vampire legends in New Orleans and “At the very back, the afterword is a vampire story of my own,” said Woywod Crandle.

In the South, there is plenty of genuine gothic to go around and after the penholders said so, vampires became southerners, In television shows like The Vampire Diaries and its spinoff, The Originals, Civil War carnage was a great resource for creating vampires. This battlefield is also the birthplace of many of the vampires in the Twilight series as well as True Blood.

The Boutique du Vampyre is known around the country as a sundry of vampire commodities. “We’ve become the authority on vampires and the movie industry verifies their props with us,” said Woywod Crandle. You can find everything from bottled vampires, hot sauce, vampire tea, and garlic to hand-bound journals and custom fangs.

Most authors today choose to have vampires unaffected by garlic as well as avid consumers of human blood. Unfortunately, science shows that drinking human blood would cause an iron overdose, called hemochromatosis, making the idea of a vampire harder to sink your teeth into. Still, modern vampirism doesn’t require blood be the source of power.

Groups of people all over the world self-identify as vampires, and though they speak of parasitic relationships like a traditional vampire sucking human blood, it is not all about death and destruction. Daley Catherine South, queen vampire of a coven in Austin, Tx, describes today’s vampires as falling into several categories—sanguine, or those who consume blood; others who feed off of energy.

Daley and her husband, Logan South, lead a group of “awakened vampires”—people who have come to the realization, understanding, and developed symptoms of vampirism and require an outside source of human energy to maintain their own health and well-being—with similar niche groups sprouting up in dark corners everywhere.

Perhaps there is magical energy operating at wavelengths that we all can’t see. Perhaps the vampires of the past are keeping themselves well hidden. Scientific debunking of past vampire lure just means we haven’t found real evidence.

Still, the whispers of the eternally undead continue to fascinate, adding the aura of sex and sophistication to the age-old webbings of fear of the unknown and aversion to “the other” in society. And so the stories continue.