THE EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN VAMPIRE by Brian McKinley

THE EVOLUTION OF THE MODERN VAMPIRE

Anyone who has looked into the original folklore of vampires from various cultures knows that there’s a wide gulf between the shambling corpses in those stories to the suave, charismatic bloodsuckers we’ve become familiar with in today’s fiction. So how did that happen? What are the elements that carried over from folklore and what was originally invented by novelists and filmmakers?

The creation of our modern concept of the vampire begins in the 17th Century. The word “vampire” had already entered the popular vocabulary due to news stories and metaphorical use by poets, but it was that famous summer vacation hosted by Lord Byron in 1816, that gave us Frankenstein, which also gave birth to the first modern vampire novel. The Vampyre was published anonymously in 1818 and, while initially credited to Byron, was eventually discovered to have been written by John Polidori who had been Byron’s personal physician. It can’t really be overstated how important this novel is in the history of vampire fiction, since it literally transformed the vampire from a dirty peasant corpse rising from the grave into a refined, seductive aristocrat for the first time.

Notable is the fact that the vampire, Lord Ruthven (pronounced riv-en), has no difficulty passing for human, is wounded by a bullet before being revived by moonlight, and walks by day with no issue. He kills his victims by drinking their blood, but has no fangs and little in the way of overt supernatural powers. Much of that, ironically, is in keeping with some Eastern European folklore while at odds with others. Still, this novel was a sensation in its time and paved the way for much of what came afterward.

Another largely forgotten early vampire is Varney the Vampire (1847) whose author, Malcolm James Rymer, also helped give us the character of Sweeney Todd. Rymer’s novel is a massive, sprawling opus that’s not a particularly good read by modern standards, but it did give the vampire fangs, hypnotic power, and superhuman strength for the first time in the genre. Varney also introduces the idea of the self-loathing vampire who writes an account of his early life over 100 years before Anne Rice! This is really, in my opinion, where we part ways from the folkloric traditions of the vampire (in Eastern Europe, anyway, since the folklore is vastly different in various parts of the world) and start really creating the literary vampire as a distinct entity.

The next big milestone is Sheridan LeFanu’s novella Carmilla, whose title character is easily the most famous and influential female vampire in literature as well as being the first debatably lesbian vampire. Carmilla’s contributions to the vampire genre include shape-shifting (Carmilla turns into a cat and can make her body insubstantial), sleeping in a coffin, being decidedly nocturnal, and being dispatched by staking and decapitation. This story had a large influence on the next big novel, which is probably the most influential vampire novel in history. Bram Stoker’s 1889 novel, originally conceived as a stage play, gave us Count Dracula and eventually pushed the vampire into worldwide recognition. Surprisingly, the book was only a middling success upon its publication and didn’t attain its’ legendary status until decades later when Dracula and his imitators made their way into movies. Dracula brought with it the notion of vampires turning into bats, wolves, and mist, the most famous vampire hunter of all in Professor Van Helsing, and the use of crucifixes, host wafers, and holy water being weapons against the undead. It is the likely origin of the trope of vampires not casting a reflection and of their ability to control certain animals and effect the living by feeding them his blood. Dracula in the novel grows young as he continues to feed, is active during the day, and rapidly ages to dust upon being killed (by a Bowie knife rather than a stake to the heart).

Since the 20th Century, all of the other elements of the “traditional” vampire come directly from
movies: Nosferatu from 1922 brought back the vampire’s monstrousness and introduced sunlight
as a vampire-killer (apparently for financial rather than artistic reasons), and 1931’s Dracula
with Bela Lugosi cemented the popular image of the vampire in the minds of generations. After
Lugosi’s Dracula we’ve seen expansions, revisions, and inversions of most of the tropes that
were introduced by that film and its sequels, much as The Wolf Man did for the werewolf. What’s
interesting to me is how singularly influential the movies have been to the vampire genre,
especially when you consider how different the literary tradition was before them.

So, what do you think of all this? What are your favorite or least favorite vampire tropes?

Comment below!

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Brian McKinley is a reader, a role-player, and a dreamer who lives in New Jersey. A fan and student of vampire lore, he’s the author of three vampire novels: Ancient Blood: A Novel of the Hegemony, its sequel Ancient Enemies, and Drawing Dead: A Faolan O’Connor Novel.