The Vampire

Where it comes from

Stories about the dead who return to harm the living are found in many parts of the world, but the vampire as Western culture knows it comes mostly from southeastern Europe in the early eighteenth century. The English word appeared in the late seventeenth or eighteenth century and was spelled vampyre in reports of the 1730s. It most likely comes from a Serbian or Bulgarian word, vampir. Older local names include the Romanian strigoi, the Greek vrykolakas and the Albanian shtriga, each with its own habits and its own remedies.

Folk belief did not look like the elegant figure of the movies. Folkloric vampires were often described as bloated and ruddy, with blood at the mouth and nose, and fangs were generally not part of the picture. They could arise from an unnatural or untimely death, from suicide, excommunication or an improper burial, from an animal jumping over a corpse, or from a bite by another vampire. To stop one, villagers used garlic, hawthorn, holy water or a crucifix, and they staked the body in South Slavic regions, beheaded it in German and western Slavic lands, or burned it.

On screen

Cinema took the creature in two directions at once. One line, begun in Nosferatu, treats the vampire as a pest and a plague, a cold figure of decay. The other, which flowered with the sound-era Dracula of 1931 and the Hammer films of the late 1950s, treats it as a seducer in evening clothes. Most later films pick a side, or try to hold both.

Over a century the vampire has been a villain, a hero, a lover, a joke and a metaphor. The screen history below, together with the sections on origins and meaning, shows how each era has filled that open shape with its own anxieties.

Common traits

• Sunlight is fatal in most film versions, a rule popularized by Nosferatu and not found in all folklore.
• A vampire often needs an invitation to enter a home, a rule that appears in some traditions and is used heavily in fiction.
• Garlic, holy objects, running water and a wooden stake are common weapons, though folklore varies widely by region.
• The bite is both a feeding and a transmission, which ties the vampire to disease and to desire.
• Immortality is both the vampire's appeal and its curse, since it brings loneliness and a need to hide.

Panic in the Balkans

The European vampire became a public matter in the eighteenth century. Reports of vampire cases in East Prussia in 1721 and in the Habsburg lands between 1725 and 1734 reached newspapers and learned societies. Two cases became famous. Petar Blagojevic, a Serbian who died at 62, was believed to have returned to attack his neighbors. The case of Arnold Paole in the same period was also widely discussed. Officials who traveled to examine graves wrote reports that were printed and passed around Europe.

Scholars argued over what was happening. Dom Augustin Calmet published a long treatise on the subject in 1751. Empress Maria Theresa sent her physician Gerard van Swieten to investigate, and he concluded that vampires did not exist; laws then restricted the opening of graves. Modern readers often suggest that the exhumations show how communities explained epidemic illness and the ordinary look of decomposition. The fear was real even if the creature was not, and it supplied a vocabulary that writers would take over.

From poem to novel

In literature, the vampire became a gentleman. John Polidori, a physician who had been traveling with Lord Byron, wrote The Vampyre during the storytelling contest at Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva in the summer of 1816, the same gathering that produced Frankenstein. Polidori's tale was printed in The New Monthly Magazine on April 1, 1819, falsely credited to Byron. Its villain, Lord Ruthven, was a charming aristocrat who preyed on those around him. Critics often treat it as the start of the Romantic vampire.

Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla followed in 1871 and 1872, first serialized in The Dark Blue and then reprinted in the collection In a Glass Darkly. Set in Styria, it tells of a young woman and the charming girl who enters her household, and it became the prototype of the female and lesbian vampire in fiction. Twenty-five years later came Bram Stoker's Dracula, published in May 1897 and told through letters, diary entries and press cuttings. Stoker took the count's name from an 1820 history of Wallachia and Moldavia by William Wilkinson. The widely repeated link with Vlad the Impaler is, in the words of one scholar, tenuous.

The silent and early sound era

Cinema met the vampire early. The Vampire (1913), directed by Robert G. Vignola, and A Fool There Was (1915), with Theda Bara, used the word for a seductive woman and not for the undead. A Hungarian Dracula film, Drakula halala (1921), is now considered lost. The first masterwork was Nosferatu (1922), directed by F. W. Murnau and starring Max Schreck as Count Orlok, a rat-like figure who brings plague to a port town. Its makers had not obtained the rights to Stoker's novel, and Florence Stoker sued the studio, Prana; the dispute ended with an order to destroy all copies. Some prints survived. For more on its look and legacy, see our timeline of early horror cinema.

Universal's Dracula (1931), with Bela Lugosi, gave the character the evening dress and the accent that people still imitate. It was followed by Dracula's Daughter (1936), Son of Dracula (1943) with Lon Chaney Jr., House of Frankenstein (1944), House of Dracula (1945) and Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), in which Lugosi played the count for the second and last time on screen. Carl Dreyer's Vampyr (1932) loosely adapted Carmilla, with credits that name Le Fanu's collection In a Glass Darkly as its source.

Hammer, Blacula and the 1960s and 1970s

In 1958, Britain's Hammer Films released Dracula, starring Christopher Lee. Lee's count was physical and dangerous, a sharp change from the more theatrical Universal manner. Hammer made a long run of sequels, and in 1970 it adapted Le Fanu with The Vampire Lovers, starring Ingrid Pitt. Elsewhere in the decade, Roger Vadim directed Blood and Roses (1960), Roman Polanski made the comedy The Fearless Vampire Killers (1967), and Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend was filmed as The Last Man on Earth (1964), a story that also influenced Night of the Living Dead.

The 1970s widened the circle. Blacula (1972) and Scream Blacula Scream (1973) arrived in the early 1970s. Vampyres (1974) and Love at First Bite (1979) represent the erotic and comic ends of the spectrum. Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979), with Klaus Kinski, was a slow, mournful tribute to Murnau. This was the period in which the vampire also became a figure of comedy and parody, a sign that the type was well enough known to be turned upside down.

From the 1980s to Coppola

The 1980s moved the vampire into the mall and the suburb. The Hunger (1983), directed by Tony Scott, made the creature a stylish, urban immortal. Fright Night (1985), with Roddy McDowall, and The Lost Boys (1987) set the creature among teenagers and suburbs, while My Best Friend Is a Vampire (1988) played the idea for comedy. Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) was a film before it was anything else. In the same year Francis Ford Coppola released Bram Stoker's Dracula, an ornate, romantic reading that returned the story to the novel's structure and its sense of tragedy.

In the 1990s and after, genre mixing became normal. John Carpenter directed Vampires (1998), a western-style hunt starring James Woods; see his entry for his other work. Shadow of the Vampire (2000) imagined the making of Nosferatu, with Willem Dafoe as Schreck. Later films, including What We Do in the Shadows (2014) and the 2020s remakes and revivals of Nosferatu, show a character that audiences can enjoy as horror, melodrama or comedy.

Vampires beyond Europe

The vampire is not only European. Chinese tradition has the jiangshi, a reanimated corpse; in the older stories a sorcerer led such bodies home for burial using a paper charm on the face, and if the paper fell away the corpse could turn dangerous. Hong Kong turned this into a popular cycle in the 1980s and 1990s, with Mr. Vampire (1985) as a landmark. Malaysian tradition knows the penanggalan and the pontianak, the Philippines the manananggal, and Vietnam the ma ca rong; Africa has the asanbosam, the adze and the impundulu, and the Caribbean has the soucouyant.

These figures are not just the same story in different costumes. Many are living witches or spirits, not corpses, and many depend more on the family and the community than on a single monster. Japanese cinema has also used vampires since the late 1950s, though the folklore behind those films is Western. For the Japanese ghost tradition, which tells a different story about the restless dead, see the onryo.

What the vampire means

The vampire is flexible because it combines three feelings: fear of death, attraction to power, and anxiety about contagion. In Stoker it is an old aristocrat invading modern England. In Murnau it is plague arriving by ship. In Carmilla and its descendants it is a forbidden intimacy. In the 1980s it is a nightlife that adults cannot reach, and in more recent films it is an outsider who is also a neighbor. Writers have connected it to disease, addiction, sexuality, class and immigration, and each reading has found support in some film.

The same flexibility explains the creature's comparison with other undead. The zombie is usually a crowd without a personality, while the vampire is nearly always an individual with a voice, a history and a style. That is why vampire stories tend to be about seduction and secrecy, and zombie stories about numbers and survival. The two figures meet in Matheson's novel, which is a story of a lone survivor in a world of undead.

Where to start in the library

Begin with Nosferatu, the earliest vampire film in the collection and an essential piece of film history, then read about the supernatural subgenre for the wider context. The film shows how many familiar rules, such as death by sunlight, were still being invented. If the body-centered side of the myth interests you, the body horror entry covers transformation and contagion on screen.

Readers who want to see how a monster changes over time can follow the vampire through the decades listed above and notice what each one adds. Stoker and Polidori supply the gentleman, Le Fanu the lover, and Murnau the plague. Coppola, Carpenter and the makers of What We Do in the Shadows each decide which of these to keep. The pleasure of the character is in that choosing.

Verified details

• Bram Stoker's Dracula was published in May 1897 and was told entirely through letters, diaries and clippings.
• Stoker took the name Dracula from an 1820 history of Wallachia and Moldavia by William Wilkinson.
• John Polidori's The Vampyre was printed on April 1, 1819, and was first credited, falsely, to Lord Byron.
• Carmilla appeared 25 years before Dracula, in 1871 and 1872.
• In Nosferatu the vampire is called Count Orlok, and Max Schreck played him.
• Florence Stoker sued over Nosferatu, and the dispute ended with an order to destroy all copies; some prints survived.
• Hammer's Dracula, starring Christopher Lee, was released in 1958.
• Bela Lugosi played Dracula in 1931 and again in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948.
• The sunlight weakness is common on screen but is not found in all vampire folklore.
• In 1751 Dom Augustin Calmet published a treatise on vampires, and Empress Maria Theresa soon sent a physician to investigate.

Sources and further reading

• Vampire, Wikipedia
• Vampire film, Wikipedia
• Dracula (novel), Wikipedia
• The Vampyre, Wikipedia
• Carmilla, Wikipedia
• Vampire folklore by region, Wikipedia