This list was inspired by my research for Vamparazzi.
- Recognizable vampire mythology goes back as far as ancient Babylonia and the Sanskrit tales of classical India. There were blood-drinking demons (known as lamiae) in ancient Greece and Rome, in the medieval Islamic world (ghouls and affrits), and in Renaissance Europe.
- Various forms of vampire lore exist in Asia, the Pacific Rim, Africa, Central and South America, and Australia. The Slavic folklore of Eastern Europe is where much of our own culture’s concept of vampires originated. Eastern Europe is also where Max learned to hunt vampires, as is recounted in Vamparazzi.
- In 1718, the Treaty of Passarowitz transferred control of large regions of Eastern Europe from the Ottoman Empire to the Habsburg monarchy. A decade later, the Austrian government started hearing for the first time about “vampire epidemics” in its newly-acquired eastern provinces
- The vampire epidemics of Eastern Europe became so widespread and notorious, and the gruesome anti-vampire activities they inspired were so alarming, by the early 1730s the Austrian Empire sent government officials to investigate. (Translations of the officials’ reports can be found in Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality.)
- Unlike the witch crazes which had previously swept across Europe, vampire scares typically focused primarily on accusing the dead of evil behavior. So hunting and slaying vampires mostly involved digging up graves and desecrating corpses, rather than persecuting and killing the living.
- In Slavic lore (as well as that of various other cultures), vampires are undead, i.e. dead but mobile and active. In some cultures, vampires are instead demons or creatures whose origins are entirely supernatural. And in some cultures, they may be evil spirits that invade a living body.
- In all mythologies, vampires prey on living people (sometimes specifically on women, children, or babies), and in most cases, they drink human blood. They also often eat human body parts. Which body parts depends on which culture is telling the story.
- Although staking vampires to “kill” them was common in some Slavic regions, it was often instead used as a method of immobilization. By driving a stake through the torso of a vampire to pin it to its grave, you could prevent it from rising to hunt and kill. Max employs this technique on a vampire hunt in Vamparazzi.
- In other regions, decapitation was considered the only truly reliable method of stopping a vampire. People in other areas considered cremation essential to prevent a vampire from rising (or from rising again), while still others believed that a vampire must be disposed of in water. Sometimes the heart of the vampire had to be cut out of its body.
- Staking became widely (almost universally) considered the way to kill vampires because it’s the method Bram Stoker decided to adopt for his 1897 novel Dracula, which became the most influential vampire fiction of all time.
- Vampires in European folklore don’t have fangs; this is an invention of fiction and film. Stoker’s influential novel popularized the notion of vampires having protruding teeth (and then Hollywood really ran with the idea), which had previously appeared in some popular 19th century fiction. (Max, who knew Stoker, deplores such irresponsible inaccuracies.)
- Stoker originated the concept, still popular in many vampire portrayals today, that a vampire has no reflection in a mirror. This trope doesn’t exist in folklore or in fiction before Dracula. (Max, who certainly never encouraged Stoker to think such nonsense, also denies that Stoker based Dr. Van Helsing on him.)
- Sunlight being fatal to vampires is also a fictional invention. Vampires are active by night rather than by day in Slavic folklore, but there is no tradition of them bursting into flames, melting, or turning to ashes if exposed to sunlight.
- The detailed written reports of the Austrian officials investigating the vampire epidemics in Serbia in the 1730s were read and discussed with fascination, and their contents were widely disseminated and repeated. This was how the vampire folklore of Slavic villages started spreading through Western Europe in the 18th century.
- During the rest of the 18th century, vampires started making appearances in German-language poetry, including Goethe’s “The Bride of Corinth” (1797). They first became popular in English poetry via Lord Byron’s “The Giaour” (1813) which was both a critical and commercial success. Byron learned about vampires on his Grand Tour of Europe.
- The grandfather of modern vampire fiction is The Vampyre, a gothic tale published in 1819. Its author, Dr. John Polidori, adapted it from a fragment written and abandoned by Byron at the Villa Diodati in 1816, where Polidori was employed as Byron’s personal physician, and where Mary Shelley began work on Frankenstein in response to Byron’s suggestion that everyone at the villa write a ghost story.
- Polidori’s Vampyre was the first narrative fiction in English about vampires, and it originated many concepts still in vogue today, such as its portrayal of the vampire as aristocratic and seductive. In Slavic folklore, by contrast, vampires were ordinary peasants, and they were grotesque, mindless, ravening monsters, like the creatures Max encountered during his days as a vampire hunter in Vamparazzi.
- Polidori’s Vampyre was a big commercial success, reprinted many times throughout the 19th century. It influenced other portrayals for the rest of the century, including Bram Stoker’s interpretation of the vampire as a shrewd and manipulative aristocrat. In Vamparazzi, actress Esther Diamond is working in a (fictional) modern stage adaptation of Polidori’s tale.
- The vampyre in Polidori’s story is identifiably based on Lord Byron, with whom the young doctor had parted on bad terms. Byron didn’t want to be associated with the story’s authorship and took active steps to correct rumors attributing it to him. Nonetheless, rumors persisted for decades that Byron was the author of this story which has so heavily influenced concepts of the vampire.
- Here’s an anti-vampire measure that I found in my research and really wanted to use in Vamparazzi, but I never found a good place for it: One of the ways used to ward off vampires at night during the Serbian vampire epidemics of the 18th century was to sleep beneath a cloth that was covered in human excrement. (I’m guessing that kept everyone else away, too…)
