Vampires are so ubiquitous in modern literature, cinema and popular culture that it seems like they’ve been un-living with us forever.
Indeed, Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles trace the ancestry of vampires to Ancient Egypt. But scholars suggest a much more recent, European origin for the vampire: some time in the 16th century, or slightly earlier.
Older tales, such as the Greek Empusae, Lamia, Mormo and Striges have more in common with ghouls, witches and werewolves than vampires (i.e., undead and feasting on blood). Indeed, the Greek Vrykolakas, a sort of combination zombie-werewolf, derives its name from the Slavic varkolak, a word which also eventually lent itself to the term vampir.
One archaeological discovery giving a definite timeline to the origin of the vampire is a 500-year-old burial in Poland, discovered just a few years ago. The corpse has a stake through its leg, to stop it from leaving the coffin, and a rock in its mouth, to stop it from drinking blood.
Around the same time, in 1500, the inhabitants of the Yorkshire village of Wharram Percy were terrorised by a vampire with a body “swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood”. The body was mutilated and burned to ensure it would not rise again. Wharram Percy was, perhaps not coincidentally, deserted around this time and remains so to this day.
Archaeological digs have recently uncovered ten burials, from between the 11th and 13th centuries, which show similar treatment. As many as three women, two men, a teenager and two children under five were crudely decapitated with knives, their bodies dismembered and their skulls smashed and burnt sometime after death to prevent them from rising from their graves.
By 1734, belief in vampires was evidently widespread enough to merit the word’s inclusion in the Oxford dictionary. There, a vampire was described thus: “These Vampyres are supposed to be the Bodies of deceased Persons, animated by evil Spirits, which come out of the Graves in the Night-time, suck the Blood of many of the Living and thereby destroy them”.
Less than a decade later, in 1746, a French monk named Antoine Augustin Calmet wrote a treaty, based on the accounts of Joseph Pitton de Tournefort, a botanising man of science, who had earlier claimed to have come face to face with a plague of bloodsucking vampires in Mykonos in 1702.
But the modern archetype of the aristocratic European vampire arrived, not with Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897, but in a work written following one of the most consequential story-telling nights in history.
In 1816, Lord Byron was staying at his Swiss Villa Diodati, with his friends Percy and Mary Shelley, Mary’s stepsister (and Byron’s pregnant mistress), Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s personal physician, Dr. John Polidori. 1816 was the famous “Year Without a Summer”, following the titanic eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia. Snowed in, Byron suggested a ghost story competition, to pass the time.
The result was two groundbreaking, influential, literary classics.
The first, of course, was Shelley’s Frankenstein. The other is less well-known today, but no less influential: Polidori’s The Vampyre, which was published in 1819.
The Vampyre’s Lord Ruthven is the vampire we all know and love today: an urbane, sophisticated, seductive aristocrat. Although Polidori’s Lord Ruthven is English rather than European, he is in every way the archetypal romantic, libertine model for modern vampires from Count Dracula to Twilight’s Edward Cullen.
Intriguingly, though, the first extant film version of Dracula, Nosferatu (a Hungarian film from a year earlier, Drakula Halála, is now almost entirely lost, although a single print is said to exist in a Hungarian archive) eschewed Polidori and Stoker’s suave aristocrat: Nosferatu’s Count Orlok is a hideous creature, with rat’s face, bat ears and terrifyingly long fingernails. Although, mysteriously, he retains his seductive powers.
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