A History of Vampires: In Folklore and Art

From bloated corpse to brooding count — the true history of the creature that refuses to stay dead

A History of Vampires in Folklore and Art is a popular history in two parts:

Part One: The Folklore
The vampire of legend did not begin in Transylvania. It did not begin anywhere in particular, because it was not a single creature. It was an answer to a universal problem — death arriving in clusters, taking the young, moving through a village with something resembling intent, and leaving the living with no satisfactory explanation.

Across the ancient world, every culture developed its own myths. The Mesopotamians had Lamashtu. The Norse and Anglo-Saxon chroniclers recorded the draugr. The Chinese had the jiangshi. West Africa had the sasabonsam and obayifo. The peoples of the Philippines, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Americas each had their version of life-stealing monsters hard to keep in the ground.

Part One examines the historical records and folklore surrounding these myths and legends, and how they migrated from the ancient world to the new.

Part Two: The Art
The vampire emerges from the graveyards of ancient villages and enters popular culture via art and literature as a different creature. Writers and filmmakers sanitized these ancient beings, dressing them in suits and capes, giving them aristocratic manners and immortal weariness. They then put them to work as mirrors for whatever a given era feared or desired.

Follow the vampire across two centuries of art, beginning with the Romantic poets, who found in it the personification of seduction and predatory desire. Trace the creature through the Victorian penny dreadfuls and the lesbian Gothic of Carmilla, through the theatrical invention that gave Dracula his opera cape, and into the silent cinema, where Nosferatu made the vampire ratlike and plague-stricken before Hollywood glamorized it again.

From there, the book examines the Hammer horror films that painted everything in lurid color, the blaxploitation cycle launched by Blacula in 1972, the 1980s comedies that briefly turned the vampire into a suburban joke, and the brooding romantic heroes of Interview with the Vampire and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. It takes in the comics page, the video game, and the era of sparkling teenage vampires.

A History of Vampires in Folklore and Art is a full account of the most durable monster in the Western imagination — from village exhumations to the box office, from the corpse that would not stay dead to the creature that, across three centuries of popular culture, has refused to go out of style.

This book is for:

• Readers of popular and cultural history
• Horror fans curious about where the genre's most iconic figure actually came from
• Fans of gothic literature — Stoker, Le Fanu, Polidori — who want the full literary lineage laid out
• Film buffs with an interest in horror cinema, from Nosferatu and Universal monsters through Hammer, Anne Rice adaptations, and beyond
• Folklore and mythology enthusiasts interested in how different cultures across history explained disease, death, and the fear of what lies in the grave
• Writers of horror, gothic fiction, or historical fiction who want accurate source material on vampire lore and its evolution
• Vampire fiction fans — Sinners, Twilight, True Blood, What We Do in the Shadows — who want to understand the mythology beneath the pop culture
• Collectors and readers drawn to Ovid Publishing Group's classic vampire texts, for whom this volume serves as the essential companion and guide