by Brian Righi
And suck the blood of all thy race:
There from thy daughter, sister, wife,
At midnight drain the stream of life;
Yet loathe the banquet which perforce
Must feed thy livid living corse …
Wet with thine own blest blood shall drip
Thy gnashing tooth and haggard lip;
Then stalking to thy sullen grave
Go—and with the Ghouls and Afrits rave;
Till these in horror shrink away
From spectre more accursed than they!
Lord Byron based the work on tales he heard while traveling through Eastern Europe, specifically during his stay at the court of Ali Pasha in Albania, and the poem went on to meet with widespread acclaim from both critics and readers alike.
While many of these earlier works still relied on the folkloric imagery of a monster running amuck in the graveyard at night, an important paradigm shift began to take place in how writers and therefore readers saw the vampire. On April Fool’s Day 1819, a groundbreaking new short story entitled “The Vampyre” appeared in the English journal New Monthly Magazine. Penned by none other than Lord Byron’s former physician John William Polidori, the inspiration for the tale began as all good horror stories do: on a dark and stormy night.
Byron and Polidori were staying at the Villa Diodati near the shores of Lake Geneva, in Switzerland, in the summer of 1816 with the poet Percy Shelley; his soon-to-be wife, Mary Godwin; and Godwin’s stepsister, Claire Clairmont. Inclement weather kept the small group confined indoors most days, but at night they amused themselves by reading horror stories to one another. On one such night, as the rain pelted the shutters and lightning flashed outside, someone proposed they have a contest to see who could write the best ghost story. The result of the challenge produced two of the greatest works in horror literature to date: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus and Polidori’s “The Vampyre.”
In Polodori’s vampire tale, a young Englishman named Aubrey meets the mysterious aristocrat Lord Ruthven. While the two are traveling across Europe together, they are set upon by a ruthless gang of bandits, resulting in Lord Ruthven receiving a mortal wound. Before succumbing to his injuries, he makes Aubrey swear an oath upon his honor to keep his death a secret from the world for one year and one day. Aubrey soon after returns home to England, where he is shocked to find Lord Ruthven very much alive and well, and although he suspects a supernatural influence at work he is honor-bound to keep the secret. Aubrey’s horror is further compounded when he learns that his sister and Lord Ruthven are engaged to be married on the very day his oath is to expire. As the story climaxes, Aubrey writes a letter to his sister warning her of the danger she faces, but the correspondence arrives too late. Lord Ruthven has already married the young, unsuspecting girl and murdered her on their wedding day before disappearing into the night.
While “The Vampyre” became a bestseller across Europe, running through numerous editions and translations, many at the time attributed the work to Lord Byron, even as he emphatically denied it. The relationship between the two men quickly soured after their stay at the villa, and they went their separate ways never to speak again, but many scholars believe that Polidori based his vampire character on Lord Byron himself.
The genius of the work, however, lay not in the act of the author maligning his former employer, but in the way he turned the very idea of the vampire upside down. Polidori dragged the vampire from its dank tomb, dusted him off, gave him expensive clothes and a crisp new English accent, and set him loose to roam among the well-bred of society. With this new take on the old tale, John William Polidori in turn created a new vampire—the romantic vampire. Unfortunately for Polidori, however, he never realized the importance he played in the annuals of the vampire, as he committed suicide in London on August 24, 1821, by drinking cyanide.
Yet while the author may have perished, the legacy he helped to found lived on, and in 1845 the Scottish writer James Malcolm Rymer picked up the thread by releasing the gothic horror story Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood. Appearing from 1845 to 1847 in serialized installments known as “penny dreadfuls” (because of their inexpensive cost and bloodcurdling storylines), the work when collected in its entirety spanned 850 pages over 220 chapters.
The series begins with a brutal vampire named Sir Francis Varney terrorizing a family, the Bannerworths. From there on the storyline, which is confusing enough, weaves its way in and out of various plot twists, barely keeping to its narrative. Characters come and go, and there are even hints that Varney is related to his victims; readers are told that he bears a strong resemblance to a portrait in Bannerworth Hall of the late Marmaduke Bannerworth.
Despite its ponderous and convoluted storyline, the uniqueness of the work lay in the evolution of its main character. In early installments Rymer portrayed Varney as a bloodthirsty and remorseless creature bent on revenge, yet as the tale progresses the vampire is seen with increasing sympathy as a man cursed for the ages with a condition he cannot escape. While Varney meets his end on a number of occasions, he is forced to rise each time to carry on the nightmare of his existence. His final end, and that of the series, comes when Varney casts himself into the fires of Mount Vesuvius, leaving a written account of his life with a priest.
Unlike Polidori’s infamous Lord Ruthven, who struts across the pages as the quintessential aristocrat of polish and sophistication, Varney was written to be far more monstrous in both his appearance and his intentions. Rymer also employed many of the vampiric themes and conventions modern readers have come to recognize in the creature today, including supernatural strength, hypnotic powers, and fangs that left puncture marks in the necks of his victims. He did not, however, saddle his villain with some of the limitations associated with vampires, such as an aversion to sunlight, garlic, and religious icons.
In 1872, twenty-five years after Varney ceased to terrify readers, a novella entitled Carmilla appeared as a three-part series in the magazine The Dark Blue. Composed by Dublin-born mystery writer Sheridan Le Fanu, the story was later collected for publication in the book In a Glass Darkly, which featured a number of gothic and mystery tales by the author.
Narrated by the heroine Laura, the suspense-driven tale begins with a carriage accident near her family’s castle in the forests of Styria that brings into her life a girl of the same age named Carmilla. While Carmilla is recuperating at the castle, her mother oddly announces that she must leave on pressing business and will return in three months’ time to fetch her daughter. During Carmilla’s stay, the two girls become fast friends, and while their relationship blossoms so do Carmilla’s romantic advances towards Laura. Before long Laura grows suspicious of her new companion, who carefully avoids speaking of her past and prefers to sleep most of the day and roam about at night.
When a painting arrives at the castle of Laura’s ancestor Mircalla, Countess of Karnstein, its resemblance to Carmilla is uncanny. Eventually Laura tracks down the grave of her ancestor Mircalla—only to be attacked by Carmilla, who finally reveals herself as a vampire. Soon the vampire hunter Baron Vordenburg joins the cast and helps locate Carmilla’s secret tomb, where an imperial commission is convened to exhume and destroy Carmilla’s sleeping corpse.
With Carmilla, Le Fanu departed from the accepted role of the vampire as a primarily male seducer and also infused within the tale erotic undertones between the two main female characters that have labeled Carmilla one of the first lesbian vampires in the history of literature—although not the last. The name of Laura’s ancestor Mircalla is of course an anagram for Carmilla, and thus once again highlights the familial aspect of the vampire to its victim present in so much folklore. Yet Le Fanu was also not above adding his own inventions to the mix. In the story, Carmilla slept in a coffin by day, exhibited an unnatural beauty, could pass through solid walls, and could assume t
he form of a fiendish-looking black cat when she so chose.
In 1897 another Irish author, Bram Stoker, built on the success of his predecessors and burst onto the literary scene with a sensational vampire novel entitled Dracula. First produced in a hardback edition on May 26, 1897, by the publisher Archibald Constable and Company, the novel lived on to give audiences its most enduring image of the vampire to date, spawning numerous other books, plays, and movies across genres as diverse as horror, science fiction, and even comedy. Stoker, who was the business manager for the world-famous Lyceum Theatre in London at the time, wrote the novel to supplement his income, originally calling it The Dead Un-Dead and then just The Undead before settling on the name of its main character, Dracula, for the title.
In the epistolary novel, told through a series of letters, journal entries, and even a ship’s log, an English solicitor named Jonathan Harker travels to Count Dracula’s castle in the wild Carpathian Mountains of Transylvania to finalize the purchase of certain properties. Once there he unwittingly becomes the prisoner of the count and for a time falls under the spell of three female vampires. With Harker trapped in the ancient castle, Dracula makes his way to England on the Russian ship the Demeter, which washes ashore along the northeastern English coast with all its crew either missing or dead. Now loose in the English countryside, Dracula begins to menace Harker’s fiancée, Mina, and her friend Lucy. When Lucy falls ill with a strange wasting disease, Professor Abraham Van Helsing is called in to treat her, but despite his best efforts Lucy dies shortly after his arrival. Following her burial she begins to rise from the grave each night as one of the undead, forcing Van Helsing and several of her former friends to drive a stake through her heart and decapitate her.
While these events are transpiring, Harker escapes Dracula’s castle and makes his way to Budapest, where Mina joins him and the two are married. The newlyweds return to England, where they join Van Helsing and others in the hunt for Count Dracula. In the process Mina is bitten by Dracula three times before he flees back to his native land of Transylvania. In hot pursuit the vampire hunters catch up with him just outside his castle walls as the sun begins to rise. In a final climactic scene, one of the vampire hunters slashes the throat of Dracula while another pierces his heart with a knife. Dracula then crumbles into dust as the sun crests the mountain’s peaks. The puncture marks on Mina’s neck disappear, signaling that she is free of the vampire’s influence.
A major part of the novel’s success lay in Stoker’s spine-tingling depiction of Count Dracula, which relied on a blending of both the tragic Byronic figure popular with his Victorian audience and more primitive animalistic elements that added a heightened sense of horror to his character. Dracula could on the one hand appear a charming and cultured gentleman out for an evening at the opera, while at the same time he moved through the pages of the story like a wild beast, crawling down walls head first or commanding rats and wolves to his bidding. Yet Dracula was more than any of the vampire characters that came before him, and in a sense became the model by which later writers and moviemakers styled their vampires. He slept in coffins filled with the soil of his native land, avoided sunlight at all costs, drank the blood of beautiful women, commanded the weather, and avoided crucifixes whenever possible.
To help formulate his frightful masterpiece, Stoker drew heavily on earlier works, including Polidori’s “The Vampyre” and Le Fanu’s Carmilla. He also spent considerable effort researching Eastern European folklore and borrowed from sources such as Emily Gerard’s 1885 essay “Transylvania Superstitions.” To further flesh out his arch-villain, Stoker turned to William Wilkinson’s 1820 Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia with Various Political Observations Relating to Them, and there found mention of the infamous tyrant Dracula, to whom he forever linked his fictional character.
Despite the standing Dracula enjoys today, Stoker’s novel was slow to catch on with Victorian readers, who passed the work off as just another gothic adventure novel and one of many “invasion” stories flooding the market that featured creatures or other supernatural forces invading the British Isles. Even the sinister character of Count Dracula himself wouldn’t gain iconic status until after Stoker’s death, when the novel was adapted for the silver screen in 1931.
As time marched on and the prominence of the vampire genre grew, writers continued to transform the image and even the idea of the vampire in ways to meet the needs of each new generation of readers. While in most cases the vampire remained a bloodsucking monster that preyed upon humanity, writers in the mid-twentieth century departed from traditional storylines in order to shock their audiences in new and more interesting ways.
In 1954 Richard Matheson published the novel I Am Legend, which combined the horror of vampirism with the science of a post-apocalyptic world consumed by a deadly plague. The tale later inspired three separate movies: 1964’s The Last Man on Earth, with Vincent Price; 1971’s The Omega Man, starring Charlton Heston; and I Am Legend, the 2007 movie featuring Will Smith.
In 1976 Colin Wilson added yet another new spin to the old tale by casting his vampires as a race of wandering space aliens come to earth to drain humans of their life force, in the appropriately titled novel The Space Vampires. Then, in 1986, vampire fans were treated to another reworking when Brian Lumley created his fantastic Necroscope series, in which vampiric parasites known as the Wamphyri spill into our world from another universe.
Yet as far-reaching and imaginative as these other works are, one of the most influential vampire tales since Dracula is Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire, first published in 1976. The novel opens in the New Orleans of the late 1700s, and the story is told from the perspective of the vampire Louis, who is cursed to become a blood drinker after being bitten by a vampire named Lestat. Throughout the early portions of the novel, the two vampires are close accomplices as Louis struggles with his new life as one of the undead. Lestat creates another vampire to add to their cozy little “family,” a small girl named Claudia, but further divisions arise in their relationship that threaten to tear them apart.
Eventually things come to a head when Claudia poisons Lestat, slits his throat, and dumps the body in the swamps outside the city. Louis and Claudia then flee to Europe in search of other vampires like themselves, and in time encounter the vampire Armand and his coven, the Théâtre des Vampires in Paris. Before long the two new arrivals are accused of trying to kill their maker when Lestat reappears, having survived Claudia’s assassination attempt, and charges them with the crime. As punishment Louis is locked in a coffin to starve to death while Claudia is exposed to sunlight and killed. Armand then releases Louis, who in revenge destroys the coven, and the two set off for America together.
After the release of Interview with the Vampire, additional novels followed, many furthering the tale of the vampire Lestat, which became collectively known as the The Vampire Chronicles. What set Rice’s vampires apart from their predecessors was their internal struggles with the guilt and loneliness that consumed their cursed state. In this regard, Rice’s vampires became more human than any who came before and set the trend for future books and movies, which portrayed the creatures as tragically romantic figures at odds with themselves and the world around them. Based on the success of Rice’s vampire books, in 1994 a film adaptation of Interview with the Vampire appeared, starring Brad Pitt, Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater, and Tom Cruise.
Center Stage
About the time that vampires were finding a new lease on life in the works of nineteenth-century writers, they began making an appearance on the stage as well. Inspired by Polidori’s story “The Vampyre,” a theatrical production entitled Le Vampire was first adapted for the Paris stage on June 13, 1820, by the French author Charles Nodier, who took the liberty when revising Polidori’s work to relocate the storyline to Scotland. A few months later, the British dramatist James Planché introduced The Vampire, or The B
ride of the Isles to the world at the Lyceum Theatre in London, on August 9, 1820. This production was one of the first to feature the special effect known as the “vampire trap,” in which a trap door in the stage floor or wall quickly opened and shut, allowing the actor to appear or disappear as if by magic. Nodier’s earlier work also inspired the two-act German opera Der Vampyr by composer Heinrich Marschner, which was first performed in Leipzig on March 29, 1828, and met with instant success. Even Alexandre Dumas, the author of such works as The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo, got in on the action with a production similarly titled Le Vampire in 1851.
Perhaps one of the more interesting venues in which such dramas appeared was the infamous Le Théâtre du Grand-Guignol, which literally means “The Theatre of the Big Puppet.” First opening in Paris in 1897, the theater was located within a former church and lured in Parisian audiences with horror plays featuring particularly gory special effects and bloody climaxes. For over sixty years the theater thrilled audiences, until it was forced to close in 1962 when it found modern theatergoers too desensitized by the horrors of two world wars to be captivated by its performances any longer.
Even the legendary Dracula was originally intended to be adapted for the stage by its author, Bram Stoker, who held readings of the work before its publication in the hopes of attracting interest in it as a drama. Unfortunately for Stoker, he never did get a theatrical version off the ground, but more than a decade after his death an actor named Hamilton Deane and a journalist named John Balderston produced it for the stage featuring a little-known Hungarian actor named Bela Lugosi in the title role. From the moment it first appeared on Broadway in 1927, American audiences flocked to its performances, which were craftily advertised to theatergoers, informing them that “… it would be wise for them to visit a specialist and have their hearts examined before subjecting them to the fearful thrills and shocks that Dracula had in store for them” (Deane 1960, 107–8).