Vampires in Folklore and Fiction

With Steven Moffat's next project being a Dracula TV show, a remake of Nosferatu coming out in a few days, and Paramount about to do a film about Vlad III Tepes' father, I thought it might be a good time to broach this topic.

Is anyone else here a fan of vampires and vampire hunters?
 
I'm afraid Dracula is about as far as I've gone. (I didn't think it was particularly good...but at least it wasn't Twilight, which I have thus far successfully refused to read or watch.)
 
I'm a bit of a Nosferatu fan, having had close ties with two very different incidental music projects for the showing of the film. I have seen a couple of the vampire hunter films, which were interesting. One very untypical vampire film I like is "Priest". I've also met a couple of real-life people who claim to be vampires. But traditional vampires? no I am not really a fan.
 
Real-life people who claim to be vampires? Why...?

My sister talks about wanting to be a Twilight-style vampire, but she mostly just likes the idea of (angsty) eternal youth.

It occurs to me that there is a vampire in Harry Potter...but it plays a small role and is portrayed as a comic character.
 
I'm curious to know how one could be a real life vampire... It seems like you wouldn't live very long if all you ate was blood. Is that even possible?

The only exposure I've really had to vampires was the Dawnguard quest line in Skyrim. You had to fight a vampire lord to keep him from blotting out the sun. I had a few friends that were really into Twilight for a while. I always thought that was kinda creepy..
 
Urgh. The "real-life" vampires are some people who think it's cool to dress in black and drink blood. It's very unhealthy.

As the gamebook for Vampire: The Masquerade says, "You are not a supernatural creature. If you think you are, please seek help."

Anyway, did anyone know that in the Middle Ages, some people thought you could become a vampire when you died if

-You were born with teeth.
-You had red hair.
-Your mother didn't eat enough salt while pregnant.
-Think of something, and it was probably a way.
 
Chinese mythology features vampires of a sort. In their stories, the vampires decidedly ARE NOT sexy. They show more effects of their human death than is usually the case in European vampire legends: rigor mortis locks their legs together, so they have to hop like birds instead of walking. But they have enough evil magic power to compensate for their impaired mobility.

As for why kids would wish to BE vampires: Michael "Bat-Bat" Del and I addressed this very question back in the heyday of Dancing Lawn roleplaying. Kids wish they could be part of a superior elite in-group. There you have it.

Back before I even joined The Dancing Lawn, I shared my Christian testimony with a fantasy-obsessed teenage girl who claimed to be a "PSYCHIC vampire." She said she could absorb energy from people. I could at least see practical sense in this variant. If you start walking up to people and trying to suck their blood in reality, you will get pounded into a bloody mess real soon. But if you just gaze at passers-by and pretend that you're draining intangible power from them, they won't notice anything and they WON'T pound you into a bloody mess.

At any rate, I refuse to see glamour in being a parasite who feeds on reasoning human beings. As some of you may remember, my superhero character Grey Eagle was invented as a REACTION AGAINST sick vampire fantasies. Vampires take; Grey Eagle gives. Vampires are out for themselves; Grey Eagle gives his all for the good of others.


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Yep. Vampires are parasites, but do make pretty good villains. I am actually currently writing a vampire novel in which I am attempting to give vampirism some serious downsides. Reasons to avoid becoming one. I don't think that that's seen enough in modern literature.

On the other hand, I am also drawing on the literary idea of the sympathetic vampire, which was seen in literature before Dracula was published, in the penny dreadful, Varney the Vampyre. The difference, of course, between Varney and later sympathetic vampires is that Varney is only sympathetic because he hates what he is, and wants to cure himself. Something that is noticeably lacking in modern "sympathetic" vampires. How sympathetic can someone be if they're perfectly fine with staying a bloodsucking parasite?
 
Chinese mythology features vampires of a sort. In their stories, the vampires decidedly ARE NOT sexy. They show more effects of their human death than is usually the case in European vampire legends: rigor mortis locks their legs together, so they have to hop like birds instead of walking. But they have enough evil magic power to compensate for their impaired mobility.

That's really fascinating. There's actually a book that I considered reading a while back which talked about the biological origins of vampire legends. The main idea was that the handling of dead bodies, prior to modern embalming, resulted in certain nasty situations which probably contributed to the way folklore described vampires.
 
Although I have not read any horror fiction in years, I was listening to a lecture this weekend on the Origin of Science Fiction, and apparently the first modern vampire story came out of a night of ghost stories in 1816 that not only featured Dr. John William Polidori's "Vampyre," but also the seed that became Frankenstein by 18-year-old Mary Shelley (the first science fiction novel).
 
>>> Vampires are parasites, but do make pretty good villains.


Well said, W-Satyr. Today's popular entertainments have MUCH MORE THAN ENOUGH of cynicism, and glamourizing of persons/creatures who add nothing good to the world. We need more heroes, not more anti-heroes.
 
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