An Introduction To The Confusing Origin Of The Sexpire. I Mean Vampire.

Vampires tend to go in and out of style, but even when millions of teens and their sexually frustrated moms are not freaking out about the latest “teen has romance with vampire, but somehow does not end up as dinner” story, vampires are an ever present shadow on modern pop-culture, cast by centuries of folklore. The enduring fascination with vampires is perhaps best expressed in Bram Stoker’s classic novel Dracula, which though it incorporated no real folklore, got one thing terrible right: much like the loud general in Dr. Strangelove, we are all about the bodily fluids. Although Dracula is said to be written in the coded style of the Victorians, heavy with uncanniness. However, my reaction to it was HOW IN THE HELL IS THIS CODED? THIS IS OBVIOUSLY ALL ABOUT BANGING! DRACULA AND MINA ARE TOTALLY 69ING RIGHT NOW AREN’T THEY? THEY ARE 69ING ON A BOAT I CAN’T EVEN. So when you read Stoker’s extraordinary novel, just know that all that blood represents…something else.

 

 The real life inspiration for Dracula, Vlad the Impaler.

I like to think the Impaler nickname is a double entendre. A warlord in the streets, a freak in the sheets, amirite?

And because of writers like Stoker, and writers who totally suck unlike Stoker, the concept of what a vampire is has gotten totally distorted. Suddenly, anything undead or drinking blood can be called a vampire. As someone who once tried really hard to cultivate the title Erin the Vampire Scholar (geddit?) I will not stand for that shit. A vampire needs to have a) the fangs, b) the undeadness, c) the blood drinking, and d) a creepiness that relates to sex, but not necessarily in a hot way. The first place that this particular vampire developed was in Eastern and Central Europe, in various Slavic communities. The reason that random blood drinkers, like the Indian Goddess Kali are sometimes called vampires has to do with something called daemon contamination, where everybody gets their bad guys all mixed up with each other. For instance, it’s been hypothesized that the vampire’s entanglement with sex comes from daemon contamination with the Slavic mora, a demon that raped people in their sleep (mora-mare-nightmare). But bar none, my favorite vampire misunderstanding is the theory that Jesus Christ was a vampire because he rose from the dead and encouraged his followers to drink blood. That shit is cray.

 

Easy rule to remember: if it's not trying to fuck you or kill you, it's not a vampire.

Your average Slavic vampire was probably not the sort of person that you envision yielding your virginity to under a full moon. First of all, he would arrive for your first date total bloated (a side effect of being totally hella dead), decaying (…from deadness), and possibly stuffed with apotropaic garlic, so passionate kissing is off the menu. His breath might even taste of blood if you aren’t his first meal, I mean date, of the evening.

Sidebar: Apotropaic is a great folklore word, the sort of thing that makes people think you really know what you are doing (you don’t). It basically means preventative or protective, so in this case it denotes all of the weird shit they did to dead bodies before burial to keep them safely unvampired. Like, preemptive heart-staking, decapitation and stuffing the mouth of a dead body with garlic.

Also repels second dates like a charm.

But it is actually unlikely that this is your first date with your undead love, in fact he is probably your recently deceased husband, come to chastise you for getting back into the dating game too soon. The wife of the deceased was most often the first person to be visited by the vampire. It was not unusual in the highly patriarchal societies of Eastern Europe for husbands to demand their marital rights posthumously, which general lead to the wife’s eventual death. More on that in a sec.

Psychoanalysts have theorized that this is a psychological phenomenon to do with survivor’s guilt and the propensity of the survivor to feel responsible for their loved one’s demise. Not because they killed they killed their husband or family member, but because at some point they thought to themselves “Gah Dad, your weird jokes are like, so embarrassing. I wish you would just die!”

There is some (theoretically) scientific explanation for this as well. Much of vampire lore springs from populations having little or no knowledge of how infectious diseases work. So when a town got sick, Patient Zero was branded a vampire. Of course his wife and family would die first, not because he came back to vamp them, but because they had the closest contact and became infected first.

Such is life for the Slavic vampire. Thanks to that pesky “daemon contamination” (getting your bad guys all mixed up), vampires were blamed for everything from bad weather to strange noises in the attic, to, of course, mysteriously pregnant widows.  As you can see, widows were straight up vampire bait. If they weren’t imagining their dead husbands coming back to life, or dying because of their dead husband’s plague, they were using the dead husband to explain away their inconvenient pregnancies. Because hey, it’s not cheating if it’s with your dead husband’s corpse.

Till death do us part? Amateurs.

The cultural of tradition of machismo that made villagers think that it was totally reasonable for a man to maintain sexual control over his wife after his demise is same factor that influenced and formed the Vampire legend itself, with its cycle of biting and staking (I lay this theory out more fully in my 2012 conference paper “Gender and Control: Penetrating the Vampire Legend”). Going back to Ancient Rome even, we can see that sexual penetration represented a statement of power in patriarchal society (one could argue very well that this is still the case). So when things happened that affected a man’s ability to do man stuff like take care of his fields and keep his horny, widowed sister out of trouble, people created a creature whose power and horror lay in one allegorical, penetrative moment: the biting of the vulnerable neck with pointedly pointy fangs. Furthermore, they created a creature that could only be vanquished by stabbing it with a wooden dildo. I mean, come one. That’s what it is. Between the teeth and the stake (virtually the same shape), there are too many phallic symbols involved to discount (FYI “phallic” means “it looks like a wang”).

Get yo freak onnnnnnn.......

 

Now I know what you may be saying. Sometimes a gun is just a gun, and vampire fangs are just vampire fangs. And I say to you DID YOU LEARN NOTHING FROM STOKER? One of the most enduring and fascinating things about vampires is that they are never meaningless in our cultural imagination. Not even in Twilight, which had all sorts of fucked up implications. If you’re interested in reading about it, I highly recommend the analysis of blogger Cleolinda.

 

An important element of the vampire confusion is that this creature of the night doesn't only exist in Folklore and Literature, but as a character in History. There were several "vampire panics" in the 17th and 18th centuries. Obviously (well, probably) there were no actual vampires involved, but people were motivated by very real fear. We can put names to the maybe-undead and the villagers who persecuted their bodies, months and years after they were interred. To those villagers, lacking modern medical knowledge, every coffin contained Shrodinger's vampire. That's enough to put anyone on edge. Furthermore, my BFF Stoker did not help matters by dragging poor Vlad Tepes (Dracula) into it. Vlad, the pointy faced guy with the righteous goatee pictured above, was indeed a huge douche known for impaling people and being way too chill about his wives suicides, but literally the only thing Stoker utilized of Vlad's was his nickname which means "son of the Dragon" or "little dragon," depending on the translator.

So, I hope this has illuminated our fanged friends for you somewhat. What with questionable History channel programming and backseat folklorists posting misleading or unresearched information on tumblr, vampires are a singular site of confusion between history, folklore, and pop culture.