Let Me In: Welcoming a Definition of ‘Vampire’

(Fat Dracula)

By Cody Wagner

                  The imagination of humans always has someone, or something to fill in the empty darkness when fear takes hold. At first thought, the first creature thought of in said darkness is perhaps one of the more popular and most revisited monsters in history, the vampire. It’s a creature that has plagued our nightmares for hundreds of years as the fear of a bloodsucker attacking us made us think twice on just who we invite inside. A vampire, in terms of folklore, is a reanimated corpse that awakens at night to feed on the blood of a victim through sucking its blood through its pointed fangs to either feed or to produce more vampires.

                  Defining precisely what makes a vampire is an interesting on as one must be specific. If one describes a predator who feeds off another organism, then a parasite would come to mind. While a vampire has a (typically hematophagous) parasitic bond with its victims, vampirism differs in the way that they may have the ability to change their victim into a vampire themselves. They are also a reanimated corpse, so one could confuse them with a zombie. What differs these two is agency. Zombies will usually stumble around mindlessly until they find a victim to feast on. Vampires have their intelligence and consciousness intact and will manipulate and seduce their victims through scheming to get what they want.

                The Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary literal definition for “vampire” is as follows, “the reanimated body of a dead person believed to come from the grave at night and suck the blood of persons asleep.” This is after hundreds of years to settle on defining the creature itself. As for the word itself? That has quite a few possible origins as many diverse cultures have a version of a vampire. For example, it’s believed one of the earliest origins for “vampire” is the Turkish “uber” (meaning witch) which formed to the Slavic “uper/upyr” which was the name of a proto-poltergeist that would terrorize the living at night but would not have any other of the vampire tropes we know today. In fact, the word “vampire” itself continued to transmute until France in 1737 in Lettres Juives would go on describing cases of vampirism in a nearby village. The word would then be popularized following the publication of John William Polidori’s “The Vampyr” in 1819. Which would be expanded upon in Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Stoker’s Dracula (1897).

                  What makes vampires fascinating is in addition to breaking the laws of nature in returning from the dead, they are a monster that adheres to a unique set of rules. The common ones being to stay out of sunlight, dying when the heart is pierced with a stake, they must sleep in a coffin full of soil from their home country, they cannot enter a place without being invited in, etc. They also have a repulsion to holy iconography (i.e crucifixes, holy water,). With a creature as powerful as the vampire, their weaknesses are something that the humans have on their side so that the evil vampires are vanquished. All depending on who is writing the story, really.

Then the idea of a vampire would narrow in, notably with Nosferatu (1922) and Dracula (1931). The new monster addition to the film world would also popularize how a vampire is imagined. Typically, association of “vampire” comes with the mental image of a young, pale, (either deceptively beautiful or hideously monstrous) person in high class regal with exaggerated canine teeth as fangs, and more than likely with a widow’s peak in an old, gothic castle (bleh, bleh, bleh’s optional).

Then the vampirism became a shroud of subtext to broaden how the creature can be applied beyond the additional meaning of ‘draining.’ For example, Nosferatu was a metaphor for a foreign threat invading the homeland as Count Orlok would bring in a plague of rats much like the Black Death in 1300’s Europe. The vampires in the Underworld series would serve as the upper class repressing the poor/working class (lycanthropes). Lestat and Louis exploring queerness in the “otherness” factor of vampirism. Father Paul in Midnight Mass would bridge vampirism and Catholicism with blood-thirsty religious fanaticism. All while maintaining their parasitic roots and fear of the dead returning to life.

                  The vampire today continues to persist with the likes of Twilight, Midnight Mass, and What We Do in the Shadows. Though the definition could be spread out as subtext in storytelling, the creature remains the same. When the dead awake and rise again and feast on the blood of the living, they may be a vampire .