“Blood Is Lives” — A History of Our Never-Ending Fascination with Vampires
An interview with professor Nick Groom, author of The Vampire: A New History, on the origins of blood sucking demons, their symbolism and evolution, Dracula, and the scientific and philosophical logic of our current vampiromania.
“If there’s an answer to your disease, you’ll find it”, says the ominous voice of Jared Harris’ character to the future vampire played by Jared Leto in the upcoming superhero flick Morbius.
It’s the big screen adaptation of the comic book story of Michael Morbius, an award-winning biochemist who, in a selfish/noble quest of curing his (and other’s) rare blood disease, becomes a superhuman: a vampire. One hell of an answer, wouldn’t you agree?
Miraculous healing, good looks (abs!), eternal youth, super-strength, super-senses (echolocation, among others), super-speed, a bat posse that ensures you always make a good entrance…
It’s the dream of curing the ultimate disease: our inevitable old age degradation and mortality. (There’s also some unquenchable thirst for blood and the fact that you’re hunted by the authorities, but we can live with that, I guess.) “I feel more alive than ever”, says Doctor Morbius, like a futuristic ad for the premium product of immortality.
I love vampire stories. We all do. And not only because I’m Romanian and often spend my time in Transylvania, land of Dracula, the OG of vampire predators. Shared by many millions of people around the world, my fascination with vampires runs deep, from the tingle of fear that anyone feels in a dark forest in the middle of the night (that rare sensation of being the hunted, for a change) to the dream and hope that someday medicine would offer us some of the same supernatural benefits, without the need of a bite from a bat or generous vampire.
A true shape shifting creature, the vampire took many forms, attributes and meanings in its history, from the horror origin of undead people possessed as zombies to aristocratic predator and now superhero.
To understand the true origins and symbolism of this idea of a haunted superhuman, I talked with Nick Groom, the famous “Prof of Goth,” professor of English at Exeter University, UK, and author of The Vampire: A New History, (Yale, 2018) required reading for any vampire aficionado.
Below is a very slightly edited text version of his passionate answers and stories from our Skype conversation. Enjoy!
Origins
(Bram Stoker’s) Dracula is clearly a very important text. It’s a watershed in vampire fiction. However, vampires have been around for nearly 200 years before that — but only 200 years. A lot of people may think that they go back to classical times, or to biblical times, or to pagan history. But vampires are effectively discovered at the borders of the Hapsburg Empire at the beginning of the 18th century. And what they really represent is the encounter, or the confrontation of empirical Enlightenment science with Eastern European folklore.
You have these strange incidents of the dead apparently rising from their graves and killing the living. And this is investigated by the authorities. They send the military in, they send medical teams, they send magistrates. The authorities, the officialdom, now get involved in investigating these vampire outbreaks from the outset.
Through the 18th century, these cases of vampirism are very much associated with politics and with medical science. They think of these supernatural stories in terms of medical traumas, for example, or they analyse questions of diet, or they think of it as in a scenario of communities dealing with issues of contagion, and so forth. Effectively, vampires become thought experiments — for thinking about the human condition at this particular time. And so we get nearly 200 years of that history before Dracula, and before the establishment of vampires in our cultural imagination.
The thirst for blood
We think of zombies as quite a different tradition, but, at the beginning, vampires are sort of zombies, the undead that haunt the European imagination; they haunt the culture for many years, whether as ghosts or as revenants. And it’s interesting that vampires are particularly corporeal. In other words, they’re material, they’re physical, they are bodies that have particular needs, they’re tangible, they’re not like ghosts, that are intangible.
The question of blood comes in alongside this. It’s important because vampires are mirroring what’s going on in terms of scientific discoveries, first of all in terms of the science of the circulation of the blood in the 17th century — a series of blood experiments that begin to take place at the end of the 17th century and through the 18th century.
Blood had been associated with life, in world religions, for many, many centuries, but now it becomes identified or isolated as a scientific quality, it’s understood as absolutely essential to life. Vampires are really beginning to express or give voice to those anxieties about the human body becoming more and more an object of scientific scrutiny, and less a spiritual and divine entity.
The notion of bloodsuckers is certainly shared across different cultures — or perhaps is simply replicated, because blood is such an essential element to life that it has a long history of cultural references. Every culture has its myths and legends and stories about blood.
But I think that is important to keep the scientific context in focus — that the first outbreaks were on the borders of the Hapsburg Empire, in areas around Serbia. That’s where the word is first used and that’s where the primary characteristics of the vampire actually begin to begin to emerge.
What I think is particularly interesting about this is, first of all, that these cases were so heavily documented and that bodies were exhumed, with autopsies performed on these remains. It was definitely an object of scientific attention — that, to me, is very interesting. It’s not really the stories, the supernatural stories, that are interesting to me, but the ways in which the authorities responded and realised that there was actually something strange going on at the borders of their empire and the ways in which they then tried to explain this.
That I think is the reason why vampires are very modern. They’re very contemporary, they’re really reflecting the different categories, or the different limitations, or definitions of the human that begin to emerge in the 18th century. That’s why you have medical physicians, that’s why you have legal experts getting involved, because this (new) human is being defined through the law and through medicine and through those particular institutions at this time, rather than through faith or earlier depictions. What interests me is really to show that they become what you can say are thought experiments about the nature of the human.
My favourite story is when they arrive in Britain and there’s a big debate about weighing the evidence, talking about the witnesses, the testimonies, the professional medical men who’ve been involved and whether those can be relied upon.
One of the earliest accounts suggests that vampires are really a political allegory, a way of attacking those in power by talking about the government sucking the blood from the people, exploiting the population and so forth — that, I think, is much more powerful because that, then, runs through politics all the way through the 18th century and, certainly, in the 19th century, through the writings of somebody like Karl Marx.
Vampire as sex demons
My feeling is that the sexual aspect has been overemphasized. It really says more about our society today, which, since the 1960s and 1970s, has been oversexualizing history and culture — particularly the history and culture of the past. It tends to see vampires as seducers and as this sort of sexual beings who explore transgressive or taboo sexuality. It is true that the first poem written about vampires in Germany, in the mid 18th century, represents a vampire as being more seductive, as being an erotic figure.
The first vampire story in English, which was very influential, was written by Dr. John Polidori, Lord Byron’s physician, and he based his vampire on Lord Byron himself.
The vampire is seen as a nobleman, is seen as a figure who preys upon innocent young women. That’s a powerful aspect of the vampire. (Certainly, later writers get interested in this aspect, and how Bram Stoker writes about Dracula.)
This isn’t so much about sex and the erotic, but sex and the erotic and seduction are metaphors themselves for consumption. What really characterises the 19th century is the rise of capitalism, the rise of consumer society, the fact that there are all of these commodities to be consumed and the fears are that the human will become something to be consumed. So the emphasis is on how can you rethink the human — not simply prey to a creature like a vampire. That’s what I think is really going on. I think we do tend to oversexualize vampires, which may be fun, you get some great movies out of it, but I think they are actually also asking us deeper questions about our position within society and in relation to other creatures as well. While that sexual element is clearly important, I think it’s been overemphasized in the past few years. It’s interesting to think of vampires in more ways than just as sexual predators.
From zombie to enviable immortal creature
There’s certainly the sense of longevity, in other words of living a long time, of living beyond the grave. It’s hinted at, it’s assumed, is implicit in those very early accounts. But it doesn’t really become explicit until we get to those early 19th century tales, in which the vampire can die and return and this can clearly go on over and over again.
I’ve mentioned Polidori’s vampire, which, interestingly, in the story just escapes and disappears, presumably to reappear somewhere else. The popular vampire of the 19th century is very much one who is indestructible. No matter how many times you slay these vampires they will return, they are extremely robust in that sense. Like the very popular Varney the Vampire — in the end, he commits suicide by throwing himself into a volcano. So cremation is one way of actually exterminating a vampire. But he was already 200 years old in that particular set of stories, more than 200 years old.
This develops as an ongoing motif in terms of vampires — that they have the potential to live for an extremely long time, if not forever. I think this becomes attractive because of the increasingly secular nature of society which, as it loses faith in the major religions, is looking for some other way of achieving a long life or even or even immortality. Again, it’s a way of reflecting upon our current preoccupations and concerns. And it also bears very much on medical science again, although a lot of these tales are supernatural. Of course they are, because they are about vampires. Many of them also contain those sorts of medical evidence or testimony, issues of blood science and so forth. And they do go hand in hand with technology and progress and ways of contemplating the future.
The bat
The emergence of vampires as sucking blood, at the beginning of the 18th century, then appears to be confirmed with the discovery of the vampire bat a few decades later. Natural history, the natural world showed that there were mammals that sucked blood and that’s how they actually survived. So, in a sense, the possible existence of vampires seemed to be corroborated and seemed to be proved by these discoveries in South America of vampire bats.
So that’s why the bat gets associated with vampires. When you look at natural history books and see vampire bats, that suck blood, it may seem to be a provable and evidenced element to the existence of these vampires. And then it doesn’t stretch the imagination too much to think that there could also be humanoids that survive in the same way.
‘Vampiromania’
I think vampires are here to stay! It’s interesting how contemporary vampires, 21st century vampires, are different because they are responding to our own anxieties today. We have green vampires, that don’t live off people but live off blood substitutes, or blood that has been stored in blood banks. In that sense, they become a way to reconsider and rework our relationship with other people.
They’re an enduring way of reflecting on what it is to be human in a world in which we are increasingly challenged, whether by technology or by medical science. These are all opportunities for vampires to extend into those areas and also in politics — the metaphor of the vampire in politics is something which won’t go away. I think it’s revealing that many of the vampire classics are about to be filmed or remade, that there’s still a huge appetite for them. We need to have mirrors; culture provides us with mirrors in which we can see versions of ourselves. And vampires are a very powerful way of getting us to think about how we can coexist with others who aren’t like us.
On Bram Stoker’s Dracula
I think it’s a great novel, because he did a lot of research and so he does gather up a lot of those early 18th century accounts. There’s a lot of medical science in Dracula. His brothers were doctors and he wrote to them to ask them about medical conditions. And he also investigated associated traditions, such as werewolves…
I’ve been emphasising how modern and contemporary vampires are. Dracula is a novel absolutely full of very up to date technology, like the telegraph, Winchester rifles, Kodak cameras, recording devices, and so forth.
He’s not presenting the vampire as some ancient shadowy being from the mists of time. It’s something that has to be faced with modern needs. And Dracula himself… working through solicitors, speculating real estate, buying property at the heart of the British Empire, very close to Buckingham Palace and Downing Street. So he is not some odd creature from an alien world. He absolutely knows what he’s doing and he’s playing the modern world. And he’s very efficient at doing that. That’s the appeal of Dracula. It was acclaimed at the time for what they called its up-to-date-ness. It was seen as being very up to date.
Although we get the garlic, and the crucifixes, and those sorts of superstitions as well, the Important thing to me is the fact that it’s very much about Europe in the 1890s, that it has a very contemporary feel to it. And it’s also a novel that’s written as basically a scrapbook, as a lot of different accounts that have been pulled together. But there’s no overall storytelling, there’s no narrator, telling us what to think. We just have a series of perspectives; it presents vampires as wicked problems. There’s no one way of understanding. We get versions from different witnesses, from different informants, and we have to try to make sense of what’s going on. In a sense, this is detective novel, we’re having to sift through the evidence and try to come to our own conclusions about what Dracula is and how it can best be confronted.
Vampires as an endangered species
Vampires are an endangered species. That’s one of the questions that they do pose to us, because a lot of vampire fiction is about exterminating vampires. But in our current ‘vampiromania’, a TV series like True Blood is very much about living with vampires, an intelligent sentient humanoid species that we have to live with. Should we simply try to destroy them? Well, the whole history of racial and ethnic conflicts has been predicated on that.
These 21st century versions are actually trying to think about vampires in different ways. And they do pose these questions. I mean, if vampires can only survive by killing humans, then they clearly need to be controlled. But do we control them like we control the smallpox virus? Do we keep samples, or do we just try to eradicate it completely? I think it poses a really interesting moral question.
In that sense, they are getting us to thinking about our place in the world. That’s why they’ll continue to exercise this fascination for us throughout the coming century.
Hi there! I’m Vasile Decu, science journalist, amateur astronomer, professional bookworm. And I need your help:
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