Culture
A Not-So-Scary History of Vampires, and How Vampire Wines Tried to Copyright The Bloodthirsty Beast
From freaky folklore to the beastly beverage industry, vampires are versatile creatures. One business wants to change what it means to carry the ‘Vampire’ label. Will they succeed?
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Corpses don’t typically sell luxury products.
When Applebee’s first marketed its 2019 Halloween ‘vampire cocktail,’ a bubbling purple beverage topped with plastic vampire fangs, advertisements did not feature corpses flushed with living blood.
No, Applebee’s did not feature the gory undead creatures described in Slavic folklore. Instead, its ‘vampire cocktail’ drew on the image of Braham Stoker’s Dracula and successors. It marketed alternative tastes and gothic mystique.
Fortunately for Applebee’s, Dracula fell out of copyright in 1962, and in 2019 vampires were all the rage. Unfortunately for Applebee’s, another company had previously taken note of these bloody creatures’ popularity. That same year, Vampire Vineyards sued Applebees for copyright infringement. The former claimed that the new ‘vampire cocktail’ cheapened the Vampire Wines family brand.
Wait. Can Vampire Wines do this?
Vampires have been present in modern literature since the early 1700s. They’re curiously morbid and attractive. They elude definition because they represent Westerners’ ever-changing bloodlust.
From freaky folklore to the austere beverage industry, vampires are versatile creatures.
In a market where naming a cocktail after a popular monster raises copyright infringement claims, it is important to understand that no one company ever owns full rights to this beast-turned- sex-symbol.
Premodern vampires were not sexy.
The term vampire itself is not subject to copyright. No one knows where the word ‘vampire’ even came from. Possible origins include upior, the Bulgarian word for ‘wit,’ or a Slavic adaptation of the Greek word ‘drink.’¹ Vampire legends may have sought to explain rabies or legion diseases that left the body transformed. Early folklore considered vampires animalistic creatures similar to werewolves.
Traditionally, Eastern Europeans and Estonians keep watch over their dead before burial. Any disturbance during this uncertain period was an opportunity for the soul to grow restless.²
A restless soul often turned into a vampire after burial.
During the ‘Vampire Panic’ of the mid-1700s, villagers blamed almost any misfortune on the living dead. If townspeople suspected a dead community member of vampirism, villagers would exhume recently buried corpses from their frigid graves. They’d find the body swelled with red liquid. Crimson decomposing brain and lung fluids would seep out the corpse’s mouth and pool in the stomach, leading villagers to believe that the corpse feasted on the living.
These creatures hardly resemble modern vampires. How did this uncouth monster shed its morbid past and enter popular culture as a cunning aristocrat, or the title of a disputed cocktail?
Stoker and his successors established a vampire canon that reflects a monster that is at once timeless — and a product of its time.
The changing nature of vampires
Dracula and later works reinterpreted vampire legends. They molded a new vampire who either succumbs to or fights his otherness.
Stoker was not the first to adopt Slavic vampire tales for popular audiences. Early eighteenth-century vampire literature like Heinrich August Ossenfelder’s poem The Vampire and 19th century works like Carmilla by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu primed audiences to expect sexual overtones in the vampire canon.
Vampires even made their way into popular literature through penny dreadful series like Varney the Vampire, a pulp fiction serial produced so hastily that new stories would often contradict previous Varney episodes.³ Nosferatu, an influential 1922 vampire silent film brought the count’s unmistakable image onscreen. Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles shaped audiences’ expectations by affirming that vampires struggled with their altered humanity.
These pieces of authored literature led to the normalization of the vampire. Over time, the mindless creature or heartless count became more human. With each retelling, he became more acceptable in mainstream popular culture.
Modern vampires and vampire products
Vampires appeal to Westerners because they represent not just bloodlust, but also our deepest cravings.
More recent literature like Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight saga explores how young adults grapple with their dual human and beastly natures. Other adaptations bypass bloodlust completely. These monsters satisfy their wilder nature by feeding off humans’ energy. The vampire becomes ‘vegetarian’ or feeds on animals to manage their thirst. In these later art forms, a vampire refuses the role of the killer. Instead, he lusts for something else.
Any reference to vampirism necessarily references this shifting, sensual and secular canon. The transformation of the beast driven mad with bloodlust allows authors to explore taboo sexual topics through metaphor. But this is not always the case. Recent literature explores different nuances in vampire lore.
Vampires are versatile creatures. A vampire might be a savage beast tamed with love or an outsider seeking entry at a threshold. These creatures even emerge in children’s television shows like Monster High and Vampirina. In these programs, vampires represent the struggles young people might face moving to a new school or country. Canonization has changed the vampire image so that these creatures present as humans, but with more baggage. Awake during the night, ancient, wild and sometimes reliant on parasitic relationships to survive, vampires are exceptions to the norm. Exploring these differences allows readers to experience a sort of cultural inversion.
Applebee’s ‘vampire cocktail’ acknowledges this inversion because it contains a set of playful plastic fangs grasping a suggestive maraschino cherry. Does Applebee’s decision to feature a beverage with sexual overtones cheapen the vampire image overall?
Vampire Wines and a bloodthirsty genre
Vampires are at once aristocratic and common. They are designed for adults and children. Authors must establish the rules of ‘vampirism’ early in their work to avoid confusion with ‘vampirism’ in other authored literature. For example, they must decide whether their vampires drink blood. One brand can decide which types of vampires it will include in its own series of wine or other authored work. But it does not get to decide how these creatures relate to popular culture as a whole.
The collective influence of vampire media forms a flexible canon that makes it quite difficult for Vampire Vineyards to maintain its ‘aristocratic’ vampire label.
Drawing from this versatile and often confusing canon, Vampire Vineyards’ decision to defend its title against other vampire food and beverage brands falls short. It is worth noting that even though Vampire Vineyards calls itself a ‘family brand,’ the company was founded by Los Angeles entertainment attorney Michael Machat, whose firm specializes in trademark disputes. Suing Applebee’s restaurants is likely a publicity stunt organized to help the Vampire Wines family brand garner media support.
Vampire Wines has rights to ‘vampire’ and ‘Dracula’ wine branding. The company has filed similar suits against Taco Bell for its vampire-themed burrito. California District Courts have temporarily resolved these claims.
Bloodthirsty vampires.
Blood-red distillations.
Sensual wine.
Today, the connection between these items needs no further explanation. But when Machat founded the chain, he claims,
“Many thought we were crazy when we dared to call our wine, “vampire.”… Wine was meant to be revered, respected and worshipped. It was downright irreverent… [But] we simply were the first to realize that wine doesn’t have to be dull and boring, but instead full of adventure.”
This claim falls short. Vampire Vineyards seeks to control what products deserve the ‘vampire’ label when the brand is one author in a larger, often ‘cheap’ genre. Outside the wine industry, Vampire Wines has no more claim to its ‘vampire’ title than does a flimsy paperback thriller.
Vampire wines was not the first to pioneer monstrous branding in the beverage industry. It cannot prevent other firms from continuing the vampire mania that erupted after the release of the film Twilight in 2008.
Machat founded Vampire Wines in 1988, well after plain-labeled Mt. Monster Wine came onto the market in 1855. Other drinks, including Monster Energy, Voodoo Ranger IPA and Mortal Kombucha continued this tradition of naming mass-produced beverages for audiences familiar with growing popularity for ‘alternative’ and gothic tastes.
Vampire Wines may have recognized a growing demand for such labeling. But this brand may also owe its current success to ‘cheap’ vampire fiction.
With the release of the film Twilight in 2008, the amount of vampire media and fan media skyrocketed. The number of Google searches for ‘vampire’ exploded during November 2008 to April 2017 with the release of Twilight and later vampire series.
This boost in vampire popularity allowed Vampire Vineyards to open a New Orleans restaurant in 2020. Vampire Vineyards may have chosen its name at an opportune moment, but today it remains part of a larger tradition of gothic-alternative style preferences.
Modern markets enjoy vampires. From classic Dracula to young adult romance and preschool-appropriate Vampirina programming, vampires capture our imagination. Like it or not, Vampire Vineyards must realize that the image of the complex and occasionally ‘cheap’ vampire is complicit in the company’s own success.
And yet, after Vampire Vineyards filed suit against Applebee’s ‘vampire cocktail’ and the Halloween season ended, the casual dining chain removed the spooky beverage from its Halloween lineup.
This case currently appears to be pending further action. Case details were last updated in December 2020. But the results so far send a powerful message: anyone who names their products ‘vampire’ best beware.
In this way, Vampire Vineyards continues to control the marketable vampire canon from its position within this market. Vampire Vineyards has since threatened similar suits. If this suit prevents future restaurants from naming their dishes after the bloodthirsty creatures, does this mean that Vampire Vineyards achieved its aim after all?
Vampires — like any complex beast of folklore — can not belong to one group or company. These creatures allow authors to explore uncomfortable topics in desire and belonging. They’re versatile. Vampire Wines succeeded in frightening industries who might otherwise use the ‘vampire’ label, but they cannot upend the vampire canon alone.
Exploring the history of vampirism, we discover that the austere count is only one member within the ‘vampire’ label. Vampire Vineyards must be willing to accept these creatures in their entirety — especially when they emerge in local restaurants in the form of a creepy cocktail.
Further Reading
[1] Wilson, Katharina M. “The History of the Word ‘Vampire.’” Journal of the History of Ideas, vol. 46, no. 4, Journal of the History of Ideas, Inc, 1985, pp. 577–83, doi:10.2307/2709546.
[2] Valk, Ülo . “Ghostly Possession and Real Estate: The Dead in Contemporary Estonian Folklore.” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 43, no. 1, Indiana University Press, 2006, pp. 31–51, doi:10.1353/jfr.2006.0009.
[3] “Blood, Death, and Varney the Vampire.” Reid, Connor. Words to That Effect. HeadStuff. 30 October, 2019, https://www.headstuff.org/words-to-that-effect/words-to-that-effect-36-blood-death-and-varney-the-vampire/
