Monster Mash (2)

Vampires are the "breakout success" of the monster world. Back in the middle ages, vampires were just another supernatural menace -- walking corpses that fed on the blood of the living. Sure, they were scary, but so were the fairies lurking in the wood, the Devil loitering at the crossroads, and the ghost in the churchyard.
   
Vampires would have remained just another quaint superstition had it not been for an amazing house party at the Villa Diodati in Switzerland in 1816. That was an unusually cold summer, possibly the result of the Mt. Tambora eruption the previous year. So a group of literary-minded British travelers were stuck at the villa with nothing to do but make up ghost stories. Percy Shelley didn't write anything. His wife Mary wrote Frankenstein. Lord Byron wrote a fragment but abandoned it.

And Byron's doctor, John Polidori, wrote "The Vampyre." Polidori's story got rid of the icky walking-dead vampire covered with grave dirt and reeking of decay, and replaced it with a sinister, urbane, upper-class vampire remarkably similar to his famous patient Byron. In fact, when the story was first published in Britain it was attributed to Byron himself.
   
More than half a century later Bram Stoker, a theater-mad Irish lawyer, wrote the ultimate vampire novel, Dracula, which cemented the vampire's position as the aristocrat of the horror world.

A hundred years after Stoker, Anne Rice cranked up the sexiness factor, finally dispensing altogether with any graveyard paraphenalia. White Wolf games adapted Rice's vampires to the roleplaying game Vampire: The Masquerade, which organized vampires into tribes and concentrated on the political interplay among vampires in the modern world.

Nowadays, vampires aren't smelly walking corpses -- that role has passed to zombies, which is a subject for another day. Instead, in modern fiction vampires are attractive, immortal beings who just happen to suck a little blood now and then.

Vampires, considered objectively, are parasites -- they have the feeding habits of ticks or leeches, but happen to be spirits or walking corpses. Like all parasites, they have a great many specialized adaptations to their lifestyle: specialized mouthparts (fangs), and a method of tranquilizing or controlling prey (possibly via pheromones). This has several interesting implications: vampires are likely host-specific, which explains why they insist on drinking human blood. (This also suggests there should be analogous species preying on other mammals.) In addition, vampires aren't generalists -- they can't do much that isn't related to blood-drinking.

If you have a persistent vampire problem, talk to these guys.

Comments

[Mr. Cavin]

I recognize that my comment is chillingly pedantic, and I am certain you know all of it already. But I see this gloss on literary history often enough that I feel the record needs a little straightening, if only for someone who’s writing a paper and suddenly finds themselves here.

During the dreary and wet summer of 1816, while hanging out at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva, the four young writers challenged one another to write horror stories. Percy Shelly, as you say, began something he never set to paper. Mary began the thought processes that eventually led her to Frankenstein. Lord Byron, who had, three years before, began a formal literary interest in traditional folkloric Vampirism in his Orientalist epic poem The Giaour, actually wrote the first several pages of an ostensible vampire story. It was notable in that it portrayed the central monster, which was normally a bloated bloody corpse, as an aristocrat named Augustus Darvell. Having read these pages, there is little evidence of more than a pervasive sinister existentialism about Darvell, but we have Mrs. Shelly’s assertion that a vampire was what he was meant to be. We are not privy to the same airy discussions the young quartet were having around the Swiss campfires on those evenings. I always thought this was pretty neat, that Byron himself was somehow responsible for the arch romanticizing of this common villager’s folkloric bugaboo. Byron was such a sexy jerk.

Sadly, Byron, whose attention span was probably never all that, and who was actively putting pen to paper for the third canto of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, never bothered finishing the story. This is where poor Dr. Polidori comes in. The doctor took that enigmatic story snippet and ran, authoring the Vampire. Again, according to the opinions of those present, this story ran more or less according to Byron’s initial ideas, though Polidori went so far as to fashion his aristocratic protagonist, Lord Ruthven, after Byron himself. But it is important to note that this was, according to everyone involved, including John William Polidori himself, Byron’s idea made manifest through the doctor’s later tinkering. Three years later, as a matter of fact: the Vampire wasn’t published until 1819.

So what did Dr. Palidori actually manage to create over those wet summer nights in Switzerland? I like how Mary Shelly puts it best, so here she is:

“Poor Polidori had some terrible idea about a skull-headed lady who was so punished for peeping through a keyhole—what to see I forget: something very shocking and wrong of course; but when she was reduced to a worse condition than the renowned Tom of Coventry, he did not know what to do with her and was obliged to dispatch her to the tomb of the Capulets, the only place for which she was fitted.”

Man, what a sentence! And what a drive-in B-side, too. I’d really like to have read that story. Imagine if he’d persisted and finished it, imagine also that Polidori’s taste-making sway then held firm: we’d live in a wonderful world with nineteenth century books about, and Universal and Hammer Film Studios versions depicting, and teen angst allusions to, and Loony Toons send-ups of, and pre-code comic books about, and Wax Museum sculptures illustrating, and millions on millions of trick or treating kids all dressing up and plodding about as a skull-headed woman. Sigh.

[Cambias]

Thanks for a very informative comment! It sounds as if Polidori's original story would have been perfect for a comics adaptation by Fletcher Hanks: http://www.toonopedia.com/fantomah.htm