The Vampire Transformed: From Dracula to Twilight
Early Folklore Undead
People have been telling stories about vampires for a very long time. In cultures from around the world, there are stories and legends about vampires and other undead creatures. Back then, these stories were regarded as true, and as important warnings for the evil that exists in the world. Most of the modern tropes about vampires, however, are not part of these stories, or at least not very consistent. In the 12th century, for example, there are accounts of revenants, which is a vague sort of term for those who come back from the dead. In Old Norse literature, there are stories of draugr, who were powerful undead creatures, and accounts of barrow-dwellers. This was the inspiration for J.R.R. Tolkien’s barrow-wight in Lord of the Rings. But these types of figures are not really vampires at all as we would think of them. These wights are more like ghosts who have a physical body. They do not suck blood or turn into bats. But they do share one two important similarities with our more recognizable vampire: they live beyond a natural death, and this undead state is contagious. Just like a vampire can create more vampires by biting them, in many tales those who are killed by wights become wights themselves.
It is important to remember that these early vampire tales were not told purely for entertainment. They were regarded as true. People would open graves and destroy bodies that were thought to be undead. This genuine belief in the reality of vampires or the undead existed even as late as the 18th century.
The 18th-Century Vampire Craze
In the 18th-century, there was a major craze about vampires that swept through Europe. Even though this time period is regarded as “The Age of Enlightenment,” there were numerous graves that were exhumed, and bodies that were staked, because of suspected vampirism. Even governments got involved, funding expeditions to rid their lands of the vampire menace. East Prussia had a number of vampire attacks reported in 1721, and the rumors sort of spread from there. In 1746 there was a huge work published on the subject: Treatise on the Apparitions of Spirits and On Vampires by a well-known scholar. Things didn’t settle down until Empress Maria Theresa of Austria sent her personal physician to investigate, and he concluded that vampires were not in fact real; as a result, laws were passed prohibiting the opening of graves or tampering with bodies (Hoyt 101-06).
The Romantic Vampire
The Romantic vampire entered public consciousness when John Polidori published his story, The Vampyre in 1819, still within living memory of the vampire craze. There were undoubtedly those who still believed in the reality of vampires at this time, especially in more rural areas.
The term romantic here refers to the era of Romantic Literature, and not to the idea of romantic love. This was the period in British literature (1798-1837) in which the more modern idea of the vampire was born, although the most famous of vampire stories, Dracula, would not be published until rather later in the 19th century. The vampire that John Polidori created for his story is no dirty revenant who crawled out of a barrow. He is a nobleman named Lord Ruthven, a suave man of culture and a master manipulator. The character of Ruthven was immensely popular and immediately spawned a number of imitations. He appears now and again even in recent vampire stories. Ruthven would remain the quintessential vampire figure until later eclipsed by that most famous count.
Dracula
Published by Bram Stoker in 1897, Dracula has become completely enmeshed into popular culture, to the point that we have things like Count Chocula cereal and a Count on Sesame Street (who loves to count things). In 2023, we had Nicolas Cage of all people starring as Dracula in the horror-comedy Renfield (it actually wasn’t too bad). He has become just a common figure that, to some extent, it can be difficult to fully understand just how horrifying Dracula was to Victorian readers, because we have sort of grown numb to the genre, and also because part of what made the novel terrifying was the innate fears of society during that time. “Dracula is the embodiment of everything that was considered creepy…He brings to England death, loss of souls,” and the “liberation of female sexuality” (Vučković and Dujović 4).
While the character of Dracula is certainly fascinating, he is a completely selfish monster who thinks nothing of torturing and killing others. His polite manners and civilized behavior are merely a facade that hides a terrible and deadly intent. In Stoker’s novel, when Dracula turns Lucy into a vampire, she becomes the antithesis of what Victorians would have considered an ideal woman. Instead of being chaste and nurturing, she freely displays sexual desire and seeks to tempt others while drinking the blood of children. This same behavior can be seen in Dracula’s three brides at his castle, to the point that even the upright Jonathan Harker finds himself seduced by them.
This female sexual hunger on display by the various lady vampires would have been seen as degenerate behavior by contemporary readers (Vučković and Dujović 4). So the terror of Dracula isn’t just that he will bring death, but that he is actively corrupting the moral principles of Victorian society during a time when people were already feeling anxious about cultural stability. In short, Stoker’s vampire is a locus for moral disease, a corruption that he can inflict others with, even against their wills.
It is also in Stoker’s novel that many of the common tropes about vampires and their weaknesses became established: the aversion to sunlight, fear of crosses and communion wafers, lack of a reflection, inability to cross running water, aversion to garlic, etc. These elements remained fairly stable in many vampires stories told even a century later. In the case of sunlight, many later stories made sunlight absolutely deadly to vampires, whereas Stoker merely made Dracula’s powers limited during daylight hours. For instance, the vampires we see in later films such as The Lost Boys (1987) or Blade (1998) still are more-or-less in the same category as Dracula, even if the figures aren’t necessarily Eastern European noblemen. The vampires in these films are evil, immortal, and powerful, and they must be destroyed. We could love the vampire as we love any great villain, but we didn’t really sympathize or root for him.
But underneath, the next generation of vampire had already been written, when Anne Rice wrote her novel Interview with the Vampire (1976).
The Sympathetic Vampire
To a casual glance, at first it might seem that Anne Rice’s version of the vampire story is doing nothing new. After all, her tale is heavy with a gothic aesthetic, and her vampires are blood-drinking creatures of the night who die if exposed to sunlight. She does get rid of some of the tropes, such as the aversion to garlic and crosses, but her creatures are still very recognizable as vampires. They feast on the blood of humans to sustain their immortal existence.
The huge difference with Anne Rice’s version is that the vampires are the main characters of the story. In fact, humans barely exist in her story at all, other than a source of food. All of the main characters are vampires. Some of these characters are monstrous and evil at times, while others struggle to be good. Her character Louis, for example, is thoughtful and philosophical, and tries to drink animal blood instead of hurting people. But he eventually gives that up and somewhat embraces his darker nature.
In other words, many of her characters are tragic Romantic heroes, much like Mary Shelley’s Victor Frankenstein. They are characters who are often brooding, gothic, and conflicted about their own natures. And we, as readers, get to see all of this. The very first novel in Rice’s Vampire Chronicles is titled Interview with the Vampire because the protagonist Louis is telling his life/unlife story to a reporter. We never get to hear Dracula’s story from his perspective. With Louis, suddenly we see things from the mind of the monster. As a result, we find we sympathize with him. Maybe we even want to be like him. Maybe drinking blood and being immortal isn’t such a bad deal.
The huge concern with the damnation of the soul is absent in Rice’s books. In Stoker’s Dracula, religion is a constant theme. When Van Helsing puts a communion wafter on Mina’s head to protect her and it burns her skin (because she had already been bitten by Dracula), she screams with both pain and with terror for the state of her soul. It is a powerful moment. She falls to her knees and begins repeating, “Unclean! Unclean!” What horrifies her most is not the idea of a undeath, but rather that her very soul has been corrupted. This element is largely gone with Anne Rice’s take. In her version, religion is powerless against the creatures of the night, and God seems very absent.
Interestingly, all of Rice’s vampire characters are male, because she always kills off her female vampires. In the first novel, Louis ends up having two female vampire companions, but they feel like shallow, somewhat annoying characters compared to Louis, and they don’t live for very long. What this means is that the underlying theme of liberated female sexuality via the corruption of Dracula is completely absent. Rice’s vampire society is a boy’s club only. And this version of the vampire tale, of a handsome male vampire who is a sympathetic, but tragic figure, sets the stage for the next transformation: Twilight.
The Fairy Tale Prince Vampire
While Rice certainly delved underneath the hood, so to speak, of the vampire mythos, Stephenie Meyer more or less explodes it in her novel Twilight (2005). While her Bella and Edward might be quite well-known characters, her novel is not really about vampires at all. What I mean to say is that at some point, if you start taking away the qualities of a thing, it stops being the thing altogether. Meyer’s vampires seem to lack any of the tragedy or horror elements from the genre. They aren’t really monsters in a real sense. They don’t hide in the darkness; they are immortal beings who glitter in the sunlight, leading to endless mockery about the “sparkly vampires.” They do not have an endless thirst for human blood, they drink animal blood. Essentially, her vampires are tame, sanitized superheroes who pose no threat to humanity, civilization, or to anyone’s immortal soul.
I’m not going to mock the series too much. Others have done that enough. The books are teenage romance novels marketed to young girls. The vampire character in Twilight is essentially the classic fairy tale prince who comes to save Bella, who is basically Cinderella. The fact that the prince is a vampire would be interesting if he had any vampire-like qualities. Instead, this 103-year-old immortal being apparently had nothing better to do but (wait for it) attend high school. Now, this might make some sense if he were a traditional vampire looking to drain the blood of all the unsuspecting teenage girls, but this isn’t the case here. Unlike Dracula’s complex plots of gaining a power base in London, Twilight is the story of a 100-year-old dating a teenager. The more you think about the story, the less sense it makes.
But this lack of sense does compute if we understand that Twilight is, before anything else, a fairy tale. And fairy tales really don’t make sense either. For example, in Charles Perrault’s classic version of Sleeping Beauty, her prince comes to wake up her. But here’s the catch. The prince’s mother is an ogre, who is married to a normal man. How that worked out and produced a handsome prince will just hurt your brain. So, it makes no in-world sense, but it helps create a plot where the mother-in-law is trying to destroy Sleeping Beauty. In the same way, constantly going to high school for 100 years when you are an immortal being with riches really sounds stupid. It also sounds like a special form of hell. But what it does is create a scenario where the fairy tale prince (Edward) can meet the passive, introverted princess (Bella) and sweep her away into a world of romance.
Conclusion
The figure of the vampire has taken on many forms since the days of medieval folklore, and I think it is a genre that will remain with us for some time. Even the quintessential vampire character, Dracula, is constantly going to be re-imagined in films and other genres. Sometimes this depiction is rather bad, like the recent Dracula 2020 TV series that aired on Netflix. The problem with that series is that it took Dracula out of his Victorian setting and plopped him down in modern day. While there is some cheap humor to be had in such a set-up, like Dracula swiping on Tinder looking for a meal, it essentially loses what makes both Dracula and Interview with a Vampire powerful stories: the horror, the tragedy, and the gothic aesthetic. This is why Twilight (and its many clones) is at heart a fairy tale dressed up in vampire clothes, and not really a vampire tale in truth. While Rice did make significant changes to the vampire genre, she still kept the essential elements of the genre. You could remove all of the vampire elements from Twilight and still make the story work. You can’t do that with Dracula or Interview with the Vampire.
In fact, that is essentially what 50 Shades of Grey is. Originally that book was a piece of Twilight fan fiction whose opening lines read: “Bella Swan is drafted in to interview the reclusive enigmatic Edward Cullen, multi-millionaire CEO of his company. It’s an encounter that will change her life irrevocably, leading her to dark realms of desire.” While that book has been labeled “the Great Idiot American Novel” by Erin Gloria Ryan, what E.L. James did is remove all the vampire bits and publish her Twilight story. And it sold 70 million copies. Somehow that feels like the natural evolution of the fairy tale vampire, to shed himself of vampirism completely. We can only hope that the more classic elements of the vampire story will continue to be re-imagined and explored, as it is a genre that peeks at what it means to be human, and what it means to be a monster.
Bibliography
Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola. 1992. Columbia Pictures.
Hoyt, Olga. Lust for Blood: The Consuming Story of Vampires. Chelsea: Scarborough House, 1984.
Interview with the Vampire. Directed by Neil Jordan. 1994. Warner Bros.
Meyer, Stephenie. Twilight. Little, Brown and Company, 2005.
Rice, Anne. Interview with the Vampire. Alfred A. Knopf, 2022.
Stoker, Bram. The Essential Dracula, edited by Leonard Wolf, Simon & Schuster, 2004.
Vučković, Dijana; and Pajović Dujović, Ljiljana. "The Evolution of the Vampire from Stoker's Dracula to Meyer's Twilight Saga." CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture 18.3 (2016).
