Vampires: History & Myth

October 2024 Series – check out the rest of the series!

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Welcome to the series for October! For spooky season, this month will be all about vampires. We’ll begin with a history article, where I’ll delve through the history and origins of the vampire myth. Over the course of this month, we’ll use the lessons from the origins of vampire stories to inform a vampire race for players of D&D, a vampire creature for Vaesen, and to review a solo RPG about actually playing as a vampire through time.

Mythology

East vs West

The mythology of a vampire begins in Eastern Europe, specifically in modern-day Hungary and Romania. There’s a reason that Dracula is located in Transylvania. But before we can really dig into the details of Eastern European vampires, we need to understand the medieval and Renaissance division between Eastern and Western Europe. The cultural gap between those two regions is going to be critical in understanding vampire mythology.

The roots of this cultural divide can date back well into antiquity. The Romans certainly had a notion of cultural difference between Italians and Greeks. The Roman Empire was routinely divided into a “western” and “eastern” emperor by the 300s AD.

However, you do have to pick a starting date when looking at the course of a historical trend. To me, the most important division is the “Great Schism” of Christianity, which divided the Eastern Orthodox Church from the Catholic Church, in 1095. This religious conflict, in part a political question of whether to accept the Pope in Rome as superior to other leading bishops in other parts of the Mediterranean, would lead to a lot of specific doctrinal differences.

The extent of these differences would reach such a level that some later medieval sources from western, Catholic Europe, did not even really see Greek Orthodox Christians as true Christians.

A great deal of Eastern Europe would be conquered by the Ottoman Empire, a Muslim empire centered in modern-day Turkey, following the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1456. The Byzantines were primarily Greek and was the direct descendant of the ancient Roman Empire in their eastern territories. The Byzantine Empire had collapsed slowly over the Middle Ages until its capital of Constantinople was captured by the Ottomans and turned into modern Istanbul.

Rule by the Ottomans in Eastern Europe would lead to a great deal of cultural blending between the Orthodox Greek population and the Muslim Turkish population, which further made western Catholics see the people of this land as something “other” and “non-Christian.”

With that cultural context out of the way, let’s talk about vampires.

Eastern European Vampires

Vampires in the folktales of Hungary and Romania in the Early Modern period tended to seem almost more like zombies – essentially, an eastern European form of rather generic undead. Specifically, vampires were those who died in “unusual circumstances” or who did not receive proper burial rites. These included criminals and people who committed suicide. As a result, they never truly died, and would be reanimated to cause trouble in their previous community, looking for vengeance or to finish whatever business kept them from reaching the afterlife. Some of these stories involved blood-drinking (for example, the Romanian strigoi), but they are just as commonly associated with more general magic or interfering with the harvest or the weather.

This same sort of ‘unquiet dead’ folklore did not really exist in Catholic, Western Europe. Ghosts were probably the closest type of restless dead, but they were incorporeal and so could not be touched. As a result, when Catholics tried to record, publish, and spread folklore stories from the east, they tended to credit vampires as being animated by demons or demonic energy.

Media Adaptations

Bram Stoker’s Dracula

By far the most important way that the vampire myth reached western Europe (and from there, America) was from a British author, whose book Dracula has become essentially synonymous with the word vampire. There were other vampire books published in the west before Dracula, but none had the same cultural impact or staying power in our modern imagination.

Stoker’s Dracula is named for the word “Devil”, based on an old account of parts of Eastern Europe by a British historian who lived around the same time as Stoker, named William Wilkinson. To Stoker, Dracula was in communication with the Christian Devil, if not a physical incarnation of him. This reflects the Catholic interpretation of Eastern European folklore around the undead. 

Stoker’s Dracula is a work of horror. It is meant to be creepy. In part, this was because most of Stoker’s audience would not have known that Dracula is a vampire; they would not have known what a vampire was. This is something that we cannot really accomplish anymore in any retelling of Dracula. Just the name instantly tells us that the character is THE vampire.

Stoker’s Dracula crawls around on the side of a building on all fours, can summon wolves, has mind control powers, can create other vampires out of his victims, and can only be killed by having his head cut off and his heart stabbed. Later stories which put limitations on vampires, like not being able to cross running water or not being able to walk around in the daylight, are not in Dracula nor in earlier folk stories. They’re innovations to the vampire myth meant to provide extra weaknesses for the vampire, for use in their own particular stories. Burning up in the sun, for example, was added to the vampire mythos in the 1922 movie Nosferatu, which wanted a dramatic way to kill their vampire that would be cheaper than choreographing a fight scene.

Instead, a lot of the tension around Dracula is that the protagonists don’t know what he is, and so do not entirely know what is going on when their friend starts losing a lot of blood every night and requiring regular transfusions. There's an additional element here that vampires look human. Dracula appears as an old man in Transylvania, and as a much younger man after he is revived on the potent blood of Britain, but he is always a man. Part of the mystery and the fear of Dracula is that he is undead, a monster, a killer, an immortal being who has seen centuries pass – a very natural, human fear of immortality and undeath – and yet he appears completely human, with full human capacity for conversation and complex thought, unlike a zombie.

There is a whole racial element to Dracula as well. Dracula is from Eastern Europe, and his “invasion” of England is meant to be disturbing to a British audience at the time. Dracula in his homeland is old and decrepit, but when he comes to Britain, he becomes young and powerful, which was used to signify how the balance of power in the world was shifting from east (Constantinople, and then the Ottoman Empire) to England, which was enjoying its largest imperial size under the reign of Queen Victoria. British people at the time saw Eastern Europe, which had been under the rule of the Ottomans, as a “lost territory”, filled with bandits and wolves and other dangers that were long banished from “civilized” England. The book is loaded with these sorts of racial connotations about Eastern Europe being something other, inferior, and foreign.

There’s also a lot of academic theories around vampires as a fear of ‘sexual immorality.’ The woman turned into a vampire in Bram Stoker’s novel has multiple proposals and it is implied that she has premarital sex, as opposed to the purer, chaste, more virtuous woman who is able to resist Dracula’s bite. At another point, three vampire “brides of Dracula” try to seduce and/or kill one of the protagonists. This also is racialized, as polygamy was common in the Ottoman Empire, and so was seen as a corrupting, exotic, eastern influence.

That said, despite all of these things that have not aged well, I highly recommend you read Stoker’s Dracula. It is extremely well-paced and structured, it does not read “boring” or slow or even particularly old-timey, and it is genuinely a fun read. I particularly had fun reading it as a series of letters from the Daily Dracula substack.

So what really made Dracula scary to its original audience? An air of mystery, a fear of immortality and undeath coupled with a fully human appearance, and fears of ‘others’ from distant and disturbing lands.

Killing Dracula: Making the Vampire commonplace

Somewhere between Bram Stoker’s Dracula in 1897 and Twilight in 2005, vampires stopped being scary. Stephanie Meyer’s vampires glitter in the sunlight, remain eternally youthful in order to romance humans, and can ethically choose to not drink human blood to avoid causing harm to their love interests. Vampires have become sexy, objects of desire, rather than puritanical warnings about sex; Bram Stoker would be appalled that Edward Cullen is meant to be attractive. Vampires have become the enemies of werewolves, rather than being able to control wolves themselves as Dracula can.

I’m not going to go into every different type of vampire media that contributed to this trend. There are way too many pieces of media that can be pointed to. But I am going to touch on a couple.

Interview with the Vampire by Anne Rice is a contributing player in this trend, but--having now watched the excellent AMC show--it also does meaningfully engage with the Dracula narrative's themes. The vampires in Anne Rice's stories are narcissistic, manipulative, violent, and abusive. They have sex appeal, but you don't want to be romantically involved with one. They often maintain an air of mystery, though more in a manipulative way than a "what is this creature" way, though different vampires do seem to have unique or rare powers that others might not, in order to keep the mysterious element of what exact this vampire can do an open question. The nature of them, the blood drinking and all that, maintains the natural fear of undeath. Their immortality is a major theme, as is the fact that they look human. In fact, their sex appeal is part of that – you never know, in Anne Rice's world, if the man trying to pick you up at the bar is just a man or if it is a vampire looking to drain your blood and leave you a lifeless husk. And they even connect to the fear of 'others'--French vs American, gay vs straight, the decrepit vampires of Eastern Europe vs the charming vampires of Paris--though the fact that the story is told from the vampires' point of view does inherently alter this part of the vampire myth.

About two decades after Anne Rice's first book comes out, the Dracula myth itself is rewritten in this "vampire as sexy" mode. Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 movie adaptation of Dracula depicts Dracula as a star-crossed lover; his deal with the devil is motivated by the death of his wife, who becomes reincarnated in one of our British heroines. While it still engages with a lot of the content of the original book by virtue of the source material, Coppola's Dracula loses a lot of his mystery (his motivations are too romantic and clear; and we know his powers because we know what a vampire is by 1992), and he's not an 'other' spreading different sexual norms in Victorian England because he is engaged in the sort of monogamous love interest that would be prized by the norms of our other characters.

There is an effort to ‘make vampires scary again’ in some media. It was described in the RPG space in the original, 1978 publication of Ravenloft, a campaign setting for Dungeons & Dragons, and is also present in the 2016 Curse of Strahd remake of Ravenloft for 5e. Strahd is certainly not intended to be a romantic figure, but rather a terrifying, abusive one. I think that the 2023 horror movie, The Last Voyage of the Demeter – an adaptation of one chapter in Stoker’s book – fits into this effort of making vampires scary once again. But making them 'scary' again means more than making them play a villainous, powerful role, as Strahd does; it means engaging with what made them scary in the first place, even if that means adapting them away from some classic vampire tropes.

Lessons and Takeaways

When we start making our RPG content about vampires throughout the rest of this month, I definitely want to lean into this reclamation of the ‘scary’ vampire. I also think we can create  more interesting and unique homebrew material by rejecting some of the modern innovations on vampiric powers that we’ve accepted as normal – like vampires being unable to go in the sun. It allows a clever DM to surprise their players by playing against assumptions that players have built up through exposure to modern vampire stories. This sort of playing against trope can let us recapture some of the air of mystery and "yikes, what is this thing" that made Stoker’s book so effective.

How can we capture the natural human fear of undeath? Making effective horror in RPGs is often hard, particularly when you have characters that are powerful, as they are in 5e. And it is difficult to truly grapple with if we're making it as a player option, so next week's vampire lineage for D&D players likely won't fully capture this aspect.

How can we capture that fear that vampires look human? Well, that part is easy – don't make it obvious that you're dealing with a vampire. Vampires should be secret to be scary, and the revelation that the human you're speaking with is actually an immortal, blood-sucking creature should be a reveal rather than a premise.

And lastly, I want to modify the fear of ‘others’ element of the vampire myth. Curse of Strahd really leans into making the very land it is set in feel foreign and intimidating, but it does it by leaning on historically negative depictions of Romani people and Eastern Europe in general; it plays into the same sort of exoticized, anti-foreign attitudes of a Victorian Bram Stoker, which I don’t think we should be reinforcing. So instead, I hope in the design-with-me posts, to capture something that makes our vampires feel distinct and unique – and scary because of being sort of unknowable – without resorting to stereotypes of real-world cultures.

Wrapping Up

Huge credit for the foundation of this post comes from a history class I took in undergrad taught by Professor Jonathan Lyon, called “Dracula: History & Legend”. Dr. Lyon provided a lot of the information that was foundational to this post. Additional credit to the fabulous adapters of Anne Rice's Interview with a Vampire at AMC whose adaptation really made me think about how to make vampires scary when we already know what vampires are. Because Lestat and Armand are scary characters, even when they're being fun and sexy at the same time.

Thank you for reading and supporting the blog! We have a bunch of vampire content coming down the pipeline for the entire month of October that I'm really excited about.