Santanico Pandemonium poster art Season 2, From Dusk Till Dawn TV series – one of my favorite female vampires. Yes – it’s not Salma Hayek from that scene in the film but Eiza Gonzalez is more vamped up in the poster here
(13) VAMPIRES &VAMPIRISM
And now we get to the hungrier folklore of the dead, albeit not so much in archetypal ghostly incorporeal form, but back from the dead as revenants. They came back wrong. Not much good comes out of coming back from the dead as a rule. It usually involves preying upon life to sustain one’s unnatural, undead being – treading water, but in blood, as it were.
There is a whole host of vampiric or ‘vampire adjacent’ beings or creatures in folklore and mythology, worthy of their own top ten, going all around the world and back to the dawn of history or beyond.
But when it comes to vampire folklore, despite all the vampiric predecessors and variants, we’re talking “the folklore for the entity known today as the vampire” that “originates almost exclusively from early 18th-century southeastern Europe” – and its progeny in modern fantasy or horror, mostly from the archetype of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which arguably overshadow their precessors in folklore.
And the elements of vampires in folklore are also worthy of their own top ten. There are many variants, lacking a single definitive type, although there are a elements common to a number of European vampire folklore legends. Like witchcraft, which to some degree it overlaps and resembles, vampirism evolved into a mythos with remarkable complexity and depth – even down to a similar frenzy of vampire sightings (and stakings) in the eighteenth century.
There are the various attributes or traits of vampires, although a surprising number of those identified with vampires in modern popular culture originate not from traditional folklore but modern fantasy – as they do for the creation or origin of vampires, which tends to be more haphazard in folklore (such as by a cat jumping over a corpse) than the viral version of vampirism in modern fantasy.
There’s also the various means of preventing vampires (as in the various means of preventing a corpse from becoming a vampire, or at least causing too much trouble as one), identifying vampire, and most importantly of all, protecting against or destroying them. A personal favorite from folklore you don’t see too much (if at all) in modern fantasy is their weird obsessive-compulsion – if you left a bag or sack of grain or seeds in its path, it had to count every single grain or seed, usually detaining it all night. Except perhaps the Count in Sesame Street, which I’d like to think is an esoteric survival of this element of folklore.
And then there are the historical explanations for vampires and vampirism – anomalies in the natural process of decomposition (for elements identifying corpses as vampires), premature burial or grave robbery, various diseases (with porphyria and rabies being the most notable), and psychological or political explanations.
RATING: 4 STARS****
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