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

(3) VAMPIRES

And now we get to the hungrier folklore of the dead, distinct in their corporeal form from ghosts – 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, going all around the world and back to the dawn of history or beyond.

While the archetypal vampire of European folklore – “the folklore for the entity known today as the vampire” – is relatively recent, originating “almost exclusively from early 18th-century southeastern Europe”, the broader archetype of the hungry corporeal dead goes back at least to ancient Mesopotamia, as John Blair points out in his book Killing the Dead.

And so too does killing the dead (again) as per the book’s title – 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 vampires, and most importantly of all, protecting against or destroying them.

When the dead aren’t ghostly in horror, they’re hungry. The corporeal dead, and killing them, is a substantial part of horror fiction.