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The 11th and 12th Century- Early Vampires- Yikes 😬

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The 11th and 12th Century- Early Vampires- Yikes 😬

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Through the 11th and 12th centuries, vampires were used as scapegoats for the unscientific masses to blame for disease origins, such as rabies and tuberculosis. The appearance of the original vampire took on the form of a human leech with blood flowing from their mouth, bad breath, and a bloated stomach (Zinoman, 1).

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1700s - Vampires Bust Out of The Coffin in Europe

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1700s - Vampires Bust Out of The Coffin in Europe

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In a book written by Karl Ferdinand von Schertz in 1704, Magia Posthuma, cases of alleged vampirism are examined throughout some locations of Eastern Europe. These incidents caused interest in vampires to explode through Europe. The hysteria got so fierce that empress Maria Theresa (the 1740 sovereign of modern day Transylvania and other countries)  passed a law banning the exhumation and destruction of corpses, as well as other acts of superstition (Petersen). Europe was in complete belief of the night dwelling disease spreaders.

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1800s - The 19th Century Gives Rise to The Count

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1800s - The 19th Century Gives Rise to The Count

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It wasn’t until the 1800s that vampires really started to take their quintessential form as wealthy creeps in formal wear. Enter Count Dracula with his fangs full of metaphor. In 1853 the first mandatory vaccine laws were being enacted in England, and the people weren’t having it. Vampires embodied their feelings of bodily violation and fears of possible vaccine repercussions (Zinoman, 2).

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1881 - Packs a Punch to the Jugular of Vaccines

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1881 - Packs a Punch to the Jugular of Vaccines

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In 1881 James Wilkinson published a handbill titled The Vaccination Vampire with the purpose of metaphorically describing vaccinations as vampiric. Wilkinson's fear-mongering handbill pushed the claim that vaccinations would lead to “degradation and extinction,” and were a source of “universal pollution” (Zinoman 2).

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James John Garth Wilkinson (1812-99) was an opponent of vaccination, as Nadja Durbach describes in her study Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in Negland 1853-1907 (Duke Univ. Press, 2005):

'The poor, claimed Wilkinson, are all "imbrued in each other's taints"; vaccination "mingles in a communism of blood the taints of the community." Since blood was transmitted through "hundreds of thousands of beings" by way of arm-to-arm vaccination, every "hereditary sewer opens up into every nursery; nay, into each infant's very heart," Wilkinson warned. The sewer, which carried the waste of society and which had connotations of sexual pollution, was infecting the child, who was supposed to be pure and innocent, untainted by physical and moral corruption. Since vaccination had passed blood from arm to arm to arm, no matter how healty a child seemed, each vaccinated infant was a repository for the diseases of the entire community. Each person's blood was no longer his own, Wilkinson suggested, for each individual shared in the diseases with which the "residuum" infected the social body. Vaccination, its critics maintained, was thus a dangerous form of "body-mixing."' (p. 130-1)

In 1881 Wilkinson published a handbill titled The Vaccination Vampire with the purpose of metaphorically describing vaccination as vampiric:

'The state tracked anti-vaccinators, pursuing them like criminals through the use of a creature that, like the vampire, was specifically trained to track the smell of the blood. Vaccination, Wilkinson further argued, was like a raven perched on "parturient" sheep, waiting to pluck out and devour the eyes of the newborn lambs. It "hover[ed]" over the pregnant woman who waited in the "shadow of its wings," primed and ready to attack the infant. Winged and hovering, vaccination here figures as both a bird of prey and a vampire haunting the laboring mother. The vampire's concern is with the blood, but, according to Wilkinson, vaccination disrupted the entire fluid economy of the body. The "Vaccination Vampire" polluted the "pure babe" precisely at the point of its "suckling," the handbill warned, for the mother's milk was "blighted" by fear of the "poisoned lancet"; thus, the "Vaccination Vampire" was a source of "universal pollution" and degeneration, for it led to "degradation and extinction." The "cradle is born to an immediate medical hell," Wilkinson warned, for the "Vaccination Vampire" "befouls" and "demonizes" and is the "Supreme Quack and grand Apollyon or Destroyer of the Human Race." Wilkinson's "Vaccination Vampire" thus epitomized what anti-vaccinators considered an invasive and violating operation.' (p. 138-9)

According to Durbach, from the middle of the 19th century the vampire 'came to symbolize the bloodthirsty doctor':

'Orthodox medicine was seen to be vampiric because of the Galenic tradition of bloodletting. In 1850, the medical botanist Albert Isaiah Coffin declared that, since the doctor asserts that disease is in the blood, he "attacks your veins like a vampire." In 1885, Wilkinson claimed that medicine was dead "but stirs and rises from its grave as a vampire; and is the night-haunting demon of the end of the Nineteenth Century." In language that was apocalyptic as well as gothic, Wilkinson both dismissed orthodox medicine as dead and yet feared its reanimated return, for vaccination, he implied, had breathed new life into the medical profession. (p. 139)

Over the next pages of her study, Durbach relates these notions to views of blood transfusion as well as themes from pieces of 19th century vampire fiction like Braddon's Good Lady Ducayne and Stoker's Dracula.

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James John Garth Wilkinson (1812-99) was an opponent of vaccination, as Nadja Durbach describes in her study Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in Negland 1853-1907 (Duke Univ. Press, 2005): 'The poor, claimed Wilkinson, are all "imbrued in each other's taints"; vaccination "mingles in a communism of blood the taints of the community."

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1897 - Bram Stokes the Fear Fires with Dracula

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1897 - Bram Stokes the Fear Fires with Dracula

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When Bram Stoker’s Dracula was published in 1897 it set off a chain of monstrous events that would change the horror genre forever. He certainly knew how to prey on people's fears and really stoked the fires of the anti-vaccine movement. Stoker also increased anxiety levels by giving Dracula the ability to shapeshift into a bat and fly, and a raging unrequited libido (Zinoman 3).

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1922- It's Time For My Close-up Herr Murnau

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1922- It's Time For My Close-up Herr Murnau

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Nosferatu translates from German to English as vampire. Being taken as a direct adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula, the first vampire movie takes audiences by silent storm. The timing of this movie also played to the audiences contagious fears. Nosferatu was filmed less than a year after the end of the 1918 global pandemic which claimed about 25 million lives worldwide (Zinoman 3).

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Talk about a Glow Up. Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula is what we all envision when we think of the vampire cliche. This rendition of the tale turns the vampire into a charismatic, debonaire, desirable character. With eyes that smolder and a bite that kills, Dracula takes the audiences weakness for attraction and makes it a deadly fear.

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The 1954 novel I Am Legend by Richard Matheson reignited the viral transmission paranoia that originally sparked the public's fascination with the vampire myth.  Recently there has been a link to the novel, and 2007 film, in the covid era anti-vaccination conspiracy theories. The novel  introduced apocalyptic horror onto the scene and made way for countless renditions of this variety (Zinoman 5).

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Seduction in the search for blood, fanned the flames of many 20th century vampire encounters. With Anne Rice on the scene composing her southern gothic novels, lust was the new rabies.🤣
The 70s did see the use of the vampire in a progressive attempt to shine a light on civil rights struggles with the movie Blackula. This movie was just the start of using vampires to highlight racial disparities in America.

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1980s and 90s - We Sure Are Far From Neverland

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1980s and 90s - We Sure Are Far From Neverland

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In the 80s the vampire genre starts to see the merger of the  myth and dark comedy. With the 1987 cult classic The Lost Boys hitting horror in the funny bone, the genre then opened up for shows like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its spinoff Angel in the 90s.
The AIDS epidemic also brought the disease tie-in to the genre with Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film, Bram Stoker's Dracula. The stark tone arcing back to the origins of the vampire myth was met with critical acclaim while playing on the very real fears surrounding blood and sex in the 90s (Vinoman 5).

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2000s - #TeamEdward #Sparkely #Twilight4Life

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2000s - #TeamEdward #Sparkely #Twilight4Life

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Twilight took the 2000s by brooding, steamy, awkward storm and gave every teen girl a team to be on. The movie's storyline  brought the vampires out of the shadows and into the realm of romantic heros fighting their natures for the love of others. The 2000s also gave rise to shows like True Blood and Black as Night which used their story lines as direct challenges to civil rights issues.

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2020s - Midnight Mass Takes Quarantine to a Whole New Level (Spoiler Alert)

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2020s - Midnight Mass Takes Quarantine to a Whole New Level (Spoiler Alert)

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In the 2021 thriller, Midnight Mass, Father Paul returns from a trip where an angel gave him his youth back, and gave him the "cure" to all that ails the people of his tiny community, its blood. The Father then begins adding small amounts of the angels blood to the communion wine for the whole town. This show does a major tie in to the vaccine fears of early vampire lore, taking what should be salvation and turning it into damnation, and directly relates to the current pandemic.

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The Future of The Vampire, The Myth That Never Dies. 

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The Future of The Vampire, The Myth That Never Dies. 

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The most recent season of American Horror Story turns to the covid fears of its audience with a character presenting with a hacking cough named Tuberculosis Karen. Now that the world has had its own fresh batch of hell, what's next for the vampire myth seems very frightening indeed. With more to be scared of both politically and medically, the possibilities of where the stories could go seem endless. Veteran horror director, Joe Dante, wrote in an email that “The pandemic has heightened our fear of each other, of infection and contagion, invisible droplets delivering a cataclysmic blow to our physical beings... I think a wave of vampire stories that captures a claustrophobic preoccupation with death and paranoia may be filling our screens next" (Zinoman 6).