by Hege Nabo

Created on: February 21, 2011

Vampires have played a prominent role in horror fiction throughout most of the 20th century, and are gaining in popularity. The creatures of the night still manage to frighten and entice after nearly two hundred years in popular fiction.

The books about emotional and vegetarian vampire Edward Cullen in the Twilight Saga has no doubt played an important part in the renewed interest. They have sold over 100 million copies and the second movie New Moon collected around $300 million in box offices. Google searches for vampires have more than doubled in the last five years.

There are several features people think they know about vampires. Up until recently they would all be repulsed by garlic and crucifixes, and they burned to ashes in daylight. They had pale, beautiful compositions and were sophisticated members of the nightly society.

Although vampires have existed since Ancient Persia and throughout China, India and Ancient Greece, the original literary vampire had its roots in medieval Eastern Europe. Contrary to the vampire today they were little more than reanimated corpses.

Before Polidori’s The Vampyre from 1819, they were puffy in appearance and far from able to blend in among society. The vampire Lord Ruthven who changed all this had “a winning tongue” and “many of the female hunters after notoriety attempted to win his attentions”.

The trend continued with sympathetic Varney the Vampire from 1845-47 and Carmilla from 1871. In 1897 the most famous of them all took the stage and has stayed there since: Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

One feature we most attribute to the vampires didn’t appear until this time: the fangs. It was to take another 80 years before they gained a conscience, or a soul, and started refusing human blood. The idea was first introduced in Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire in 1976 and later followed by Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997), Daybreakers (2009) and not to mention the Twilight Saga (2005).

The original Dracula did not perish in daylight like many contemporary vampires. Folkloric vampires were described as nocturnal, but they would not normally die. The first vampire to actually be vulnerable to the sun was Count Orlok in the movie Nosferatu from 1922.

Common concepts such as lack of reflection in mirrors, garlic, crucifixes and holy water probably have roots in the original puffy folklore vampire.

Garlic, for example, was a common mosquito repellent. The idea was possibly that what kept

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