Vampire

• 1. Introduction

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  The vampire is a mythical creature that has haunted human imagination across nearly every culture on earth. In European folklore, these were not the pale, gaunt figures familiar from modern cinema. They were bloated, ruddy-faced, wearing burial shrouds, returning to the villages where they had lived to torment their own families. That image only shifted in the early 19th century, when literature began reshaping the myth into something altogether more seductive. What drove entire governments to dig up corpses and drive stakes through them? Why did a mass panic sweep through the Habsburg Empire in the early 18th century, leading officials to write formal reports on vampire activity? And how did a creature rooted in Slavic folk belief about decomposing bodies become one of the most persistent figures in global popular culture? Those are the threads this documentary pulls.

• 2. A Word From the Steppes

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  The word vampire arrived in Western European languages through a chain of borrowings that stretches back across the Eurasian steppes. The English word vampire, appearing in print as vampyre in 1732, came through the German Vampir, which was drawn from the Serbian word vampir. Yet the concept runs deeper than any single etymology. A pagan worship of upyri is attested in Old Russian as far back as the 11th through 13th centuries. Oxford and other authorities argue for a Turkish root, meaning witch, carried into Hungarian and then French. The spread of the belief has been linked to the migrations of the Kipchak-Cuman people across the Eurasian steppes, with origins traced to the regions around the Volga River and the Pontic steppes. What is almost universally accepted is that the modern word derives from Slavic languages, where nearly every branch has its own cognate form: Polish wąpierz and upiór, Ukrainian упир, Russian упырь, Czech and Slovak upír. The Albanian dhampir appears to combine two Gheg words: dham, meaning tooth, and pir, meaning to drink. It was a Polish Jesuit priest, Gabriel Rzączyński, who introduced the term to German readers in 1721, and after Austria gained control of parts of Serbia following the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, officials began formally documenting the local practice of exhuming and destroying suspected vampires.

• 3. The Folklore Creature

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  Folkloric vampires looked nothing like the cloaked aristocrats of later fiction. Villagers described them as bloated, with purplish or dark skin, blood seeping from their mouths and nostrils as they lay in their coffins with one eye open. Chewing sounds were reported coming from graves. The teeth, hair, and nails appeared to have grown since burial, though fangs specifically were not a standard feature. Causes of vampiric transformation were varied. In Slavic and Chinese traditions, a corpse jumped over by a cat or dog risked rising as one of the undead. In Russian belief, those who had rebelled against the Orthodox Church during their lives were especially vulnerable. The Albanian dhampir, a hybrid creature born of a vampiric father called the karkanxholl or lugat, held the unique ability to detect and kill the lugat, which was itself invisible to ordinary people. To prevent the dead from returning, communities buried corpses face-down, placed scythes or sickles near the grave, or scattered poppy seeds and millet on the ground so that any risen vampire would spend the night compulsively counting the grains. This obsessive counting appears in Chinese narratives about rice sacks, in Indian tales, and in South American stories of witches. Finding a suspected vampire required a virgin boy riding a virgin stallion, generally black, through the churchyard; the horse would refuse to pass over the correct grave. In Greek practice, a wax cross and a piece of pottery inscribed with the words Jesus Christ conquers were placed on the corpse.

• 4. The 18th-Century Panic

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  In the early 18th century, despite the Age of Enlightenment pressing back on folk superstition across Europe, reported vampire attacks surged. The panic began with an alleged outbreak in East Prussia in 1721 and spread through the Habsburg monarchy from 1725 to 1734. The first well-documented case centered on Petar Blagojević of Serbia, said to have died at age 62 and then returned to ask his son for food. When the son refused, he was found dead the next morning. Blagojević was accused of attacking neighbours, who died from what was described as blood loss. The second major case involved Miloš Čečar, a former soldier turned farmer, who died while haying; the deaths that followed in his village were attributed to his return. Government officials examined both bodies, produced written reports, and disseminated those accounts across Europe. Even officials joined locals in hunting and staking suspected vampires. At least sixteen contemporary treatises explored the theological and philosophical implications of the epidemic. Dom Augustine Calmet, a French theologian, published a comprehensive investigation in 1751, and its readership included Voltaire, who responded critically. The controversy ended when Empress Maria Theresa sent her personal physician, Gerard van Swieten, to examine the evidence. Van Swieten concluded that vampires did not exist. The Empress then passed laws prohibiting the opening of graves and the desecration of bodies, and other European countries followed her lead.

• 5. Bodies and Explanations

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  Author Paul Barber argued that vampire belief grew from pre-industrial societies confronting the unfamiliar process of decomposition. Rates of decay vary with temperature and soil composition, and many of the observable changes were unknown to ordinary villagers. As gases from decomposition accumulate in the torso, pressure forces blood to ooze from the nose and mouth, making a body look plump and well-fed, especially striking if the person had been pale or thin in life. In the Arnold Paole case, one exhumed woman was described by her neighbours as looking healthier than she ever had when alive. Driving a stake through a swollen, gas-filled body could produce a groan-like sound as gases escaped past the vocal cords, and other sounds as the gas moved through the body. The retreating skin and gums after death expose the roots of hair, nails, and teeth, creating the illusion of post-mortem growth. In the Blagojević case, the skin and nail beds emerging beneath the peeling outer layers were interpreted as new skin and new nails. In 1985, biochemist David Dolphin proposed a link between porphyria and vampire legend, suggesting blood consumption might alleviate the condition's symptoms. This theory received significant media attention but was subsequently rejected by medical experts, who noted Dolphin had confused fictional blood-drinking vampires with folkloric ones, many of whom did not drink blood at all. Neurologist Juan Gómez-Alonso examined rabies as a possible link; hypersensitivity to garlic and light, disrupted sleep patterns, hypersexuality, a drive to bite others, and frothing at the mouth are all symptoms of the disease, and wolves and bats are common carriers.

• 6. Literature and the Modern Myth

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  The literary vampire that most people picture today was largely invented in 1819 with John Polidori's story The Vampyre. Polidori was Lord Byron's personal physician, and the charismatic, aristocratic vampire Lord Ruthven was modelled on Byron himself, partly through Lady Caroline Lamb's satirical portrayal of Byron in her novel Glenarvon. Lord Ruthven's adventures later spawned a series of stage plays in which he became an antihero. Varney the Vampire, a gothic horror serial by James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest, ran as penny dreadful pamphlets from 1845 to 1847 and was eventually published in book form at 868 double-columned pages. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla followed in 1871, notable as a lesbian vampire story in which the creature is portrayed with a degree of sympathy. Bram Stoker drew on both these predecessors, as well as on Emily Gerard's 1888 travel book The Land Beyond the Forest and an account of Vlad Tepes passed on by a London colleague, when researching his 1897 novel Dracula. The book's opening chapter was omitted from the 1897 publication and only released in 1914 as Dracula's Guest. Stoker's portrayal of vampirism as a disease of contagious demonic possession, with undertones of sex, blood, and death, resonated in a Victorian Europe where tuberculosis and syphilis were widespread. Several attributes now considered essential to the vampire only crystallized during the 19th century: fangs appeared with Varney and Count Dracula, while vulnerability to sunlight entered through Count Orlok in F. W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu. The cape with its high collar was introduced by playwright Hamilton Deane in 1920s stage productions of Dracula as a theatrical trick to help the character appear to vanish. The US Library of Congress selected Universal's 1931 Dracula, starring Béla Lugosi and directed by Tod Browning, for the National Film Registry in 2000.

• 7. A Global Creature

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  Vampire-like beings appear independently across Africa, Asia, and the Americas, sharing the thirst for blood though differing dramatically in form. In West Africa, the Ashanti describe the iron-toothed, tree-dwelling asanbosam; the Ewe speak of the adze, capable of taking the form of a firefly and preying on children. The Betsileo of Madagascar tell of the ramanga, a living outlaw who drinks the blood of nobles. In the Philippines, two main vampiric creatures exist: the Tagalog mandurugo, which takes the form of a beautiful girl by day and grows wings and a long hollow tongue by night to feed on sleeping victims, and the Visayan manananggal, an older woman who severs her upper torso to fly on bat-like wings and prey on sleeping pregnant women. The Malaysian penanggalan detaches only her fanged head to seek blood, and Malaysians hung thistles around doors and windows to catch her intestines on the thorns as she tried to enter. In Vietnam, the ma cà rồng was described by 18th-century Confucian scholar Lê Quý Đôn as a creature that stuffed its toes into its nostrils at night to fly into houses with pregnant women, then cleaned itself in barrels of sappanwood water to pass undetected by day. In New England during the late 18th and 19th centuries, tuberculosis, known then as consumption, was blamed on nightly visits by dead family members who had themselves died of the disease. The most recently recorded American case involved Mercy Brown, who died at nineteen in Exeter, Rhode Island, in 1892. Her father and the family physician removed her from her tomb two months after her death, cut out her heart, and burned it to ashes. In Romania in February 2004, relatives of a man named Toma Petre followed the same procedure: disinterring his corpse, removing his heart, burning it, and mixing the ashes with water to drink.

• 8. Meaning and Persistence

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  Welsh psychoanalyst Ernest Jones argued in his 1931 treatise On the Nightmare that vampire legends give shape to unconscious drives: love, guilt, and hate fuel the idea that the dead return, and mourners project their own longing for reunion onto the corpse, imagining that the deceased must share that desire. Where unconscious guilt complicates that longing, Jones saw it transform through repression into dread, with desire replaced by fear and love replaced by what he called oral sadism. Voltaire, writing in his entry on Vampires in the Dictionnaire philosophique in 1764, noted the irony that just as belief in literal vampires was fading, stock-jobbers and brokers were openly sucking the blood of the people in broad daylight from very agreeable palaces. Karl Marx defined capital as dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour. Werner Herzog in Nosferatu the Vampyre gave the metaphor an additional twist when the bourgeois solicitor Jonathan Harker himself becomes the next vampire. The tabletop role-playing game Vampire: The Masquerade introduced terms like embrace and sire into contemporary vampire fiction. The HBO series True Blood, premiering in 2008, used the vampire's existence as a framework for discussing legal equality and religious belief. Modern vampire subcultures include practitioners of what they call sanguine vampirism, the actual consumption of blood, operating largely within the Goth subculture, drawing on the fiction of Anne Rice and the aesthetics of Victorian England. Reports of vampire attacks circulated in Malawi in late 2002 and early 2003, with mobs killing one person and attacking several others including a regional governor; fear and violence recurred there in late 2017. The vampire bat itself was named after the folkloric creature rather than the other way around, as the Oxford English Dictionary records the folkloric use in English from 1734 and the zoological classification not until 1774.