Truly, Madly, Deadly_ The Unofficial True Blood Companion - Becca Wilcott [7]
The vampire made its first fictional appearances in 1819 when John Polidori wrote The Vampyre. Rumored to be modeled after a domineering Lord Byron (earlier incorrectly believed to be the text’s author), Polidori’s villain was suave and seductive but evil. Following this, James Malcolm Rymer’s horrific and gruesome Varney the Vampire tales were published to great success from 1845 to 1847. In 1871, Sheridan Le Fanu introduced a lesbian vampire to the horror canon with his story Carmilla.
Without a doubt, though, it’s Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897) upon which most modern vampire portrayals are based. First publishing his book to mediocre response, Stoker died in near poverty 10 years before F. W. Murnau’s film adaptation Nosferatu (1922) and Hamilton Deane’s stage adaptation (1924) brought Stoker’s monster to the mainstream, with comparisons between vampirism and contagious diseases such as syphilis, turning Stoker’s vampire into an apt contemporary metaphor.
But would the real Dracula stand up? Stoker’s protagonist has long been rumored to be based on Vlad Tepes, a bloodthirsty medieval character who impaled his victims and was called Vlad the Impaler. But scholar Dr. Elizabeth Miller has good reason for debate. In her book Bram Stoker’s Notes for Dracula, she and co-author Robert Eighteen-Bisang dissect Stoker’s handwritten notes. They discovered that nowhere in them was there a reference to Vlad. Instead, they discovered a note about a 15th-century ruler named “Dracula,” along with an additional notation that Stoker had learned that the Romanian translation for “Dracula” meant “The Devil.” Stoker wrote “DRACULA MEANS THE DEVIL,” leading the scholars to speculate that Stoker, in fact, did not have Vlad the Impaler in mind when naming his iconic and legendary character.
The vampire often rose again in the 20th century, particularly as more vampire fiction appeared as ongoing series of books, often crossing over into the young adult and romance markets. J. R. Ward’s Black Dagger Brotherhood series, L. A. Banks’s Vampire Huntress Legend series, Laurell K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, Kim Harrison’s The Hollows series, and Charlaine Harris’s Sookie Stackhouse novels all portray vampires in a new light (pardon the pun), many diverging from the original legend of vampires as the ruthless monsters who feed without conscience.
It was Marilyn Ross’s Barnabas Collins series (1966–71), based loosely on the television series Dark Shadows, that issued in the sympathetic, tragic vampire, less evil than existential, the obvious predecessor to True Blood’s Bill Compton. This was followed by Anne Rice’s hugely influential and epic Vampire Chronicles (1976–2003), picked up again in Stephenie Meyer’s paranormically popular Twilight series (2005–2008).
Bats, Vampires, & Dracula by Elizabeth Miller
Ever wonder which came first — the bat or the vampire? How did bats become so associated with Count Dracula that the poor maligned creatures are forced to lurk in the recesses of 20th-century popular culture? Is it all the fault of that Irish writer Bram Stoker and his novel Dracula (1897)? Hopefully, the following paragraphs will answer these (and other) questions.
As all bat lovers know, there is a species known as the “vampire bat,” the most common of which is Desmodus rotundus. Found only in Mexico and parts of Central and South America, they feed primarily on the blood of livestock. A vampire bat will bite its prey with razor-sharp teeth while the prey is sleeping. Rather than suck the blood, it laps it up, much as a cat laps milk.
As for vampires (those blood-sucking monsters of fiction and film), these