By Matthew Beresford
In blood-soaked lore passed down the centuries, the vampire is a monster of unending fascination: from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this seductive lover of blood haunts pop culture and inhabits our darkest imaginings. The cultural heritage of the vampire is a wealthy and sundry story that's now ably documented in From Demons to Dracula, a compelling learn of the vampire fable that finds why this creature of the undead fascinates us so.
Beresford’s chronicle roams from the mountains of jap Europe to the foggy streets of Victorian England to Hollywood, as he investigates the portrayal of the vampire in background, literature, and artwork. beginning with the unique Dracula, Vlad the Impaler, and his prestige as a countrywide hero in Romania, he endeavors to winnow out truths from the complicated legend and folklore. From Demons to Dracula tracks the evolution of the vampire as an icon and supernatural creature, drawing on classical Greek and Roman myths, witch trials and medieval plagues, Gothic literature, or even modern works corresponding to Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire and Elizabeth Kostova’s The Historian. Beresford additionally seems on the frequent influence of reveal vampires from tv indicates, vintage videos starring Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee, and newer movies resembling Underworld and Blade. Whether as a demon of the underworld or a light-fearing hunter of people, the vampire has persisted throughout the centuries, the booklet finds, as powerfully symbolic determine for human issues with existence, dying, and the afterlife.
A wide-ranging and engrossing chronicle, From Demons to Dracula casts this blood-thirsty nightstalker as a remarkably complicated and telling totem of our nightmares, actual and imagined.
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Additional resources for From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth
Sample text
Ence between vampires and witches is that vampires could not be found and slain, yet the tragedy is that any woman or man could have been put to death as a witch, so long as there was ‘evidence’, be it a tortured confession or a ‘heretical gift’ such as the power of healing or herbology. It proved somewhat difficult to punish the undead harasser or blood-drinking fiend, and so the educated could dismiss the vampire myth which was so prevalent among the peasants, as they saw no evidence for it. It would take the ‘Age of Reason and Enlightenment’ to finally expose the vampire to all parts of society, fuelled largely by the European vampire epidemics of the eighteenth century.
In Transylvanian vampire folklore it is said that these witches and vampires like to ride on hemp brakes or shovels if these items are left lying about, and this may be a possible origin for the image of witches riding on broomsticks 62 in Western European traditions. It is also believed that these different types of vampires, be they the dead or live type, often meet at crossroads, churchyards, ruined houses or in the forest,26 and again these are all places associated with vampire tales in the West, most especially the churchyard.
21 In reality these ‘treasures’ were actually Roman offerings or coin hordes, but fuelled local superstitions, as it is believed that on St George’s Day the treasure burned and gave off a bluish flame (an event witnessed at the beginning of Dracula). Also notable is the feast of St Elias (20 July / 1 August); it is said that if lightning were to strike a house on this day and cause it to catch fire, one must not extinguish it, as God himself has lit the fire. 22 It was said that the inhabitants of one village witnessed the image of the Virgin Mary and of Christ ‘miraculously’ appearing on wooden objects such as walls and signposts.