Laura Wright 
The modern vampire is an alluring creature.
He is immortal, beautiful and eternally young. He lives in magnificent houses, dresses impeccably and possesses supernatural strength. Depending upon the story, he may be tragic, seductive, dangerous or even heroic.
We have literature and popular culture to thank for much of that.
The vampires of older folklore were usually something quite different.
They were dead.
And they looked like it.
Before the Romantic Vampire
There is no single ancient creature that can properly be called the original vampire. Stories involving the restless dead, blood-drinking spirits and beings that prey upon the living appeared in many cultures. The vampire familiar to Western audiences developed gradually, drawing especially heavily upon the revenant traditions of Eastern and Central Europe.
These creatures bore little resemblance to the elegant aristocrat who would eventually dominate vampire fiction.
The folkloric vampire was often believed to be an actual corpse that had returned from the grave.
It did not necessarily charm its victims.
Sometimes it simply came home.
When the Dead Returned
In older European traditions, the dead could become dangerous for numerous reasons. Improper burial, suicide, unusual circumstances surrounding death, perceived wickedness in life and violations of religious or community customs could all arouse suspicion.
Sometimes the supposed vampire was identified only after people in a village began dying.
The dead person might then be blamed for the illnesses and deaths of surviving relatives or neighbors. The grave could be opened so the body could be examined for evidence that the deceased was somehow still active.
What constituted evidence depended upon local belief.
A corpse that appeared insufficiently decomposed might be considered suspicious. So could blood or reddish fluid around the mouth. Changes in the appearance of the body after burial, now understood as ordinary aspects of decomposition, could be interpreted as signs that the corpse had been feeding.
To people without modern knowledge of decomposition, what they saw when a grave was opened could be terrifying.
And sometimes the corpse looked considerably healthier than everyone thought a corpse ought to look.
What Did a Traditional Vampire Look Like?
Popular folklore varied considerably, but old descriptions of suspected vampires were frequently grotesque.
Some were described as pale, gaunt or corpse-like. Others were supposedly swollen after feeding, their bodies bloated with blood. Accounts sometimes described reddish mouths, staring or fiery eyes, unusual fingernails, foul odors and other signs associated with the grave.
The famous vampire fangs were not always an essential feature.
Neither was the cape.
Nor the immaculate evening wear.
The vampire of folklore might look less like a mysterious count awaiting you in a candlelit castle and considerably more like a dead neighbor who had somehow climbed out of his grave.
That distinction is important.
The vampire was originally frightening partly because it was familiar.
It might have been someone you knew.
The Smell of the Grave
One particularly unpleasant feature of the folkloric vampire was its association with decomposition.
Modern vampire fiction frequently gives its undead characters impossibly perfect bodies. Older traditions had no such requirement. A revenant could retain the physical characteristics of death and burial.
That meant odor could become part of the horror.
The creature might smell of earth, decay or the grave itself.
There is something much more intimate about that conception of the vampire. You did not necessarily discover its presence because you glimpsed a mysterious figure disappearing into the darkness.
You might smell that something dead had entered the room.
Vampires Did Not Always Drink Blood
Blood drinking has become the defining characteristic of the vampire, but historical traditions were more complicated.
Some revenants were believed to drink blood. Others attacked or suffocated sleepers, consumed the vitality of living people, spread disease or simply caused members of a household to weaken and die.
In some traditions, the vampire’s greatest danger was not a dramatic attack at all.
It was death following death.
One family member died.
Then another.
Then another.
Without knowledge of infectious disease and modern medicine, people naturally searched for explanations. If the deaths began after a particular person had been buried, suspicion could eventually settle upon the grave.
Perhaps the first victim wasn’t merely dead.
Perhaps he was responsible for the others.
Opening the Grave
This belief occasionally resulted in the exhumation and mutilation of corpses.
Communities developed various methods for dealing with suspected revenants. Depending upon place and tradition, a body might be staked, decapitated, burned or otherwise treated to prevent it from leaving the grave.
Objects might also be placed with or upon the body to restrain it.
These practices can appear grotesque today, but they make considerably more sense when considered within the worldview of the people performing them.
If you genuinely believed that a dead person was killing the living, opening the grave was not desecration for its own sake.
It was protection.
The Vampire Becomes Respectable
Somewhere along the way, the vampire underwent one of the most remarkable rehabilitations in the history of monsters.
The rotting corpse became an aristocrat.
The grave clothes became evening clothes.
The hideous revenant became seductive.
Literature played an enormous role in this transformation. Eighteenth-century European fascination with reports of vampirism helped bring the creature into Western consciousness. Nineteenth-century writers then increasingly transformed the vampire into a sophisticated literary monster.
John Polidori’s The Vampyre, published in 1819, helped popularize the aristocratic vampire through the character Lord Ruthven.
Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, published in the 1870s, brought sexuality and seduction even more prominently into vampire literature.
Then came Bram Stoker.
Dracula, published in 1897, did not invent the vampire, but it became enormously influential in shaping what later generations imagined when they heard the word.
The twentieth century did the rest.
Stage productions, films, television, novels and eventually entire genres of romantic vampire fiction progressively transformed a creature once associated with disease, decomposition and fear of the dead.
From Monster to Fantasy
The transformation is remarkable.
For centuries, people occasionally dug up suspected vampires and mutilated their bodies because they were terrified that the dead might return.
Modern audiences sometimes envy them.
The vampire now promises eternal youth, extraordinary strength and freedom from ordinary human mortality. What was once regarded as a horrific condition can be portrayed almost as a gift.
Perhaps that says as much about us as the old vampire stories said about the people who told them.
Our ancestors feared that death might not be final.
We sometimes seem disappointed that it is.
The old vampire was not Prince Charming with fangs. It was disease, death and the terrible possibility that someone buried yesterday might come knocking tonight.
And unlike its beautiful modern descendant, the traditional vampire was something nobody wanted to become.
About the Author
