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    LIFE Vampires
    LIFE Vampires
    LIFE Vampires
    Ebook175 pages1 hour

    LIFE Vampires

    By Meredith Corporation

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    About this ebook

    This special edition from the editors of LIFE Magazine examines our long fascination with vampires; shows how vampire bats live and thrive; opens the book of 'Dracula' and revisits some of history's greatest cinematic portrayals of vampires.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMeredith Corporation
    Release dateOct 8, 2021
    ISBN9781547859641
    LIFE Vampires

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      Book preview

      LIFE Vampires - Meredith Corporation

      Our Long Fascination with Vampires

      For many centuries and across the globe, there’s been an undying attraction.

      The most consequential night in the history of fright occurred in June of 1816 at Villa Diodati on the banks of Lake Geneva, where the Romantic poets Lord Byron and Percy Shelley were vacationing with Shelley’s 19-year-old fiancée, Mary Godwin, her half-sister Claire Clairmont, and Byron’s physician and traveling companion, John Polidori. Confined to their villa by two weeks of torrential rain, they began telling ghost stories to amuse themselves. Three years earlier, Byron had written The Giaour, a poem that warns of a corpse who, as Vampyre sent, is torn from its grave to suck the blood of all thy race. On this particular evening in Switzerland, he suggested that each traveler should produce a supernatural tale as entertainment for the others.

      At midnight, Dr. Polidori recorded in his diary, as Mary nursed her four-month-old baby, the group really began to talk ghostly. L[ord] B[yron] repeated some verses of Coleridge’s ‘Christabel,’ of the witch’s breast; when silence ensued, and Shelley, suddenly shrieking and putting his hands to his head, ran out of the room with a candle. Threw water in his face and gave him ether. He was looking at Mrs. S[helley], and suddenly thought of a woman he had heard of who had eyes instead of nipples, which, taking hold of his mind, horrified him.

      By the end of that wet ungenial summer, Mary Shelley had conceived the germ of Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus (1818), and Polidori, then 20, completed The Vampyre, a short novel whose profound creative impact still endures in literature, theater, television, and film.

      Polidori’s vampire, the rakish Lord Ruthven—said to be based on Byron himself—is an amoral debaucher of young women with a dead grey eye who stalks London, drinking the blood of his victims. The Vampyre was delivered to the Countess of Breuss and pretty much forgotten until the spring of 1819, when, amid Polidori’s acrimonious falling out with Byron, it was published in the New Monthly Magazine. To capitalize on Byron’s notoriety, the publisher released The Vampyre under Byron’s name. Polidori was outraged at this violation of his copyright. For his part, Byron disavowed authorship: I have a personal dislike to Vampires, and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to reveal their secrets.

      Translated quickly into French, The Vampyre appeared in Paris as a popular stage play and gave birth to so many imitations that a decade later a critic complained, There is not a theatre in Paris without a vampire!

      The film critic Manohla Dargis reckons that since the publication of Polidori’s The Vampyre, all stories involving the creatures have been about repressed desire, untamed hunger, and the possibility of blood. In a New York Times piece centered on the film Twilight, Dargis wrote: "...the blood that flows from violently pierced necks… represents ravishment of a more graphic kind. This is the ravishment that, in its pantomime of seduction and surrender, transforms innocence like that of Bram Stoker’s sacrificial virgin, Lucy, in Dracula into ‘voluptuous wantonness.’"

      Two centuries after The Vampyre hit the stands, we’re up to our necks in feral figures who prey on the living—or shrink from them. Of all supernatural monsters, none is as boldly erotic as the vampire, who more often than not takes control of victims. Dominance and submission come together, said Anne Rice, best known for her series of novels The Vampire Chronicles. The vampire must feed nightly, and he or she tends to attack his or her hosts when they’re most helpless—usually, when they’re asleep.

      The connection between vampirism and the bedroom, while not stated explicitly, did not go unnoticed by Sigmund Freud, who, in 1896, the same year Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, started using the term psychoanalysis to refer to his new clinical method and its underlying theories concerning unconscious thoughts and motivations. Freud reasoned that every child goes through a series of fixed psychosexual stages: oral, anal, phallic, latency, and genital. The name of each stage, apart from latency, highlights the area of the body which is then the main source of pleasure but also the main potential source of frustration, writes David Cohen in The Psychology of Vampires. At the oral stage the baby is all mouth. He or she gets satisfaction from putting objects into it. Babies suck, breastfeed and bite. In doing so they pander to the infantile ‘id,’ which for Freud represented the wildest primitive instincts.

      In Freudian terms, the vampire’s problem is that he or she is a sadist fixated at the oral stage, and vampire tales permit us to contemplate acts, desires, fears, and repressed impulses we’re loath to admit to consciously. Cohen suspects that some of Freud’s acolytes would take this to mean that vampires wanted revenge for some trauma, which explains why they have to bite— the most primitive form of aggression.

      J. Gordon Melton, author of the monumental reference work The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead, contends that the perceived eroticism of vampires makes them especially alluring to women, who outnumber men two to one when it comes to reading vampire lore and joining vampire fan clubs. Female vampires are so profoundly attractive to their male victims that the poor souls often wish to die to be with their devilish mates. At the same time, contemporary society is awash in so-called psychic vampires who drain emotional energy rather than blood and—by feeding on your eagerness to listen and care for them— leave you sapped and overwhelmed.

      In his recent study The Vampire: A New History, Nick Groom, a professor of English literature at the University of Macau, argues that the vampire represents blasphemous life, the life that is living but that should not be living. A vampire, he says, is the thing that inhabits one’s body but is not oneself. The spirit of a dead person, a vampire was capable of all sorts of wickedness, like changing the weather or preventing a farmer’s cows from giving milk. As for recognizing

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