Monster Men: Creatures of the Night

El Greco’s Christ Blessing depicts Christ with His right hand raised and two fingers out, as is the typical gesture for a blessing, a neutral expression with subtle hints of something more meaningful and introspective, looking right at the viewer, and His left hand on a… magic ball… which I guess is where Jesus gets his magic powers from.

The cover art for the Dungeons & Dragons expansion Curse of Strahd shows the vampire Strahd looking right at the viewer from slightly above eyeline - even though he’s sitting down, he’s looking down at us. His right hand is raised with two fingers extended as he debonairly spills playing cards onto the floor - a common visual metaphor about as played out as chess pieces for aristocratic games of political intrigue. Blessings that could turn out to be a curse, curses that may become blessings. In his left hand he holds a glass of what you first read as red wine, but of course, you know really isn’t - it’s the sacred source of his magical powers.

This similarity is a striking visual lesson in how we depict vampires - if not on a level with God then at least as powerful as God in human form. This conflict comes up again and again - on the one hand, vampires, and on the other hand, the faithful. Across eras where the tradition in art was deeply religious, and at times when the church held enormous sway in the lives of the people of Europe, vampire stories pitted the church against this sinister aristocracy. Perhaps as propaganda against the growing power of these atheist oligarchs, but sometimes as something slightly alluring, a temptation, a seduction away from the holy light into the darkness, because as much as we might see vampires as an allegory that depicts a group as villainous, scheming, parasitic, and evil to the bone, we also have to admit, vampires are pretty fucking sexy.

Monster Men: Creatures of the Night

By Eric Sophia McAllister

1. Vampires: A History

We’re about to get into a history of vampire stories, but I think there’s a really important caveat I should provide first.

We are not here to pretend that culture follows a cohesive narrative. Culture is not a monolith but rather comprises the infinitesimal actions of individuals - some following discernible patterns, some influenced by the material, some by the ideological. Vampire myths don’t come from one origin point, nor do they follow one simple path. My mission in this series is to discuss what monster stories mean, why we tell them and where they come from, but not to construct a Campbellian conspiracy theory of culture that sees all vampire stories as intrinsically the same and tracks them back to one historical moment.

There are, in fact, lots of myths of evil cannibalistic undead from around the world with no clear connections that would suggest a common cultural lineage. The problem, as is observable in modern vampire myths, is that you will rarely find a pale undead immortal blood-sucker who has an affinity for bats, mist and wolves and fears sunlight, but instead lots of myths about a pale guy who drinks blood, or an undead nocturnal creature that is killed by sunlight, or a bat-winged blood-sucking demon who is driven away by garlic, and so on. Every story has its own cultural context and meaning, and comes to take on new features and with them new meanings as culture evolves. This is why I’m a little bothered by “vampires are rich people” - but we’ll get to that properly later.

Vampires or vampire-adjacent monsters truly pop up everywhere: In Norse mythology there’s the Draugr; In sumerian mythology the Edimmu and the Lilu; In jewish folklore, estries were owl-winged bloodthirsty female demons; In Australian Aboriginal folklore there is a bloodsucking monster called a Yara-ma-yha-who, which ambushes victims to drink their blood and slowly turns the victim into one of them, but it isn’t a bat or even a bird - it’s kind of a little red frog-guy.

In Native American folklore there are some vampire-adjacent monsters: Algonquian folklore has a cannibalistic immortal creature called a windigo that was human until it committed a terrible sin like cannibalism and was condemned to wander eternally eating every person they find until they are killed. In Navajo culture there are stories of “skin-walkers” who turn into animals at night to prey on humans, can hypnotise people by looking at them and can only be killed with certain special weapons. Many tribes have stories about a mosquito man who can suck the blood and sometimes brains of unknowing victims.

Maori culture has another vampire-adjacent myth, the Patupaiarehe. These were pale, super-strong immortal beings who lived in invisible villages and preferred to eat raw food because they feared fire. They also could apparently control mist and fog and only came out on misty or foggy days or at night because the sunlight could kill them. In this story however, they are an immortal race of creatures rather than former mortals.

Chinese migrant labourers during the Qing dynasty who died far from home were transported on a rig made of bamboo that carried them standing upright and bouncing slightly, giving rise to a chinese vampire myth called the jiangshi, a hopping vampire who would feed on the qi of the living. It was the corpse-driver, a mythical necromancer, who was the especially fearful figure in this story, who would magically bind the hands and legs of the jiangshi and prod them to make them hop all the way home - this of course, bears some comparison to the zombie myth of haitian folklore, where a necromancer would resurrect the dead to work eternally as slaves. You can apparently deter a jiangshi from chasing you by throwing handfuls of rice or salt at it, which leads me to a point: european and american vampires don’t hop, nor are they driven away by rice, because different things are different and though jiangshi and vampires are identified as cultural equivalents, like all stories they don’t actually carry the same cultural meaning.

The vampire myth is extremely mutable, and part of that must be attributed to how often different cultures seem to independently invent more or less the same idea. We could go vampire hunting in indigenous folklore for creatures that contain some or even all of the features of modern western vampires, but this would be anachronistic - we would be applying an ill-fitting standard onto vampire-adjacent stories of the past. But...

Let’s give that a go anyway, just for fun:

In the Sumerian King List, Gilgamesh’s dad is supposedly a Lilu, a kind of spirit that eternally wanders the plains. This species of spirit is Lilu when masculine or Lilitu when feminine in the sumerian and babylonian texts. It also has associations with owls and, though it’s unclear partly because of translation, partly scarcity of data and partly because the culture of these stories spans enormous gulfs of both time and space, but it may be a shapeshifter who can become night birds or even bats.

This, although debated by archaeologists, may cross over with Ereshkigal the Sumerian queen of the underworld, who was depicted as a woman with owl wings and feet, and who may be the subject of the famous Queen of the Night relief, although some scholars argue this depicts Lilith, the original wife of Adam before Eve. Some versions of the Jewish tradition see Lilith as having become the queen of all evil and a bloodsucking demon responsible for crib deaths, although to me that just sounds like Adam taking the breakup really hard. Either way we may appear to have the first vampire myth. The Hebrew bible mentions Lilith once and identifies her with owls, though the Dead Sea Scrolls talk about Lilith in the plural as a type of entity, which would track with the idea of Lilith coming from Lilu.

However, a funny thing happens here where with the spirit species Lilu becoming the singular entity Lilith, especially with their shapeshifting powers, and so some myths see Lilith as having a male and female form, as well as some Jewish scholarship arguing that Lilith was the snake who offered Eve her forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden, which - I don’t know about you lads, but to me that sounds kinda sus.

So the first vampire was a transgender lesbian who spat in the face of god, married the devil and was responsible for infant mortality. Pog. In this way, being a trans lesbian night queen, Lady Dimitrescu from Resident Evil Village honours the original vampire tradition.

See? That’s a lot of fun but it also involves a lot of leaps. It makes a neat little narrative and it certainly makes me happy to buy into it, but it doesn’t actually stop to interrogate why any of the people telling those stories were telling them.

What I’m trying to avoid here is sending the message that a story necessarily carries implicit meaning between cultural contexts rather than the reality that usually those cultural contexts render it with their own meanings. In this sense tracking Lilith through from sumerian spirit to jewish demon is potentially unhelpful, but what can be useful is to look at how these ideas were projected backwards by more modern people telling vampire stories.

I’m not the first one by a long shot to make the biblical connection with vampires. In fact, many modern vampire mythologies posit Cain - the son of Adam and Eve who slew his brother Abel and was punished by God with a curse to walk the earth eternally - as the first vampire. Others claim Lilith as the progenitor of vampirism. What’s pretty interesting in the more recent culturally christian vampire mythologies is the need to fit vampires into the story of the bible. I get it, when I really enjoy a story, I also go home and write 40 extra chapters of fan fiction where all the characters are sexy undead trying to give the protagonist The Bad Succ.

We need to start talking about the middle ages and onwards, and the development of vampire mythology through this era, and as we do I want to remind everyone again that this is a huge amount of time and variation of culture, even though there are more consistent through-lines from here on. Why this period, then, if it’s just another mythological strain? Well firstly, from the 12th through the 16th century vampire myths originating in Eastern Europe started to take the forms that we’re familiar with today. Then, in the 18th and 19th century, people started reporting cases and sightings en masse. Yeah. Pretty exciting lead there, right? Bet you can’t wait to hear about that bit - but guess what? We’re gonna talk more about Jesus first.

As before, storytellers prefer to see vampires as a cohesive part of their religious view as antagonists, rather than a separate form of superstition, and as such: vampire-like demons appear in King James’ 1597 dissertation Daemonologie; A romanian (at the time wallachian) prince in 1652 passed laws guiding people on how to deal with Strigoi - the myth that would later be the basis for much of Dracula; Voltaire even has writing about vampires; there was a whole-ass theological debate in the Catholic church about how vampires not decaying bore similarities to Saints which had to be ended by the literal actual Pope writing in 1749, basically, “guys, please chill out, vampires don’t exist.”

That comparison, though, between the un-decaying bodies of Saints and the undead bodies of vampires really does put them on a level, or near-level with the corporeal holiness of Christ. I have to say, If they would just reboot the franchise with Jesus as a transmasc goth vampire hunter, Christianity would probably get a lot more subscribers. I can picture him now with the Resi Village Heisenberg outfit, pointing a crossbow right at a vampire’s face going “Your sins. Are Forgiven.” Blam!

If we can take one thing from the volume of proto-vampire myths we discussed before, although they have their own particular meanings, it’s that: just as stories about what happens to you after you die have been popular across many cultures, many many cultures have also told stories about evil, life-draining undead. It seems only natural that Christians would fit vampires into their mythology too.

Okay, but what’s all this about vampire sightings? Vampires aren’t real. You’d know if there were real vampires, wouldn’t you? If there was something preying on the people around you, you’d know, right?

In one of the earliest cases of a vampire sighting, a Serbian peasant called Petar Blagojević died in 1725, and within 8 days, 9 other people had first grown weak and weary, and then died. According to contemporary accounts, the others who died said that Blagojević rose from his grave to strangle them in the night just before they died. Now you might say Sophie, isn’t this obviously just a spate of tuberculosis cases? And to that I would have to say, isn’t that exactly what a vampire would love you to think? These Serbian peasants weren’t taking any chances, and they had an Imperial Provisor come down to witness them drive a stake through Blagojević’s heart.

According to the Provisor’s report, when they dug him up, Petar’s hair and nails had grown, and there was blood around his mouth, and when they staked him, more blood came out of him. And yeah, he had only been dead a few days, and it’s a well known misconception caused by the shrivelling of corpses that hair and nails grow, and yes, coughing up blood is a symptom of tuberculosis and other diseases… but what if that’s just what a vampire would want you to think? Nope, better burn the body!

And what about Arnold Paole, the Serbian soldier who often said he had been plagued by a vampire but had cured himself. He had an accident and broke his neck, but within a month of his death, four people started saying that he had come back and was plaguing them, and then all of them dropped dead. So the villagers, convinced there was a vampire in their midst, dug Paole back up. When they opened the coffin, his hair and nails had grown long (according to the villagers), and he was covered in blood and red like he had been feeding on the blood of others (according the villagers) so they staked him, making him shriek and struggle (according to the villagers).

It’s probably worth noting that this happened within a year of Blagojević’s case in the same part of Serbia.

BUT six years later in the same village, seventeen people died in only three months! During the winter! After illnesses of varying lengths...

Antoine Augistin Calmet, a french monk writing in 1751 (part of that theological debate about vampires I mentioned earlier) wrote in his analysis of the case, that "They discovered at last, after much search, that the defunct Arnold Paul had killed not only the four persons of whom we have spoken, but also several oxen, of which the new vampires had eaten, and amongst others the son of Millo. Upon these indications they resolved to disinter all those who had died within a certain time, etc. Amongst forty, seventeen were found with all the most evident signs of vampirism; so they transfixed their hearts and cut off their heads also, then cast their ashes into the river.”

Good job guys. Gottem. Nailed it. Vampires, dealt with. What a relief.

It stands out to me that during the middle ages in Europe, a popular way to deal with disease was with flowers. The so-called “miasma theory” was that the good air of the flowers drove away the bad air of disease, however of the wild flowers you could pick to drive off diseases, there are worse choices than garlic, which contains allicin, a broadly antimicrobial chemical.

Across Europe throughout the 1700s and into the 1800s people were gripped by a vampire mania, with many more vampire sightings and bodies being dug up and in some cases, staked, and by the end of the 19th century it had spread to America. In 1892, a woman called Mary Eliza Brown in Exeter, Rhode Island, contracted tuberculosis. From her, three of her children - Mary Olive, Edwin and Mercy - all caught it as well, and when the Mary Eliza, Mary Olive and Mercy all died, members of the community began to believe that a member of the family had been a vampire who was preying on the others. Mary Eliza’s widower, George, gave permission to exhume the bodies, perhaps in the hope that it would provide a cure for his son, and when Mercy, aged 19, was exhumed, her body was not decomposed to a degree that satisfied the community, so they decided that she must have been the vampire. Following the recommendations of folklore, they cut out and burned her heart and liver, mixed the ashes into a tonic and gave the tonic to Edwin, who died anyway, because it was tuberculosis, and not vampires.

This story is particularly noteworthy as being an exciting appearance of vampires in the new world and was sensational to the Edwardian press. HP Lovecraft, who also lived in Rhode Island, mentioned “the Mercy Brown incident” in one of his short stories, and Bram Stoker based the character of Lucy Westenra on Mercy Brown.

So I hope it’s clear at this point that vampires have acted not only as a metaphor for disease across mythology and storytelling, but also have inspired a mass panic around disease because of the association. It’s hard to wrap your head around the idea that something is just picking off the people in your community and there’s nothing you can do about besides boring quarantine measures, and disinfecting things, but if you’re hiding from vampires and purifying the undead it’s a bit more exciting. In some traditions, pouring boiling water all over a grave is a way to get rid of vampires, which might even be where the tradition of holy water comes from. In some vampire myths, the body bloats and swells as they transform into the monster, and some cultures have practiced stabbing and staking the bodies of the dead so that they can’t swell up after death.

It’s easy to see posthumous stakings and vampire mania as the actions of ill-informed superstitious fools, but it’s scary to live through times of disease, and even today there are huge numbers of people who think that 5G towers cause coronavirus because blood-drinking elites are infecting people so they can hypnotise and control them, and that only exposure to uranium or swallowing horse de-wormer will help.

It’s worth contemplating that the earliest, most famous cases in Europe came from the same area of Serbia at around the same time, and what was going on there at that time? The region had been temporarily annexed by the Austrian monarchy. A tonne of people living under a foreign imperial power they had no particular reason to trust turned to faith and superstition for their answers. Sounds familiar to me.

1. A Man with no reflection

As Franz Lieber put it, “There are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood.” When Lieber wrote that, he was introducing the idea of a psychic vampire who feeds off of the essential life force of people around - interestingly similar to the Jiangshi, or chinese hopping vampire, that we mentioned earlier. If you have a myth that, as myths often do, represents a social force as a corporeal character, inevitably that character is going to become more literally associated with people who behave in a predatory way.

I don’t know about you, but I sure am glad that vampires have moved into the realm of popular fiction, and all those frenzies of vampire sightings ended in the 1800s, huh? Well… most of them anyway.

In 1970 there were a series of vampire and ghost sightings around Highgate cemetery in London. In particular, two men called David Farrant and Sean Manchester got a lot of publicity for reporting to news outlets that they had seen spooky things in the cemetery. The news took their reports and made them even more sensational - first there was a vampire, then a vampire king, then the vampire king was practicing black magic. Farrant and Manchester were both clearly inspired by the attention.

And then they started desecrating graves.

In August, police found the remains of a corpse that had been dug up, decapitated and burned. A local paper interviewed Sean Manchester, who said “These same Satanists that desecrate Highgate Cemetery are disciples of ‘The Evil One,’ the vampire, and intend to spread the cult in the hope of corrupting the world.”

In the increased patrols in response to the incident, the police picked up David Farrant near the cemetery carrying a stake and crucifix. Not to be outdone, Manchester apparently went with a group of friends and a psychic to find the vampire in the cemetery a few days later, and went as far as opening a coffin lid before deciding against it.

Farrant and Manchester’s rivalry continued for decades, spurred on by media attention. At one point, rumours started circulating that they were going to meet on friday the 13th for a “magician’s duel”, which sadly never happened. Truly a tragic loss to comedy.

Eventually, Farrant was jailed for desecrating graves in the cemetery, although it’s not really Farrant and Manchester that I want to focus on here, but rather the media. The British press are well known for being parasitic scum who should be tried for crimes against journalism. Was that too direct? Oh well, it’s true. After ITV broadcast initial reports of a vampire sighting in 1970, a full-on swarm of people invaded the cemetery, even with police trying to keep them out.

I think it’s pretty interesting that of the Highgate Vampire’s appearances in popular culture, the Buffy The Vampire comic explicitly turns it into an emotional vampire, feeding off people’s trauma, parasitically draining victims of their emotional energy to make itself grow. The 1970 vampire hunter mob is an obvious precursor to the kind of weaponised unreality that we experience today. It’s an example of the press wielding probably more power than they realised they had in that situation.

While Salem’s Lot is the most well-known Stephen King vampire story, the one that’s really worth thinking about here is a short story called Nightflyer. In it, a photojournalist working for a sensationalist true crime magazine flies from place to place documenting the grizzly crime scenes of what turn out to be the victims of a vampire. We learn through the story the utter shamelessness of the protagonist, and at the end when the vampire shows up, he gives a very Green-Goblin-esque we are not so different, you and I speech. On its own, Nightflyer might come off a little bit edgy, but when you think about the Highgate Vampire, or as I say, the news media landscape we deal with today, it seems more poignant.

At this point I’m going more by each meaning of vampire stories rather than a history because in the modern era there are too many stories to make a clean history of. Okay now: If we’re going to talk about a class of people who are most comparable to parasitic blood-sucking vampires, it would obviously be people who write for WatchMojo dot com. And as a close second, rich people.

Vampires are an incredibly fitting metaphor for the ruling class. At time of writing this, if you die without a will in Cornwall, everything you own now belongs to Prince Charles. That’s a real actual law in effect now.

Vampirism is also a very handy metaphor for capitalism. Capitalism is, after all, an expanded form of landlordism and rent-seeking, and what is more parasitic than the systemic violence of charging people money for things like housing, food, healthcare and water? Again: writing for WatchMojo dot com. Famously, even Karl Marx used the metaphor of vampirism at various points in Das Kapital, saying for example:“Capital is dead labor, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor, and lives the more, the more labor it sucks”

I agree Karl, capitalism does suck.

One of the more comprehensive allegories for capitalism that modern culture has produced is the tabletop roleplaying game Vampire The Masquerade and more specifically its best video game adaptation, Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines. There’s more I could get into, and VtMB truly deserves a deep and thoughtful analysis, but if I were to give examples it would miss the forest for the trees.

For example, in VtMB when The Prince wants you to do something and you refuse, he thralls you, which functionally looks like him just sternly saying that you will do it, and you agreeing against your better judgement. It’s parasitic, it’s abusive, it’s creepy, and it’s exactly what it feels like when people with more money and power than you who are used to getting their own way tell you what to do. However, as good as that example is, it’s better to talk about the game as a whole. Capitalism isn’t a singular entity, and as an exploitative mode of production it forces people to exploit one another, and that’s what is so clever and powerful about the whole world full of vampires in VtMB. The Prince may be in a class oppressing people like you, but you’re a vampire too.

This is where it’s worth making a distinction between the aristocracy and capitalists. In past centuries, the aristocracy fed off the labour of the peasantry, and then as capitalism evolved, the owner class and aristocracy together exploited the peasantry and the working class, and through colonialism of course, Britain and other countries acted as international vampires draining the life-blood of their colonial subjects. Now, thanks to politicians like the thrillingly deceased Baroness Thatcher and the ideology of the free market, we’re all vampires, even as we ourselves are exploited. That’s why VtMB works so well to examine our modern condition.

At this point, the “take” that the rich and ruling class are vampires is often considered played out; too obvious to be worth much consideration; edgy. However, I think that there is a little more to be squeezed from this perspective before it’s completely dried up. I think from here we can start to get to some of the core ideas in vampire storytelling.

All language is metaphor and when I say “the rich are vampires” I’m trying to express an idea using the metaphors that I have available to me. Yes, it is a bit obvious, but maybe that’s because we currently see vampires as such a clear metaphor for people abusing power. Vampires are a caricature of a bad person with power, so the statements “the rich are vampires”, “the WatchMojo staff are vampires”, “landlords are vampires” or “politicians are vampires” are, in a sense, circular.

Even the idea that Cain and Lilith are the original vampires informs this perspective. Cain is the first murderer in the bible, Lilith is the first person to trick someone, or at least that’s what Adam will tell you: That snake woman tricked my innocent heterosexual wife into eating her fruits! Alright mate.

It’s always worth remembering how much myths shift and change in meaning over time. Remember the patupaiarehe I mentioned earlier, the spooky pale forest people in Maori folklore? Well, after the Maori first encountered white colonisers, another word started being used for patupaiarehe: pakehakeha. If you know any Maori, this bears a striking similarity to the word pakeha, which means “white person”. Whether the one word informs the other or vice versa, the fact that they made an association between these folkloric bogeymen and white colonisers is clear.

And, white people being the vampires that we factually are, we’ve also tried to use these ideas to claim that there were Aryans there before Maori people arrived on Aotearoa. Which is really fucked up. Don Brash: suck my fucking dick.

My point is, the cultural context of the time and place should never be forgotten, and our modern vampires aren’t the same as ancient vampires either in all their features, or in deeper meaning. After all.. There are some ways the vampire myth has been used historically that get a bit uncomfortable.

Vampires, as we already covered, became in folklore a kind of mythical cover for plague and disease. At the same time they became associated with a sinister power behind the scenes in the european aristocracy. Well, in medieval europe, a whole lot of people had a group of people who they thought were behind the scenes controlling the european aristocracy, and to blame for the literal plague too.

We really have to talk about vampires and antisemitism.

A huge element in medieval antisemitism was the conspiracy theory of jewish ritual child murder, also known as “the blood libel”. According to the anti-semites, jews were kidnapping children to murder them and drink their blood. Why? Well, you see, jews suffer from internal rot and haemorrhaging, like a sickly or even undead person, and the only thing that keeps them alive is feeding on the blood of christians. It may not be said quite explicitly, but this antisemitic myth casts jews as literal vampires.

The blood libel has a horrible associated history, with many cases of children who went missing in European countries being blamed on jews, and as a result, scores upon scores of jews being imprisoned, put on trial, and even burned alive.

To be clear, the part about jews being vampires is also said explicitly. “The franklin forgery” was a speech spuriously attributed to Benjamin Franklin railing against jewish immigration to the US, popular among antisemites and nazis in the 1930s. In it, Franklin is falsely described saying:

“Because they are vampires and vampires cannot live on other vampires --they cannot live among themselves. They must live among Christians and others who do not belong to their race.”

And now too, modern antisemitic conspiracy theorists in the QAnon movement claim that “elites” are killing children to harvest their adrenochrome, or in some cases literal blood. In the “more acceptable” conspiracy theory presented to people who are likely to balk at explicit antisemitism, these elites are the leaders of liberal political parties, but in the more central QAnon narrative, those leaders are all controlled by international jewish money, and in some versions the leaders are secretly just jewish themselves.

Even Dracula has a pervasive antisemitic undertone. Count Dracula is never described in the book without mention of his aquiline (hooked) nose, and in general the story draws its horror from the wellspring of fears about shadowy foreign aristocracy infiltrating the imperial core and subverting good British christian morals.

In Vampirism and the Degeneration of the Imperial Race - Stoker's Dracula as the Invasive Degenerate Other, Monika Tomaszweska writes:

“Whereas Stoker’s evaluation of Van Helsing and Morris may be seen as slightly ambivalent but quite positive, his portrait of Dracula is unequivocally negative. The Count is depicted as a reversion to the primitive races of mankind, Lombroso’s atavistic criminal defined in The Criminal Man as ‘a relic of a vanished race’. Among his ancestors Dracula enumerates the Szekleys and the Huns, emphasizing proudly that in his veins ‘flows the blood of many brave races who fought as the lion fights'”

This is as good a time as any to start talking about what Dracula is about. This ties in with my slight quibble with “vampires are rich people”, because although as I’ve covered, that is in general, laughably true, in the case of Dracula in particular, it doesn’t really hold up.

The first piece of context you need to understand is that Bram Stoker was a pro-imperialist - he supported the British Empire. The second, is that the agents of the British Empire, contrary to common misconception, didn’t conquer the world while twirling their moustaches and laughing about how evil they were.

Rather, in the first era of the empire, there was an ongoing argument about colonisation, the result of which being that the empire had to justify its actions morally with the spread of christianity to “uncivilised” people, and that the anti-imperialist factions of British politics only managed to pass laws which made colonialism legal. During the later stages of the British empire, the moral justification used by the empire was that invading countries could allow them to stop practices such as slavery in those countries. The British Empire always had a moral justification that it used as cover for imperialism.

In recent decades the US has used defending the world against the authoritarian communism of the USSR, and defeating islamic extremism as its moral justifications for imperialism, and in coming decades (if America exists in coming decades) the global north will use climate change as the cornerstone of its justification for further imperialism.

The point I’m trying to get at here, is that Stoker’s Dracula can be read to be promoting good moral positions and promoting bad ones, but without a little cultural context it is completely misunderstood. Case in point: in one scene, when the protagonists try to fight Dracula, they stab at him, and as the blade pierces his clothing, instead of blood coming out, bank notes and loose gold spills out onto the floor. As imagery that paints the rich as vampires go, that’s uhhhh pretty on the nose. So: Yes, Dracula’s wealth and his love of it is to his discredit, but also, the protagonists are the daughters of two middle class families, an accountant, a doctor, an American entrepreneur and a British Lord. To call Dracula a story that is anti-rich would be blinkered, and to call it anti-capitalist would be simply anachronistic.

In fact, Dracula is a story about the fear that, from Bram Stoker’s point of view at least, the worst possible type of guy might buy his way into English high society: foreign, a bit gay, too invested in money and not invested enough in Jesus. The antisemitic undertones of Dracula may or may not be intentional, but they are there, and in a sense they provide an easy way to understand what the story was originally about.

Culture is constantly shifting, and stories don’t necessarily carry inherent meaning. Christian vampire myths started to fit vampires into christian mythology, and even with anticapitalist vampire stories today, we’re just fitting vampires into our mythology too.

I’m doing this series because I think that horror stories are a really important thing for people who want to improve society to understand. Art is an expression of our dreams, and horror stories are an expression of our fears, so if you’re interested in what people at large hope and fear, then horror stories are a good place to find both examples and the language to describe them.

If you want a vampire story that is anti-capitalist, Vampires versus the Bronx by Oz Rodriguez is a movie about a black community facing the threat of gentrification. It actually uses a similar structure to Dracula in that the gentrifying property developers are vampires invading their community from outside, there’s a party of protagonists fighting the vampires, and in simply the best possible way that you could end an anti-capitalist vampire story, the solution is for the whole community to organise together and unite to [redacted] just like you should do to gentrifiers in real life.

1. The Modern Vampire Myth

Dracula has been adapted again and again. It’s hard to overstate the importance of Dracula in the modern vampire myth, and the conversion of vampires from folklore to pop culture. Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu is a vampire story that predates Dracula by about 30 years, and by the time Carmilla saw its first film adaptation, there were already 3 film versions of Dracula. John Polidori’s story The Vampyre is 50 years older than that and has its first film adaptation under development right now.

Of the various adaptations of Dracula, I like Francis Ford Coppola’s version, titled Bram Stoker’s Dracula the best. When you’re researching for a script about vampires and you watch ten different Draculas, the best possible adaptation is the version that treats the story itself like a folk myth that the audience are already familiar with.

The lavish and evocative set dressing and costuming of the film could be compared to Sassetta’s paintings of the life of St. Francis - a story that all viewers would already understand, and so the painter chooses to make the painting heavily stylised, giving the viewer a more interesting experience of the story. I’ve seen so many draculas at this point and across all of them, I can remember silly gibberish that I find funny from Moffatt’s, and that one shot in Count Dracula where Dracula climbs the castle wall, because it’s fucking terrifying, but I remember so much of Bram Stoker’s Dracula because it’s just so visually striking end to end.

The other thing that’s so good about Coppola’s take on Dracula is that despite the horror and fantasy elements, it is largely transformed into a romance. Perhaps it would be better to say that rather than despite those elements, it uses those elements to take the audience into a perspective that feels alien and inhuman, and finds the beauty in it. Dracula is recontextualised as a character tormented by loss and grief, who has forsaken God in his despair and ultimately exists only to once again find love. It has a delightfully romantic view on the way that love feels bigger than one mortal lifetime - the way that love feels like it needs the space of eternity to truly breathe.

In Our Vampires, Ourselves, a book on the evolution of the modern vampire mythology, author Nina Auerbach writes:
“When he offered his repulsive self for our worship, Dracula gave us more than a smell, an accent, and bloodlust: he propagated ‘vampires and vampires’ whose tastes were less specialised than their master’s. Before Dracula, vampires embodied forbidden ideals of intimacy; after Dracula, they moved to America and turned into rulers.”

In John Polidori’s The Vampyre, 70 years before Dracula, Lord Ruthven the vampire in question is an alluring fiend. Unlike Dracula he isn’t described as physically repulsive, but he is a scheming sinister figure infiltrating high society to prey on the unsuspecting aristos, which is, yeah, kinda nasty. Ruthven is the original suave upper class vampire, and his game is all built around the rigid social norms of the society in which the story is set. While the story itself isn’t erotic or even focused around the vampire seducing the protagonist, Ruthven certainly does, as Auerbach puts it “embody forbidden ideals of intimacy.” It’s clear that while the protagonist works to stop Ruthven getting away with his schemes, the close focus on what people get up to behind closed doors is the driving intrigue of the story.

To me one of the most interesting things about The Vampyre is that it was actually produced in the same famous writing contest that also produced Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There was a year where, due to a strange climate anomaly, Europe essentially had no summer, which meant that in Britain everyone just stayed indoors all the time, and during that time, a bunch of writers, Polidori and Shelley included, had a writing competition, and bam! Frankenstein! Bam! Vampyre! It’s nice to remember that sometimes really good art can also come out of people being stuck inside.

The subject of the vampire’s romantic and sexual tendencies is also prominent in Dracula. In fact, even though the original story largely paints him as a pseudo-sexual rival to Jonathan and the others, seducing first Lucy and then Mina, the first act of the book, where Jonathan is trapped in his castle, creates the same pseudo-sexual tension between the Count and Jonathan himself. Many have observed that Dracula is a very unkind, homophobic and predatory portrait of Oscar Wilde, although some have also pondered whether Bram Stoker was himself gay, and based elements of Dracula on Oscar Wilde as a kind of repression.

There are vampires and vampires, and not all of them suck blood. Some of them suck dick.

On Dracula’s sexuality, Auerbach writes:

“Edwardian vampires were, as a rule, more perverse than their later counterparts. The most flamboyant embodied the attraction of undomesticated desires. Homosexuality clung to them in the sickeningly sinister form it assumed after the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde. Dracula was one particularly debased incarnation of the fallen Wilde, a monster of silence and exile, vulnerable to a legalistic series of arcane rules”

As an aside: I don’t like vampires as a metaphor for being gay. I wish people would stop doing this. I love gay vampires, truly I do, but vampires as a metaphor for being gay, or trans, or for the AIDs virus or anything else really sucks shit. Like, in this allegory the vampire hunters are like, people who won’t accept you for being gay? I guess? But being gay and being a cannibal murderer are not the same thing, uh, ethically. Please write more gay vampires, and please stop writing this mess.

Before Dracula, vampires in popular fiction were charming aristocrats using and abusing the rules of Victorian society to do whatever they wanted. Of course this kind of romantic vampire still thrives today, but before Dracula came in and made gaming all political, vampires were just beautiful sweet sinister manipulative lovers. And before Dracula, they were also lesbians.

Carmilla, by Sheridan Le Fanu, is a story about a young woman who is being seduced by a lady vampire, who appears in her room in the night and puts her mouth on her breast. No officer, that’s just what the story says. It’s noteworthy not only for featuring homosexual - sexual? I don’t know. Homo-vampiric - scenes, but also for not condemning homosexuality. Carmilla’s central conflict is truly that Laura, the protagonist, is isolated and lonely because of her overbearing family, representative here of wider society. This isolation drives her into an intense friendship and the predatory embrace of Carmilla, who is ultimately exposed as a vampire and then killed by her family. At the end of the story, though Laura is free of the vampire and is taken travelling by her father, the story tells us that she never fully recovers her health. What was making her sick and weak? Was it the vampire, or was it being isolated and kept from having any friends, and then having her only friend killed by her protective father? Okay, it was the vampire, but you get my meaning.

Nina Auerbach has some thoughts on lesbian vampires too:

“Lesbian vampires are, at this writing, a thriving species in feminist theory, fiction, and film, but they represent utopias beyond Le Fanu’s imagination, not adaptations of his quintessentially Victorian tale of terror - a man’s dream of a friendship so compelling and terrible that only women can embody it.”

I think that the archetype that the lesbian vampire comes from is a bit older than this quote suggests, actually, although the character archetype hasn’t always been a lesbian - if you listen to Adam, anyway.

Gay vampires fall in alongside many female vampire myths of the past and a lot of the modern vampire stories in which vampires are the protagonist. In the classic vampire myth, what we could call the Cain Vampire Myth, vampires are the antagonists, and are driven by greed and lust for power.

However, for a really long time people have been telling stories about vampires with a more explicit social commentary to them. 16th century Rabbi David Ibn Zimra for example, told a story about a miserly old woman who wasn’t given proper funerary rites when she died, and rose again as a vampire to kill hundreds of people. While she obviously isn’t the good guy in this story, the moral transgression is less hers and more that of society for not taking care of her. This is an example of the vampire revenge story, which I call the Lilith Vampire Myth. It’s never been as prominent as the Cain Vampire Myth, but these kinds of vampire stories pop up all over the place. In more modern versions of this kind of story, it is more common for the avenging vampire to be more sympathetic, if not fully absolved because society is so shitty. Essentially, a Cain Vampire is self-interested, and a Lilith Vampire cares about justice.

When cishet white men are fit into these kinds of stories, they often become the kind of vampire who is the love interest in stories like Twilight or The Vampire Diaries: forever cursed by their vampire powers, unable to feed because of their conscience, but unable to live without feeding, so perpetually… brooding. In Interview With A Vampire, Louis is a Lilith vampire and Lestat is a Cain.

I want to talk about Bit, which is why I’ve prefaced it with this framing. Bit is a 2019 film by Brad Michael Elmore about Laurel, a trans girl played by Nicole Maines, who meets a group of feminist vampires who kill shitty men, led by Duke, who used to be one of Dracula’s brides under his hypnotic thrall. After Laurel becomes one of their group, things begin to unravel as it becomes more and more apparent that Duke is, well, a Cain Vampire. She explicitly rejects the idea that her man-hunting is political or ideological and through the film we see more and more that rather than rejecting the patriarchy, she’s actually just building her own similar form of hierarchy. At the end of the film, Laurel alludes to a plan to make everyone vampires, thereby making everyone equal. It isn’t necessarily a plan you’re supposed to think about too hard: the point is that hierarchies suck, just like vampires.

Bit deserves a thorough analysis, and I know my dear pal Jess - with whom I make the tabletop advice show and Rolling With Rainbows and our TTRPG actual play podcast of the same name - is planning to make a video about Bit that I faintly suspect, might be really fucking good. For my part now, I’ll say I really recommend watching Bit. It’s a great film, and it’s the subtlest trans representation I’ve ever seen. It manages to capture very real trans experiences, like some doofus coming up to you at a party to call you “brave”, while leaving a lot unsaid. My girlfriend actually didn’t realise Laurel was trans until I told her.

Now, more relevant to our discussion today: I think Bit really brings out the thesis I’ve been developing here. Vampires aren’t exactly allegories for social forces, but they do embody them, and as characters they give intentionality and agency to those forces. In the case of Bit, social hierarchies and the way they sneakily reproduce themselves even in people traumatised by them. In Vampires versus the Bronx, vampires embody gentrification. In Interview With a Vampire, vampires represent WatchMojo dot com. In some old folklore, vampires where a way to get people to understand preventative measures against disease. In older myths still, who knows. Sometimes, like in Nightflyer, the vampire just comes right out and says what the comparison is that they’re making.

So we’ve covered disease, journalists, rich people, antisemitism, and romance. Before we conclude, I’d like to talk about my favourite vampire film, that’s just barely a vampire film at all. It isn’t, really, but people are happy enough to try to call all sorts of myths and legends from other cultures vampire stories, so you know what, just let me have this one.

The Man From Earth by Jerome Bixby is one of my favourite films. It’s another piece of media here that I’ll say deserves more analysis, but it’s the one I hope to get to talk about more myself. It’s about a man who is leaving town suddenly without saying goodbye, so his friends come to his house to talk to him, and as the evening progresses, he plays a game with them, imagining what a man would be like if he had lived forever. Slowly, without quite saying it, he reveals that he is that man. The story of his life becomes a complex evolving thing throughout the film: A metaphor for social forces; A vehicle for historical reflection; An allegory for human knowledge and scientific progress; A way to ponder the nature of human life on earth.

Easily the corniest part of the film is that he claims to be Jesus Christ, and I make no apologies for it because that bit fucking whips dick and if you don’t get why you haven’t been watching the movie right. However, one of the first things he says about his life is that the reason he moves around so much is because when people realised that he wasn’t ageing and that they were, they started to blame him. The film even brings this idea back: is he a vampire, does he stay alive by draining the life of the people around him?

I think it’s absolutely fascinating that the film organically creates the same comparison between vampires and Jesus. Jesus is a metaphor people use for morally good behaviour: Neo is Jesus; Superman is Jesus. Vampires are a metaphor people use for morally bad behaviour: the rich are vampires; landlords are vampires. In a sense the film treats the claim to being Christ as inevitable - if someone lived as long as him, sooner or later he would get some people together and try to make the world a better place. So Jesus is what a good person would do if they lived forever, and vampires are what a bad person would do if they lived forever: hoard wealth, live in a castle, abuse people.

I think it’s interesting that much of what makes a vampire has to do with being invisible. They don’t show up in mirrors, or on tape, they can summon mist or turn into animals, they only go out at night. When I look at a vampire I see a shadow that isn’t really there. If I were trying to answer why we tell vampire stories I would say that the human brain is good at connecting patterns and bad at attributing causes to systems instead of people. We made up a guy to get mad at, the most human impulse of all.

Vampires aren’t the rich, they’re the shadow between the rich, the invisible social force causing the visible human results. Vampires aren’t disease, they’re the way you deal with the inherent dissonance we feel knowing that people around us could be the ones who make us sick. As the pope apparently had to point out, vampires aren’t real, and when people start thinking that they are it leads to really dark places. It’s really interesting that in the lore of Vampire the Masquerade, Dracula made Bram Stoker write Dracula. Vampires are the shadow in the corner of our eye that we can only explain by believing in vampires I guess.

But what happens when the invisible social forces are really big, and their visible effects flatten cities and put countries into a state of emergency. Next time on Monster Men, we’re talking Kaiju.