Vampires, the contagion of the undead

The belief in the existence of vampires has its roots in the mists of time. Over the centuries, the figure of the vampire has changed profoundly to the point of assuming a romantic and aristocratic aura given to it above all by numerous 19th-century writers such as Bram Stoker, author of the famous Dracula.

In 1732, an army doctor, Johannes Fluckinger, went to Medvegia, a country in the former Yugoslavia, to investigate some assassinations attributed to vampires. The locals told him about a certain Arnold Paole who claimed to be tormented by a vampire, to have got soiled with blood, and to have eaten some earth from his grave to get rid of it.

When Paole died and was buried, people began to complain of being persecuted and there were four deaths. Forty days after his death, the body was exhumed and it was found that fresh blood flowed from the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears. The skin and nails had fallen out, but they were growing back.

Fluckinger reported that deducing that it was a vampire, the villagers planted a stake in his heart, as was their custom, at which the dead man let out a groan and bled profusely. After burning the body, he took care of the four murdered, who, having been killed by a vampire, had become vampires themselves.

The villagers told the doctor that those who ate the flesh of cattle attacked by a vampire also had the same fate. Having opened the graves of 17 people who had died in the last three months, Fluckinger found that their bodies were in the same condition as Paole's. Were they vampires? Most of the signs could be explained by the normal decomposition processes of a corpse.

Such macabre effects are more easily found when the pit is shallow; which is not surprising, as popular beliefs predestined for vampirism are often buried hastily.

According to folklore, the vampire is a living corpse, sucking the blood of the living not only to exhaust their vitality and spread the contagion but also to revive themselves. The belief that vampires caused epidemics already existed in the 12th century. To keep them away, people resorted to garlic, believing that its smell dispersed that of corpses and prevented the spread of diseases.

True vampires belong to central and eastern Europe (vampire is a word that comes from Serbo-Croatian). According to ancient traditions, it is possible to kill them and render them helpless in different ways, by burying them at a crossroads, driving a stake in their heart, beheading them or burning them. Like other evil creatures, it is believed that it is possible to kill them with a silver bullet and drive them away with a crucifix.

The legends of the time narrate that sinners, suicides, sorcerers, and alcoholics are particularly prone to becoming vampires as well as high risk are children born with teeth, people murdered and left unavenged and corpses who have not had Christian burial.

In the legends concerning them, the erotic element is not lacking. In the Balkan regions there are tales of vampires coming out of graves and imposing their attention on their previous terrified spouses, while if they have not been married, they visit innocent young people. At the end of the eighteenth century, this erotic element introduced vampires in gothic horror novels and in the poems of romantic writers, who, to better adapt them to the role, made them climb the social ladder from peasants to aristocrats.

In the anonymous 1847 bestseller, Varney the Vampire or The Feast of Blood, Sir Francis Varney had metal-like eyes, claw nails, sharp teeth, and a penchant for women. Instead in Carmilla, from 1870, Sheridan Le Fanu presents a beautiful, young, and lesbian woman-vampire who in the end turns out to be a long-deceased countess.

It was this work that induced Bram Stoker to begin research on the famous vampire-hero Dracula, whose story he published in 1897. His emaciated count of Transylvania, the fruit of folkloric, historical, and fantasy elements, is freely inspired by Vlad Tepes III of Wallachia (region of modern Romania), who, during the years of his reign, earned the nickname of Impaler for having impaled, apparently, tens of thousands of people.

Among his victims, many prisoners of the wars against the Turks. He was also known by the nickname of Draculaea, which in Romanian means son of the devil (Dracula). With his canines and magnetic gaze Dracula has since appeared in many plays and films. The image of him in a modern key is elegant and extremely sensual.