tag:theconversation.com,2011:/us/topics/bram-stoker-61428/articlesBram Stoker – The Conversation2024-01-22T00:33:57Ztag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2185912024-01-22T00:33:57Z2024-01-22T00:33:57ZMy favourite fictional character: Wintering’s grotesque widows reveal the ‘monstrous’ woman as wise and progressive<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562103/original/file-20231128-15-9grq5p.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=18%2C9%2C6211%2C4138&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Phil Robson/Unsplash</span></span></figcaption></figure><blockquote>
<p>A coven of faces. All women, all weathered. Old, middle-aged, younger; one teenager among them. […] They sat and breathed in each other’s stale exhalations. Breath like the grave. Jessica couldn’t help thinking that they were rotting inside. And now she was one of them. She had started to decompose.</p>
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<p>The widows are foul, unwashed, rank. They gather at an old farmstead with peeling wooden boards and “holes in the veranda you could put a fist though”. They give off a “urinous fug of sweat and unwashed clothing”. A woman in “a brown shapeless dress, sweat-stained at the armpits” grows long, dark hairs from her upper lip and neck. Their partners have all disappeared. And so has Jessica’s.</p>
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<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=918&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/562842/original/file-20231130-21-hy19jl.jpeg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1153&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
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<p>These women are from Kris Kneen’s novel <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/wintering">Wintering</a>, which includes one of my favourite depictions of monstrosity – a man–thylacine hybrid, a type of werewolf, that stalks remote southern Tasmania, turning people into monsters (in a recognisable <a href="https://www.euppublishing.com/doi/full/10.3366/gothic.2019.0003">gothic tradition</a>). </p>
<p>But it’s not the man–thylacine monster that has stayed with me all these years. It’s the second type of (metaphorical) monster, the widows, who speak to me far more profoundly.</p>
<p>Initially, the stories these widows tell – about monster hunting – are easy for the novel’s protagonist, Jessica, to reject. They’re the kind of ramblings she might hear from people she’d stand next to at the liquor store and joke about afterwards.</p>
<p>But there’s more to their monstrosity than the grotesque. The widows present as a collection of disparate elements — a Frankenstein’s creature composed of fragments. They are a collective aberration, in a society bent on advancing women who meet social expectations while rejecting those who do not. </p>
<h2>What monsters mean</h2>
<p>Monsters – millennia old – continue to populate our imaginations. The gothic novels of the 18th and 19th centuries, such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, have menaced shelves for hundreds of years.</p>
<p>More recently and closer to home, Lisa Fuller’s <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/ghost-bird">Ghost Bird</a> and First Nations anthology <a href="https://www.uqp.com.au/books/this-all-come-back-now">This All Come Back Now</a> (edited by Mykaela Saunders) depict monsters from Indigenous perspectives, while novels such as Trent Jamieson’s <a href="https://www.textpublishing.com.au/books/day-boy">Day Boy</a>, which inventively reimagines the vampire, breathe new life into gothic monsters.</p>
<p>As American philosopher and cultural theorist <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/431308">Noel Carroll points out</a>, monsters are not just physically threatening – they threaten and challenge our ways of thinking, too. And in this way, Kneen’s mismatched collection of othered women prompts me to reflect on our assumptions about women and the social norms we’ve constructed for them.</p>
<h2>Monsters represent the ‘other’</h2>
<p>I’m fascinated by the many ways we interpret monsters. Dracula represents concerns about <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3827794?searchText=&searchUri=&ab_segments=&searchKey=&refreqid=fastly-default%3A46f3d5f5ebb26c8d1ece805ef054b7d5&seq=2">racial otherness and imperial decline</a>. No, it’s about fears of <a href="https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337689065_Supernatural_surveillance_and_blood-borne_disease_in_Bram_Stoker%27s_Dracula_Reflections_on_mesmerism_and_HIV">AIDS infection and supernatural surveillance</a> – no, it’s about <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/40754849">homoerotic desire</a>. Zombies <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctt1pwt6zr">illuminate</a> rampant consumerism, slave labour and, by pushing them to their limits, the intricate workings of human communities. (If you’ve read or watched The Walking Dead, this last one will be familiar to you.) </p>
<p>These readings attempt to project and inscribe a specific cultural meaning, belonging to a particular time and place, onto a monstrous creature. “The monstrous body is pure culture,” writes Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, who <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5749/j.ctttsq4d">researches the cultural function of monsters</a>. It “exists only to be read”. And maybe this is why monsters preoccupy me.</p>
<p>Monsters often depict the so-called “other”: the outside, the beyond and all that we perceive as distant and distinct from us … but actually comes from within. Monsters, after all, always require a creator. They exist only because we design them, constructing them from our deepest fears.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">Monsters exist because we design them – constructing them from our deepest fears.</span></figcaption>
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<p>Monsters reveal how societies define – and decide how to punish – difference and deviance. And by doing so, they also call into question <a href="https://www.routledge.com/The-Ashgate-Research-Companion-to-Monsters-and-the-Monstrous/Mittman-Dendle/p/book/9781472418012%20we%20base%20these%20definitions%20on">the very social structures</a> on which those decisions are based.</p>
<p>By creating monsters, <a href="https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/classic-readings-on-monster-theory/99074C8C5753F78E0B6F677F7C19ECBF">we police</a> social boundaries and define community norms. In Wintering, Jessica does this by rejecting the widows. Initially, she sees them as something other: something to be avoided, something lesser.</p>
<p>At the same time, though, Kneen’s widows subvert and challenge – even reappropriate – their categorisation as “other”. They are women who don’t meet conventional beauty standards, who flout social expectations. They are women who are older, single, who are sole parents. In short, they’re characters who <a href="https://www.abc.net.au/news/2023-09-16/history-of-female-monsters-greek-mythology-australia-indonesia/102856324">transgress ideas of traditional womanhood</a> – a transgression traditionally punished by derision and exclusion. </p>
<p>But Jessica’s initial repulsion gradually shifts into acceptance and eventually respect. Later, she’ll view widow elder Marijam as a window onto her future self: </p>
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<p>[…] she felt dizzy, seeing her future staring into her eyes. And it wasn’t so bad really. Tough, solitary, self-sufficient. Wise? Maybe.</p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/bram-stokers-dracula-bats-garlic-disturbing-sexualities-and-a-declining-empire-186392">Bram Stoker's Dracula: bats, garlic, disturbing sexualities and a declining empire</a>
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<h2>Reframing ‘monstrous’ women as wise</h2>
<p>Literature is a powerful vehicle for revealing and naturalising different ways of thinking. I first read Wintering after having children, when I was experiencing a newfound respect for the wisdom and strength of my own mother – and by extension, all those who have carried, lost, terminated, delivered or nurtured babies. </p>
<p>It was a time when I really started to unpack monstrous tropes for what I think they are – particularly those of the female monster, so often <a href="https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9780203820513/monstrous-feminine-barbara-creed">maligned for their reproductive experiences</a>. Maybe this is why Kneen’s creation spoke to me so profoundly (especially Marijam, the wise, wrinkled old lady, who’s quick on a walking stick and slick on a monster hunt).</p>
<p>Kneen’s reframing of the widows contributes to our ongoing process of dismantling internalised misogyny. It alerts me to a different view of those women society might have us trivialise or ignore. Certainly, this is the journey Jessica takes in the novel, eventually viewing herself as a member of the widows. </p>
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<p>“Well,” the old lady said, her smile, unbelievably, wrinkling her face even more. “We are glad you are with us, love.”</p>
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<p>Wintering’s widows leave me thinking about the women in my own life – about my own coven – and how they’re strong and wise in ways not always recognised or endorsed by the mainstream. </p>
<p>These covens have seen me through. They have decimated the idea we’re all write-offs to some degree, depending on how near or far we are from meeting “ideal” social expectations. They have shown me that together, we can be monstrously powerful. </p>
<p>And they’ve shown me it’s my job to pass this knowledge forward: the way Marijam passes hers to Jessica. </p>
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<em>
<strong>
Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/the-clearings-investigation-of-the-family-invites-us-to-ask-whats-the-appeal-and-risk-of-crime-stories-based-on-real-events-206514">The Clearing's investigation of The Family invites us to ask: what's the appeal – and risk – of crime stories based on real events?</a>
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<h2>More work to do</h2>
<p>Unpicking harmful tropes, of course, is an unfinished task. We have more work to do, especially for women whose identities include further marginalisation surrounding disability, race, class and gender. Monsters are particularly well equipped to help us do this. </p>
<p>Wiradjuri writer Jeanine Leane, for instance, writes about <a href="https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/review/saunders-this-all-come-back-now/">how Indigenous speculative fiction</a> – including fiction containing monsters – “unwrites settler control and knowing of the future and the present and the past” and re-establishes First Nations ways of knowing, being and telling.</p>
<p>There’s another, more literal, monster in Wintering – the man–thylacine werewolf – which skilfully picks at the threads of coercive control, domestic abuse and violence. It deserves its own analysis. </p>
<p>But it’s the monstrous widows who have remained with me, long after finishing the novel. They’ve invited me to reject the label of “monstrous” woman as an indication of shame or exclusion – and to reassign it as a symbol of progress.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/218591/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Martine Kropkowski does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Monsters reveal how societies define and punish deviance. Wintering’s widows make me think about the women I know who are strong and wise in ways neither recognised nor endorsed by the mainstream.Martine Kropkowski, PhD Candidate and Casual Academic, The University of QueenslandLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2120362023-10-25T15:48:37Z2023-10-25T15:48:37ZGothic getaways: the rise and evolution of ‘dark tourism’ festivals<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/553456/original/file-20231012-23-38rraq.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C701%2C1531%2C999&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A participant of the 'Stokerland' event in Dublin, in front of St Patrick's Cathedral, goes the extra mile, with an ornate costume and even stilts. </span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Luisa Golz</span>, <span class="license">Author provided</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>That Halloween is a commercial event is a platitude akin to saying that the sky is blue, or that chocolates are widely eaten on Valentines Day. Mention October 31st and the mind instantly fills with images of trick-or-treating and the inevitable paraphernalia of pumpkins, polyester cobwebs, and witch hats. Despite its superficiality today, the origins of Halloween can be traced back to the Celts and their <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Samhain">Samhain</a> celebrations, which marked the end of the autumn harvest and the beginning of winter. It was also a day when, according to Celtic beliefs, the veil between the living and the dead is particularly permeable.</p>
<p>Mexico’s <a href="https://www.nationalgeographic.com/culture/article/top-ten-day-of-dead-mexico"><em>el Día de los Muertos</em></a> (Day of the Dead) is another tradition with deep roots, possibly combining pre-Colombian rites and European celebrations such as All Saints Day. In Asia, Ghost Festivals, part of both Taoist and Buddhist traditions, are when people pay tribute to their deceased ancestors, who are believed to be able to return briefly from the afterlife.</p>
<p>A more recent addition to the “spooky” calendar of events are Gothic festivals, which could be considered a form of “dark tourism”. The name comes from the inspiration they take from Gothic literature, which has its roots in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Notable authors included Mary Shelly, Walter Scott, Edgar Allen Poe, and especially Bram Stoker, whose classic <em>Dracula</em> was published in 1897. Common themes included monsters, murders, and mysteries, with an undercurrent of dread and fear. </p>
<h2>Dracula rising</h2>
<p>One of the better known “dark tourism” festivals is the <a href="https://www.whitbygothweekend.co.uk/">Whitby Goth Weekend</a>, which takes place in the Yorkshire town where Stoker spent his holidays and from which he drew inspiration for <em>Dracula</em>. In the novel, Stoker gives a detailed account of the town’s layout, architecture and spooky atmosphere. Since the mid-1990s the bi-annual event attracts participants from a range of subcultures as well as mainstream visitors. Many of the “new” participants do not necessarily identify as “Goth”. Instead, some simply observe the spectacle, others come to celebrate Halloween and many belong to the <a href="https://theconversation.com/goth-steampunk-and-the-state-of-subculture-today-68192">“Steampunk” subculture</a>.</p>
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<img alt="Attendees of the Whitby Goth Weekend, some costumed." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=431&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555842/original/file-20231025-25-m7kafh.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=542&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">Crowds at the Whitby Gothic Weekend are often part of the spectacle.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Luisa Golz</span>, <span class="license">Fourni par l'auteur</span></span>
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<p>Stoker’s life and work are also celebrated in Dublin, the city where he was born in 1847. The <a href="https://www.bramstokerfestival.com/">Bram Stoker Festival</a> is a playful celebration of his most famous literary creation. It includes the family-friendly theme park <a href="https://www.bramstokerfestival.com/sessions/stokerland-2023/">“Stokerland”</a>, literary walking tours, and lectures about his life and legacy. The festival attracts everyone from families looking to entertain their children over the Halloween weekend to Gothic fiction enthusiasts.</p>
<p>While firm numbers are hard to come by, the popularity of these and other Gothic festivals appears to be growing. At the Bram Stoker Festival, attendance increased from approximately 25,000 in 2019 to more than 49,000 in 2022, recovering from a two-year hiatus over the Covid-19 pandemic. This cuts against the common belief that such events only attract niche audiences, members of a particular subculture, or those with an interest in Gothic fiction or literature. </p>
<h2>When participation becomes co-creation</h2>
<p>At the Whitby Goth Weekend, the boundary between spectator and participant becomes particularly permeable. Many are there for the alternative music events, shopping at the local markets, or socialising. Others take it to the next step, dress up in highly creative outfits, parading through Whitby’s cobbled streets, and retracing the imagined footsteps of Dracula. </p>
<p>These attendees become part of the spectacle, as many of those who visit come to marvel at the costumed creatures in Whitby’s Gothic atmosphere. This intersection of participation and observation draws in many photographers when the festival takes place in April and October. Participants pose for photos, while others actively perform in this staged environment.</p>
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<img alt="Tents at the Stokerland event in Dublin, Ireland." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=367&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/555846/original/file-20231025-21-au0jrt.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=462&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The ‘Stokerland’ event in Dublin, Ireland, is more family oriented.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Luisa Golz</span>, <span class="license">Fourni par l'auteur</span></span>
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<p>As a result, the dressed-up participants do not simply experience the festival as passive attendees, they become a festival attraction themselves, co-creating the festival experience. Some simply enjoy the performance aspects, while others use them to express what they see as their “true” identities. Festival organisers and local businesses enable this experience, which takes place within the town’s music venues, retail spots and hospitality spaces.</p>
<h2>Selling darkness</h2>
<p>What makes such events that are initially appealing to a niche audience become more popular among wider audiences? While some may remind us of long-standing traditions, as is the case of the Celtic celebration Samhain, others show clear signs of commodification. </p>
<p>As Gothic festival content can be co-created, so too is the marketing. With smartphones in every hand, festival-goers capture immense amounts of visual material, which they then show on social media. In this way, they spread the word about Gothic festivals, and in turn traditional media outlets can pick up the trend. </p>
<p>Thus participant’s online word-of-mouth recommendations work hand-in-hand with traditional forms of advertising. Together, they become an integral part of the “commodification of darkness”, making them an under-recognised component of festival marketing.</p>
<h2>Dark tourism destinations</h2>
<p>Ready for a spooky escape? Here are five personal recommendations for the ultimate Gothic getaway.</p>
<ul>
<li><p><a href="https://www.whitbygothweekend.co.uk/">Whitby Goth Weekend</a>, Whitby, United Kingdom, October 27-29.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.bramstokerfestival.com/">Bram Stoker Festival</a>, Dublin, Ireland, including <a href="https://www.bramstokerfestival.com/sessions/stokerland-2023/">Stokerland</a>, 28-30 October.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.festivalofthedead.com/">Salem Festival of the Dead</a>, Massachusetts, United States; the month of October.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://derryhalloween.com/">Derry Halloween Festival</a>, Derry, Northern Ireland, Oct 28-31.</p></li>
<li><p><a href="https://www.wave-gotik-treffen.de/english/">Wave Gotik Treffen</a>, Leipzig, Germany, May 26-29, 2024.</p></li>
</ul><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/212036/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Luisa Golz ne travaille pas, ne conseille pas, ne possède pas de parts, ne reçoit pas de fonds d'une organisation qui pourrait tirer profit de cet article, et n'a déclaré aucune autre affiliation que son organisme de recherche.</span></em></p>A recent addition to the “spooky” calendar of events are Gothic festivals, inspired by Gothic literature classics such as “Dracula”.Luisa Golz, PhD candidate and co-owner of Desmond Tours, Technological University of the ShannonLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/2039582023-04-18T10:51:29Z2023-04-18T10:51:29ZRenfield: Nicolas Cage’s reimagining of Dracula pulls the vampire film into the 21st century<p>“Don’t make it a sexual thing!” Nicolas Cage’s Dracula tells Nicholas Hoult’s Renfield in this new interpretation of the classic vampire movie. “I eat boys … I eat girls.” </p>
<p>In a line, the film deftly dismisses a century of <a href="https://www.bps.org.uk/psychologist/dracula-couch">post-Freudian interpretations</a> of Bram Stoker’s vampire story – and with justification. Renfield is not about sex, but about power.</p>
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<figcaption><span class="caption">The trailer for Renfield (2023).</span></figcaption>
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<p>This is most obvious when Renfield, Dracula’s servant or “familiar”, attends a support group for codependent people. When the group facilitator, Mark (Brandon Scott Jones), asks Renfield what would happen if he were to stop focusing on his boss’s needs, he responds: “He won’t grow to full power.”</p>
<p>The group finds this apparent metaphor weird, but resonant. In its recognition that gaslighting and emotional abuse are about control rather than desire, the film provides a version of the vampire myth in tune with contemporary debates. There is more than a whiff of #TimesUp about Renfield’s mission to distance himself from his abusive employer.</p>
<p>The film’s most striking power move, however, is on behalf of its production company, Universal. In its latest attempt to reboot its <a href="https://www.digitalspy.com/movies/a829209/universal-dark-universe-the-mummy-bride-of-frankenstein-the-invisible-man-trailer-release-date/">“Dark Universe” franchise</a> – a collection of movies based on the iconic horror film characters the studio established in the 1930s – the production company is aggressively laying claim to the Dracula story.</p>
<h2>Citational vampires</h2>
<p>Vampire films are, according to critic Ken Gelder, “<a href="https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/New_Vampire_Cinema/uQn8DwAAQBAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&printsec=frontcover">citational</a>”. This means that they compulsively reference other vampire films, playfully reworking the conventions of the genre. The vampire film talks endlessly about itself.</p>
<p>In Renfield, an eye-catching sequence transposes Cage and Hoult’s faces onto footage from <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VoaMw91MC9k">Tod Browning’s Dracula</a> (1931). This was the film that forever identified Hungarian actor <a href="https://www.britannica.com/biography/Bela-Lugosi">Bela Lugosi</a> with the iconic vampire. </p>
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Read more:
<a href="https://theconversation.com/vampires-rebirth-from-monstrous-undead-creature-to-sexy-and-romantic-byronic-seducer-in-one-ghost-story-114382">Vampire's rebirth: from monstrous undead creature to sexy and romantic Byronic seducer in one ghost story</a>
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<p>Renfield wants to draw our attention to the “original” (itself an adaptation of a stage version of Stoker’s novel) even as, almost 100 years later, it wants to remodel the vampire movie to 21st century specifications.</p>
<p>Recasting Cage in the image of Lugosi repurposes Browning’s film as an origin story for what is ultimately a kind of superhero movie. Renfield eats insects in order to stimulate turbocharged combat skills reminiscent of <a href="https://theconversation.com/five-exciting-additions-to-marvels-cinematic-universes-according-to-a-comics-expert-180634">Marvel characters</a>.</p>
<p>It also, however, evokes the <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20070930173700/http://www.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,952724,00.html">lawsuit that Lugosi’s heirs brought against Universal Pictures</a> in 1966. They accused the studio of profiting from Lugosi’s image after his death through merchandising, initiating a protracted case they eventually lost. It was a landmark ruling, determining that celebrities do not own their own images after their death.</p>
<p>In Renfield, the retrospective adjustment of the original film to star Cage rather than Lugosi is not only a canny joke that plays on the extreme recognition value of both actors. It is also a strategic move intended to bolster Universal’s association with the Dracula brand, as the Browning film’s copyright is due to expire this decade.</p>
<h2>Action versus comedy</h2>
<p>Renfield has the feel of the first instalment in an action franchise. But unlike previous attempts to hybridise the vampire and action genres, such as the <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaU2A7KyOu4">Blade</a> and <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_IoL7g5Ub8">Underworld</a> series of the early 2000s, it does not take itself too seriously.</p>
<p>Stars Cage, Hoult and Awkwafina deliver their lines as if with permanently arched eyebrows. Indeed, at one point, Cage rapidly raises both eyebrows twice in such an exaggerated manner that it almost breaks the fourth wall. </p>
<p>Elsewhere, extreme gore is exploited for its slapstick potential. In the screening I attended, a scene in which Renfield tears off a villain’s arms with his bare hands and uses them to whack other opponents had some audience members in stitches.</p>
<p>There is a long tradition of vampire comedy. Stoker’s novel has vampire hunter Van Helsing break down in hysterical laughter, blaming “<a href="https://www.shmoop.com/dracula/chapter-13-full-text-11.html">King Laugh</a>”, a grinning skeleton who combines hilarity and death in the manner of the <a href="https://www.thecollector.com/danse-macabre-middle-ages-danse-of-death/">medieval danse macabre</a>.</p>
<p>The self-referential nature of vampire cinema gives rise to comedy. Appreciation of Renfield’s visual gags and snappy one liners is enriched by familiarity with previous vampire films. Cage’s characteristically over-the-top interpretation of his role inevitably recalls any number of his previous performances.</p>
<p>He even seems comparatively restrained besides his extraordinarily unhinged appearance in the 1988 black comedy <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PnoSxO_2ghQ">Vampire’s Kiss</a> – another film that uses vampirism as a metaphor for gaslighting and abusive relationships.</p>
<p>The film never quite delivers what it promises, however. While comparable contemporary vampire film <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IAZEWtyhpes">What We Do in the Shadows</a> and its <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrEg-QGEonI">spin-off TV series</a> allow emotional insights to surface through the comedy, in Renfield any potential profundity is deflected into action stunts.</p>
<p>The gleeful lashings of ultraviolence result in a kind of moral murkiness, in which audiences are never sure whether they are rooting for the underdog or the violent enabler of a centuries-old serial killer.</p>
<p>A film less determined to please its audience might lean into this ambiguity and allow genuine complexity to emerge. Here, however, an uneven tone betrays an uncertainty of purpose. Ultimately, Renfield’s witty attempt to reframe a familiar story is compromised by its corporate brief: to shore up an unstable cinematic empire.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/203958/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Spooner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Renfield attempts to remodel the vampire movie to 21st century specifications.Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1933552022-10-28T15:14:40Z2022-10-28T15:14:40ZDracula at 125: how Bram Stoker’s vampire is a monstrous creation of terrifying sleep disorders<p>Having celebrated the 125th anniversary of its 1897 publication earlier this year, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/jun/24/dracula-stoker-review-colm-toibin#:%7E:text=The%20%22rather%20cruel%2Dlooking%22,how%20events%20twist%20and%20turn%22.">Dracula</a> is deservedly considered a classic – not least for the way its eponymous vampire remains a cultural icon. Bram Stoker’s novel has prompted a wide variety of critical interpretations, from the existential dread of cursed immortality to the threat of disease, intrusion and colonialism.</p>
<p>But Stoker’s vampire represents something else that has gone relatively unexplored: he is a monstrous personification of sleep disorders known as <a href="https://www.sleepfoundation.org/parasomnias">parasomnias</a>. These involve hallucinations, dreams and involuntary movement, and include phenomena such as sleepwalking, nightmares and <a href="https://www.nhs.uk/conditions/sleep-paralysis/#:%7E:text=Sleep%20paralysis%20happens%20when%20you,insomnia">sleep paralysis</a> (when you cannot move your muscles as you are waking up or falling asleep). </p>
<p>I have slept strangely ever since I was a child. I used to sleepwalk and hide my teddies around the house, or eerily stand in the corner of my parents’ bedroom. As a teenager, I began to have recurring nightmares about a malevolent figure in my life, and started to hallucinate, have bizarre <a href="https://www.sleepfoundation.org/dreams/lucid-dreams">lucid dreams</a> and experience sleep paralysis.</p>
<p>I often wake up to sinister shadows looming down at me. A few years ago, I saw a woman every night for a week, and each time she appeared she got closer to my bed. For a long time, I thought no one else experienced these things. I didn’t even know the phenomena had a name. There were times that I wondered if I was being haunted. </p>
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<p>My work investigates representations of insomnia in literature. Reading about the science of sleep, I was astounded to find descriptions of the peculiar things that often happened to me at night. I learned about the natural paralysis of the body during sleep, and the way the brain can create <a href="https://www.sleepfoundation.org/how-sleep-works/hypnopompic-hallucinations#:%7E:text=Hypnopompic%20hallucinations%20occur%20while%20a,of%20these%20hallucinations%20involve%20sound.">“hypnopompic” hallucinations</a> when half-awake.</p>
<p>Crucially, I learned how common parasomnias were, and that I wasn’t so strange after all. But for all I now understand the scientific explanations, I am often momentarily drawn into the delusion that I <em>really</em> am seeing a ghost in my bedroom.</p>
<p>As I examined sleep-related passages in Dracula while researching my non-fiction book, <a href="https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/night-terrors-why-we-have-nightmares-and-how-to-stop-them-nfh0hdc5q">Night Terrors: Troubled Sleep And The Stories We Tell About It</a>, I returned to Stoker’s novel with a different perspective, and what I found has changed the way I feel about it. Dracula’s power is not in his fangs, but in the way he disturbs the sleep of his victims.</p>
<h2>Unnatural sleep</h2>
<p>At the beginning of the novel, for example, Dracula claims his first victim, Lucy Westenra. The initial sign that she is under the vampire’s influence is her sudden habit of sleepwalking across the cliffs of Whitby. </p>
<p>It is through the character of Mina Harker, however, that Stoker really delves into the stranger side of sleep. “Tonight,” she writes in her journal, “I shall strive hard to sleep naturally.” Unfortunately, for Mina, it will be a long time before that happens.</p>
<p>As Dracula begins to attack her, she suffers nearly every parasomnia: she talks in her sleep, sees strange hallucinations and, notably, experiences Dracula’s power in the form of sleep paralysis. Seeing the vampire move towards her in the form of mist, she describes in her journal that “some leaden lethargy seemed to chain my limbs”.</p>
<p>For those of us unlucky enough to experience this parasomnia, too, Stoker’s description feels remarkably accurate. You feel pinned down, unable to move, and, worse still, you hallucinate a sinister presence sitting on top of you. When I have sleep paralysis, I often feel hands grasping my arms and neck, disembodied fingers tangling themselves in my hair. I’ve even been convinced of hands dragging me down the mattress by my ankles, only to wake and find I haven’t moved.</p>
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<img alt="A 18th-century painting of a woman in a deep sleep, arms thrown wide, with a demon sitting on her chest." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492317/original/file-20221028-40947-h8jsdc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/492317/original/file-20221028-40947-h8jsdc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492317/original/file-20221028-40947-h8jsdc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492317/original/file-20221028-40947-h8jsdc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=473&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492317/original/file-20221028-40947-h8jsdc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492317/original/file-20221028-40947-h8jsdc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/492317/original/file-20221028-40947-h8jsdc.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=595&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
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<span class="caption">The Nightmare by John Henry Fuseli, 1781.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/56/John_Henry_Fuseli_-_The_Nightmare.JPG">Detroit Institute of Arts / Wikipedia</a>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
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<h2>Stoker and the Society for Psychical Research</h2>
<p>It’s clear, then, that there are obvious parallels between Stoker’s vampire and the symptoms of parasomnias. But why was he so fascinated by troubled sleep?</p>
<p>The answer may lie with a London-based paranormal society that was formed in 1882. <a href="https://www.spr.ac.uk/">The Society for Psychical Research</a> (SPR), which still meets today, investigated strange phenomena such as ghosts, telekinesis and mind-reading through experiments. Its members were keen to explain as much as they could through physical and scientific fact, in order to gather cases of truly inexplicable experiences.</p>
<p>In doing so, the SPR was at the forefront of certain areas of research – notably, sleep disorders. One of its founding members was Frederic Myers, a good friend of Bram Stoker who was known to visit Myers’ house for breakfast. While there’s no evidence of Stoker attending any SPR meetings, it’s not too wild to speculate that at these breakfasts, conversation would have turned to Myers’ involvement in the society.</p>
<p>What’s particularly illuminating is the similarity between certain aspects of Dracula and a major project, the <a href="https://archivesearch.lib.cam.ac.uk/repositories/2/archival_objects/630399">Census of Hallucinations</a>, undertaken by the society just before its publication. The SPR asked the general public if they had ever experienced a hallucination, and to describe what they had seen.</p>
<p>The results were compiled in the 1894 edition of their journal, <a href="https://archive.org/details/proceedingsofsoc10soci/page/n5/mode/2up">Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research</a>, just three years before Dracula was published. One particular anecdote stands out as a possible influence on Stoker. A “Miss HT” describes seeing a figure in her bedroom on three occasions that “took the form of mist and then developed into a dark veiled figure, which came nearer to me”.</p>
<p>In Dracula, Mina describes a similar mist seeping into her room and forming the outline of a man before she experiences sleep paralysis. Again and again, the census anecdotes feature monsters, skeletons, beautiful women decaying into worm-eaten corpses – truly the stuff of horror novels.</p>
<p>With this research being undertaken around Stoker while he wrote Dracula, it’s no wonder that he chose to imbue his immortal vampire with the power to disturb sleep. It’s estimated that around <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2010.07.011">70% of us will suffer a parasomnia</a> at some point in our lives. </p>
<p>Dracula may be one of the most famous novels about the supernatural, but the vampire himself embodies phenomena you may well experience when you go to sleep tonight.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/193355/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Alice Vernon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Dracula’s power is not in his fangs, but in the way he disturbs the sleep of his victims.Alice Vernon, Lecturer in Creative Writing and 19th-Century Literature, Aberystwyth UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1830842022-05-20T12:15:39Z2022-05-20T12:15:39Z‘Dracula Daily’ reanimates the classic vampire novel for the age of memes and snark<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/464139/original/file-20220519-12-eujbju.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=0%2C34%2C1075%2C841&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">An online audience is reading the vampire novel for the first time, en masse.</span> <span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.gettyimages.com/detail/news-photo/vampire-teeth-to-go-with-story-on-boston-ballet-companys-news-photo/141665303">Diane Barros/The Boston Globe via Getty Images</a></span></figcaption></figure><p>If you’re an active social media user, perhaps you’ve noticed a surge in posts recently <a href="https://dramatic-dolphin.tumblr.com/post/684034902439706624/i-love-how-you-guys-are-discovering-spicy">about paprika</a>, <a href="https://noritaro.tumblr.com/post/683727305352298496/he-threw-out-my-shaving-mirror">reflective shaving glasses</a> and <a href="https://banrionceallach.tumblr.com/post/684435414397927424/darchildre-friends-we-have-reached-the-point-in">castle hospitality in Transylvania</a>. One hundred twenty-five years after its initial publication, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” is having a resurgence. </p>
<p>The current popularity bump is thanks to an email newsletter called “<a href="https://draculadaily.substack.com">Dracula Daily</a>.” The original 1897 version of “Dracula” was told in epistolary format, meaning the novel’s plot is presented through journal entries, letters, newspaper articles and the like. <a href="https://www.dailydot.com/unclick/dracula-daily-interview-matt-kirkland/">Matt Kirkland hit on a simple idea</a>: Release the novel “Dracula” by entry, by date. Subscribers to his Substack newsletter receive messages in their inboxes day by day as the vampire tale unfolds in real time. If there’s no action on that date, there’s no message sent.</p>
<p>“Dracula Daily” has become the <a href="https://twitter.com/woniiwasp/status/1522763544751747072">coolest book club on the internet</a>, <a href="https://nienna14.tumblr.com/post/683508500300759040">taking Tumblr, especially, by storm</a>. As <a href="https://skepticalinquirer.org/authors/stanley-stepanic/">a Dracula and vampire scholar</a>, I’m not surprised to see a new example of the story’s persistence and its tendency to find new life with modern audiences. Considered by many to be a classic of horror literature, Stoker’s “Dracula” is frequently <a href="https://www.jstor.org/action/doBasicSearch?Query=dracula&so=rel">referenced</a>, <a href="https://www.instagram.com/explore/tags/dracula/">discussed</a> and <a href="https://www.imdb.com/search/keyword/?keywords=dracula&ref_=fn_kw_kw_1">adapted</a>. What makes the phenomenon of “Dracula Daily” so interesting, though, is not just <a href="https://doi.org/10.1177/1354856516675256">how it is finding a new audience</a>, but the way the material is being consumed by these fans.</p>
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<h2>Following the action in real time</h2>
<p>Stoker’s “Dracula” is not unique in using an epistolary style; it’s not even the first work of vampire fiction to do so. But by including the new technologies of his time – such as the phonograph and the typewriter – Stoker gave his tale a modern feel, much as if it were written today using Reddit entries composed on a smartphone.</p>
<p>The novel starts on May 3, with Jonathan Harker, a young English solicitor, describing his travels to visit a mysterious client in Transylvania. “Dracula Daily” readers received this particular entry on the same date, <a href="https://draculadaily.substack.com/p/dracula-may-3-590?s=r">with a flippant summary stating</a> “Meet Jonathan Harker, on a fun road trip for work, as he collects some new recipes.” With that intro, the opening Stoker wrote in the 19th century to set the scene comes off like a naïve travel blog to 21st-century readers scrolling on their phones.</p>
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<p>The only difference between the original novel and the emailed content is that Kirkland opts to release the material in chronological order. For instance, Jonathan Harker witnesses Count Dracula scaling the wall of his castle in “lizard fashion” for the third and final time on June 29. His fiancee, Mina Murray, writes a letter to her friend Lucy Westenra on May 9. In the novel, the description of Dracula’s uncanny exit is presented before Lucy’s chatty letter. In “Dracula Daily,” it’s the reverse. Subsequent sections are published in the same way.</p>
<p>Newsletter subscribers are thus consuming the novel not just in a different format, but in a different order. While faithful to the original text, “Dracula Daily” is, in a sense, a partial retelling of the book.</p>
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<h2>Protectively mocking ‘my buddy Harker’</h2>
<p>Upon initial publication, “Dracula” was dismissed by some influential critics. One comment was that “the early part goes best.” And it’s these first entries that have grabbed the “Dracula Daily” audience’s attention in 2022. They follow Jonathan Harker’s journey to meet Count Dracula to assist with his purchasing of properties in England. It hardly sounds like the sinister scheming of a centuries-old undead vampire lord. To audiences in 1897, the novel was quite similar to previous vampire literature, and such details were largely overlooked as par for the course. </p>
<p>But today’s audience meets Harker’s descriptions with more critical scrutiny. Readers laugh as Harker marches past <a href="https://hydroflorix.tumblr.com/post/683450842647560192/loving-the-way-time-and-context-has-turned-dracula">what are obviously red flags</a>. When locals stare at him and talk among themselves of Satan, hell, werewolves and vampires after hearing his travel plans, Harker simply adds a parenthetical note to himself: “(Mem., I must ask the Count about these superstitions).” For Harker, who does not believe in vampires, this would hardly seem a nonsensical idea.</p>
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<p>Modern readers, even if tackling Stoker’s writing for the first time, however, are well aware that Count Dracula is a bloodthirsty vampire who has much more than British real estate on his mind. Trained by social media to mockingly scrutinize online content, “Dracula Daily” readers revel in minor details that <a href="https://selkielore.tumblr.com/post/683597812391428097/omg-the-count-kept-him-up-all-night-talking">are easily mocked</a>. For instance, the fact that Dracula, maintaining the pretense that there are servants in this remote vampire’s lair, secretly makes Jonathan Harker’s bed himself, is viewed in a new and humorous light. “<a href="https://ashtry.tumblr.com/post/683781830922698752/i-appreciate-draculas-efforts-in-running-a-one">I appreciate Dracula’s efforts in running a one man hotel</a>,” commented Tumblr user ashtry.</p>
<p>In Stoker’s time, one critic called the book’s descriptions “probably quite uncanny enough to <a href="https://beladraculalugosi.wordpress.com/contemporary-reviews-of-bram-stokers-dracula/">please those for whom they are designed</a>” – meaning, essentially, trash written for trash. Tumblr audiences in particular seem to have picked up on this quality, approaching the material with plenty of snark. It’s the mocking analysis of the novel by modern readers that <a href="https://fandom.tumblr.com/post/683789213230137344/email-isgood-again-the-dracula-daily-newsletter">sent “Dracula Daily” trending</a>.</p>
<h2>Consuming the story as a social experience</h2>
<p>Readers always interpret a book’s style and meaning through the lens of their own knowledge and experiences. But the majority of previous “Dracula” interpretation I’ve seen has been at the hands of scholars and devoted fans. The social media response to “Dracula Daily” is different, with a primarily younger audience riffing on the novel in a new way.</p>
<p>As audiences analyze the novel piece by piece, they are engaging one another with memes and artistic interpretations of the plot as it unfolds. For instance, Harker’s description of Dracula climbing down the walls of his castle in “lizard fashion” has elicited visual art of <a href="https://horseboneologist.tumblr.com/post/684336161182892032/serve-it-id-a-digital-drawing-of-count">fashion looks</a> <a href="https://draculaesque.tumblr.com/post/684328757123842048/looks-for-climbing-vertically-down-the-walls-of">inspired by lizards</a>.</p>
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<p>Because “Dracula Daily” reveals the plot day by day, readers follow the story together and are all at the same place in the narrative at the same time. As in the heyday of radio or network series television, the audience can gather around the (<a href="https://vampirediaries.fandom.com/wiki/Blog:Recent_posts">now virtual</a>) water cooler to discuss the latest revelation and speculate about what’s to come. Anyone could easily read ahead in the novel. But people are waiting with bated breath for the next installment to hit their inboxes.</p>
<p>It’s like a chapter-by-chapter book club. The forced slow pace leaves plenty of time for the ecosystem of memes and posts to flourish as the delicious dread builds about just what Dracula will do. As the plot further unfolds, I look forward to continuing to be entertained by the “Dracula Daily” audience – at least until Nov. 6, when the story will draw to a close for this year.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/183084/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Stanley Stepanic does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>A newsletter sends out chronological snippets from the 125-year-old novel ‘Dracula.’ Fans on the internet go wild.Stanley Stepanic, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, University of VirginiaLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1483672020-10-20T14:28:13Z2020-10-20T14:28:13ZRebecca and beyond: the creative allure of gothic Cornwall<p>Ben Wheatley’s <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2020/oct/18/rebecca-review-perfectly-watchable-romp">adaptation</a> of Daphne du Maurier’s novel Rebecca showcases the English county of Cornwall as a <a href="https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/daphne-du-maurier-and-the-gothic-tradition">Gothic space</a> of tumultuous waters, coarse moorlands, and perilous cliffs. Du Maurier’s Cornwall was a haunted place and the author was drawing upon a long tradition of seeing the Duchy as spectral and monstrous.</p>
<p>While Rebecca was published in 1938, Cornwall’s legends, landscape, and distinctive identity lent themselves to the gothic imagination from the end of the 18th century. As far afield as the US, Cornwall was perceived as a place of hauntings, madness, and death — a foreign, liminal threat composed of precipices and thresholds which would influence subsequent representations of the county. This could be seen in Charles Brockden Brown’s 1798 novel <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wieland_(novel)">Wieland</a>. An early example of American gothic, it follows a man who visits Cornwall with his family, where he loses his mind and jumps from the cliffs. </p>
<p>By the 19th century, these Gothic representations of Cornwall see a sudden <a href="https://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.802440">boom</a> as the county became increasingly prevalent in the wider British imagination due to a series of rapid cultural changes. These include being one of the last counties to be connected to the <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=C7lIAAAAYAAJ">national railway</a>, the <a href="https://terencecgannon.medium.com/the-collapse-of-the-cornish-tin-mines-704cd1f409de">collapse of the mining industry</a>, <a href="https://reviews.history.ac.uk/review/2114">the birth of tourism</a>, and a period of <a href="https://bernarddeacon.com/demography/the-great-emigration/">mass migration out of the county</a>. </p>
<p>All such changes spoke to more generalised Victorian anxieties of <a href="https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/07075332.2013.828643">globalisation</a>, <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/2591080?seq=1#metadata_info_tab_contents">modernity</a> and the <a href="https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007%2F978-1-349-17336-5_4.pdf">industrial revolution</a>, which caused concerns about changing economies, collapsing industries, and social (and geographical) mobility. People were also becoming more aware of Cornwall due to an increase in travel narratives, travel guides, folklore collections and stories featuring the county, as part of the rise of a <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/print-culture">print culture</a>. Increased ease of access to the county through travel also increased the county’s notoriety and what people found struck them as strange. </p>
<p>The architect John D. Sedding in 1887 <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/40826/JPassey%20Thesis%20CORRECTIONS%202020.pdf?sequence=1">stated that</a>:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>On whatever side you like to take it, the historic, the pre-historic, the natural, architectural, geological, ornithological, or on the side of its folklore, Christian or heathen — the place teems with subject matter that is as curious as it is interesting. Cornwall is the nursery ground of the saints; the fabled land of Lyonesse; the home of the giants; the haunt of fairies, pixies, mermaids, demons, and spectres. To speak of its natural aspects, its wild seaboard, and frequent air of savagery, one is almost bound to use terms of fancy.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure>
<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/LFVhB54UqvQ?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
</figure>
<p>These features provided ample fuel for gothic authors of the time. </p>
<h2>An ancient place</h2>
<p>Bram Stoker, the author of <a href="https://theconversation.com/dracula-free-movement-of-vampires-a-fitting-horror-story-for-the-brexit-era-129124">Dracula</a>, set <a href="http://www.bramstoker.org/novels/08stars.html">The Jewel of Seven Stars</a> in Cornwall in 1903. The story features the mummy of an Egyptian queen that requires a suitably ancient, foreign land in which to be <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3781/3781-h/3781-h.htm">resurrected</a>. Explaining why Cornwall is the perfect place, the novel’s Egyptologist, Abel Trelawny, says:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>In a hundred different ways [Cornwall] fulfils the conditions which I am led to believe are primary with regard to success. Here, we are, and shall be, as isolated as Queen Tera herself would have been in her rocky tomb in the Valley of the Sorcerer, and still in a rocky cavern.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Beneath Cornwall lies labyrinths of mining chambers, which could be seen as not too far removed from graves or tombs. The county is also isolated at the “Land’s End”, and associated with magic and mystery, partially through <a href="https://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/tintagel-castle/history-and-legend/">Merlin and King Arthur.</a></p>
<p>In Thomas Hardy’s early novel <a href="https://www.hardysociety.org/oxo/40/a-pair-of-blue-eyes/">A Pair of Blue Eyes</a> (1873), two suitors fight for a Cornish maiden, travelling from London on the new rail network to Cornwall. While the two vie for her hand, neither is aware that she is also on board; however, she is travelling as cargo rather than as a passenger as she lies in a coffin journeying home for the last time. The incoming Londoners arguing over an already dead Cornish woman speaks to anxieties over the coming of the rail and how an influx of “outsiders” might change Cornwall as <a href="https://ore.exeter.ac.uk/repository/bitstream/handle/10871/40826/JPassey%20Thesis%20CORRECTIONS%202020.pdf?sequence=1">expressed by the writer William Connor Sydney</a> in 1897:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>Railways, and the gradual assimilation of its people more and more into ordinary English society will have the effect, it is greatly to be feared, of banishing its huge array of witches and hobgoblins, giants and dwarfs, grim spectres, and haunted corridors to the limbo of things that had been.</p>
</blockquote>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="Crumbling mine on the coast with waves crashing below." src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=397&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/364466/original/file-20201020-18-qm6yy5.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=499&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Botallack Mine, Cornwall.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.shutterstock.com/image-photo/botallack-mine-cornwall-west-devon-mining-1795306897">Kathleenjean/Shutterstock</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Arthur Conan Doyle even sent Holmes and Watson to Cornwall for a retreat in The Adventure of the Devil’s Foot (1910) only for them, unsurprisingly, to encounter “<a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/files/2349/2349-h/2349-h.htm">the Cornish horror – [the] strangest case I have handled</a>”.</p>
<h2>Ghosts and gold</h2>
<p>Mines and subterranean spaces, in particular, inspired several gothic tales. On such tale is Joseph F. Pearce’s <a href="http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?130326">The Man Who Coined His Blood Into Gold</a> (1893) where a poverty-stricken miner is told by an underground goblin that he can transform each drop of his blood into gold coin with magic. The miner is later found, dead amongst his glittering horde. The tale appeals to 19th-century anxieties surrounding the collapse of the mining industry and the ravages of industrial capitalism. </p>
<p>Cornwall’s landscape is unique for both its world-famous mine networks and rugged coastlines, notorious for shipwrecks. Margery Williams, most famous for the children’s story <a href="https://digital.library.upenn.edu/women/williams/rabbit/rabbit.html">The Velveteen Rabbit (1922)</a> set <a href="https://www.proquest.com/docview/6518834/4302075EC05E4CF2PQ/2?accountid=9730">The Last Mitchell</a> (1905) in Cornwall, where a “living” ghost, having perished in a wreck, haunts his ancestral home, only to finally vanish once his body is returned to his home. </p>
<p>Edgar Allan Poe, the poster child of the gothic, even ventured as far as Cornwall, “one of the wildest and least frequented portions of fair England,” in his short story <a href="https://poestories.com/read/ligeia">Ligeia (1838)</a>, where a man is visited there by the spectre of his lost sweetheart.</p>
<p>Cornwall’s dislocation from the mainland, its reputation as both “<a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/uk-england-cornwall-44400199">English and not-English’</a>”, its tempestuous and radical history, and its wealth of folklore and legends, all lend themselves to a Gothic literary tradition that stretches over 222 years. With Wheatley’s incarnation of the mysterious county, it’s certain that this place of ghosts and magic still captures our imaginations today.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/148367/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Joan Passey works for the University of Bristol and her PhD was funded by the AHRC South, West, and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership.</span></em></p>Wild coastlines, rich folklore and a sense that it’s a place unto itself, at once England and not, has made Cornwall the ideal setting for Gothic tales.Joan Passey, Teaching Associate in Victorian literature and culture, University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1408302020-06-23T14:40:28Z2020-06-23T14:40:28ZVampire myths originated with a real blood disorder<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342281/original/file-20200616-23255-h4uj5g.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=52%2C46%2C3750%2C2683&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">A street painting in Bucharest, Romania, depicts Bram Stoker, right, the author of Dracula, sharing a drink with Vlad the Impaler, left, the medieval Romanian ruler who inspired the book.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">(AP Photos/Vadim Ghirda)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The concept of a vampire predates Bram Stoker’s tales of Count Dracula — probably by several centuries. But did vampires ever really exist?</p>
<p>In 1819, 80 years before the publication of <em>Dracula</em>, John Polidori, an Anglo-Italian physician, published a novel called <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/6087/6087-h/6087-h.htm"><em>The Vampire</em></a>. Stoker’s novel, however, became the benchmark for our descriptions of vampires. But how and where did this concept develop? It appears that the folklore surrounding the vampire phenomenon originated in that Balkan area where Stoker located his tale of Count Dracula.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342292/original/file-20200616-23247-1wf5585.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342292/original/file-20200616-23247-1wf5585.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342292/original/file-20200616-23247-1wf5585.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342292/original/file-20200616-23247-1wf5585.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=927&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342292/original/file-20200616-23247-1wf5585.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342292/original/file-20200616-23247-1wf5585.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342292/original/file-20200616-23247-1wf5585.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1164&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Bram Stoker’s <em>Dracula</em> has become the benchmark vampire.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Penguin Random House)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Stoker <a href="https://www.irishtimes.com/news/world/europe/bram-stoker-a-hero-for-struggling-corner-of-romania-1.1850499">never travelled to Transylvania</a> or any other part of Eastern Europe. (The lands held by the fictional count would be in modern-day Romania and Hungary.) </p>
<p><a href="https://www.bramstokerestate.com">The writer was born and brought up in Dublin</a>. He was a friend to Oscar Wilde and William Gladstone. He was both a Liberal and a home-ruler — in favour of home rule for Ireland. He turned to theatre, and became business manager of the Lyceum Theatre in London. It was his friendship with Armin Vambery, a Hungarian writer, that led to his fascination with vampire folklore. He consulted Vambery in the writing of <em>Dracula</em>, whose main character was loosely fashioned on <a href="http://www.english.upenn.edu/%7Emgamer/Etexts/prince.dracula.html">Vlad the Impaler</a>, a bloodthirsty prince born in Transylvania in 1431.</p>
<h2>Medical source of the myth</h2>
<p>But where did the myth of vampires come from? Like many myths, it is based partly in fact. A <a href="https://doi.org/10.1016/s0140-6736(09)61925-5">blood disorder called porphyria</a>, which has has been with us for millennia, became prevalent among the nobility and royalty of Eastern Europe. Porphyria is an inherited blood disorder that causes the body to produce less heme — a critical component of hemoglobin, the protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body tissues. It seems likely that this disorder is the origin of the vampire myth. In fact, porphyria is sometimes referred to as the “vampyre disease.”</p>
<p>Consider the symptoms of patients with porphyria:</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342284/original/file-20200616-23213-1btom74.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/342284/original/file-20200616-23213-1btom74.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1200&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342284/original/file-20200616-23213-1btom74.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1200&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342284/original/file-20200616-23213-1btom74.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1200&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342284/original/file-20200616-23213-1btom74.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1508&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342284/original/file-20200616-23213-1btom74.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1508&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/342284/original/file-20200616-23213-1btom74.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1508&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Elements of vampire folklore correspond to symptoms of porphyria.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">(Pixabay)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p><strong>Sensitivity to sunlight</strong>: Extreme <a href="https://doi.org/10.1001/jamadermatol.2015.6066">sensitivity to sunlight</a>, leading to facial disfigurement, blackened skin and hair growth.</p>
<p><strong>Fangs</strong>: In addition to facial disfigurement, repeated attacks of the disease causes the gums to recede, exposing the teeth, which then look like fangs.</p>
<p><strong>Blood drinking</strong>: Because the urine of persons with porphyria is dark red, folklore surmised that they were drinking blood. In fact, some physicians had recommended that these patients drink blood to compensate for the defect in their red blood cells — but this recommendation was for animal blood. It is more likely that these patients, who only went out after dark, were judged to be looking for blood, and their fangs led to folk tales about vampires.</p>
<p><strong>Aversion to garlic</strong>: The <a href="https://doi.org/10.1353/pbm.1990.0051">sulfur content of garlic</a> could lead to an attack of porphyria, leading to very acute pain. Thus, the aversion to garlic.</p>
<p><strong>Reflections not seen in mirrors</strong>: In the mythology, a vampire is not able to look in a mirror, or cannot see its reflection. The facial disfigurement caused by porphyria becomes worse with time. Poor oxygenation leads to destruction of facial tissues, and collapse of the facial structure. Patients understandably avoided mirrors.</p>
<p><strong>Fear of the crucifix</strong>: During the Spanish Inquisition (1478-1834), 600 “vampires” were reportedly burned at the stake. Some of these accused vampires were innocent sufferers of porphyria. Porphyria patients had good reason to fear the Christian faith and Christian symbols.</p>
<p>Acute attacks of the disease are associated with considerable pain, and both mental and physical disturbance. This condition has been ascribed to the English King George III, although subsequent analysis has <a href="https://doi.org/10.7861/clinmedicine.15-2-168">shed some doubt on porphyria</a> as the cause of his “madness.”</p>
<h2>Porphyria</h2>
<p>Nowadays, with our scientific knowledge of porphyria, instead of fearing these folks, <a href="http://canadianassociationforporphyria.ca/Porphyria-Treatments">we can love and care for them</a>. Porphyria remains incurable, and treatment is mainly supportive: pain control, fluids and avoidance of drugs and chemicals that provoke acute attacks. Some success has been achieved with stem cell transplants.</p>
<p>Could Stoker have known of the existence of porphyria, and/or its link to vampire folklore? It was only in 1911, eight years before Stoker’s book appeared, that the diseases of porphyria (there are several types) <a href="https://porphyriafoundation.org/for-patients/about-porphyria/history-of-porphyria/">were classified by H. Gunther</a>. However, physician, researcher and author George Harley had described a patient with porphyria a few years earlier.</p>
<p>Through his gothic novel, Stoker surely wins the prize for the best example of myth entangled with medicine!</p>
<p><em>This story is an edited excerpt from the book</em> Of Plagues and Vampires: Believable Myths and Unbelievable Facts from Medical Practice <em>by Michael Hefferon</em>.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/140830/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Michael Hefferon does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>Did vampires ever really exist? The myth is likely related to a medical condition with symptoms that may explain many elements of centuries-old vampire folklore.Michael Hefferon, Assistant Professor, Department of Pediatrics, Queen's University, OntarioLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1351242020-03-30T17:13:19Z2020-03-30T17:13:19ZFive novels from the Victorian era to give comfort in troubled times<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324033/original/file-20200330-146724-1jxx671.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=15%2C15%2C5160%2C3430&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Tennessee Witney via Shutterstock</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The evolution of the novel and short story <a href="https://sites.udel.edu/britlitwiki/the-realistic-novel-in-the-victorian-era/">in the 19th century</a> brought us one of the greatest human sources of comfort, besides food and a nice hot bath. When someone tells me they are planning to “curl up with a good book”, I am filled with a sense of peace on their behalf – of quiet enjoyment, perhaps accompanied by a little soft music and the crackle of a fire. </p>
<p>Regular solitary time is becoming the norm for many. Many of us are already tired of the enjoyable inanity of Netflix and Amazon Prime and are ready for something to lose ourselves in completely. </p>
<p>In the 19th century, the novel boomed as <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/themes/reading-and-print-culture">literacy and leisure time increased</a>. Novels were <a href="https://www.bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/victorian-readers">frequently published in weekly parts</a>, one to three chapters at a time. They had to be long enough to fill the required number of issues, and interesting enough to ensure readers kept buying the magazine or periodical (or run the risk of being cancelled mid-series). It is this combination that makes them a great resource for times like today.</p>
<p>Human beings are <a href="http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20180503-our-fiction-addiction-why-humans-need-stories">designed to love stories</a>. Our brains seek narratives to help us make sense of the world. We communicate using stories to exchange knowledge and gain understanding. As <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=OlRjDwAAQBAJ&pg=PT7565&lpg=PT7565&dq=fiction+is+to+the+grown+man+what+play+is+to+the+child&source=bl&ots=4uymm8f_3k&sig=ACfU3U2d7_yryl1iGI1_XjwaYEuv3PGrGA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiS-7rlmcLoAhW1uXEKHf1VDPYQ6AEwHHoECC4QAQ#v=onepage&q=fiction%20is%20to%20the%20grown%20man%20what%20play%20is%20to%20the%20child&f=false">Robert Louis Stevenson wrote</a>: “fiction is to the grown man what play is to the child” – through fiction we learn by imaginative experience. </p>
<p>Stories help us gain insight into things we cannot or should not experience. They also keep us safe – we tell each other cautionary tales all the time. So let’s do as our NHS doctors and nurses ask and learn from their stories of the virus – while also tucking ourselves away with some great old novels:</p>
<h2>Anthony Hope: The Prisoner of Zenda (1894)</h2>
<p>An exciting and funny adventure story about a man who goes on holiday and ends up as temporary king of Ruritania. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=1011&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1270&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1270&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324081/original/file-20200330-146724-1duraxs.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1270&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Rollicking Victorian adventure story.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Magnum</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>London-born adventurer Rudolf Rassendyll is persuaded to pretend to be the king after the real king is kidnapped by his evil half-brother on the eve of his coronation. A distant relation of the royal family, Rudolf is the king’s spitting image.</p>
<p>Beautifully written and filled with energy, the story romps across the beautiful scenery of Ruritania to the mysterious castle of Zenda. Rudolf is one of the most vibrant and positive characters I have come across and will fill you with hope. But what will he do when he falls in love with the king’s beautiful fianceé?</p>
<p>Read it for free on <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/95">Project Gutenberg</a>.</p>
<h2>Florence Marryat: Her Father’s Name (1876)</h2>
<p>Cross-dressing, swashbuckling adventuress Leona Lacoste journeys from Rio de Janeiro to London to clear her father’s name. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=905&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324045/original/file-20200330-146678-1310dgs.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1137&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Cross-dressing derring-do.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Unknown to her until his death, he has been in hiding in their Brazilian home, having escaped some scandal or crime in England. To get to the bottom of the mystery, Leona must stop at nothing.</p>
<p>Disguised as a man to make the journey possible in the 1870s, she proves herself onboard a ship in a dramatic duel and seduces the daughter of a rich industrialist. But what will she uncover about her unknown family history?</p>
<p>Read it for free on <a href="https://archive.org/details/herfathersnamea02marrgoog/page/n12/mode/2up">Internet Archive</a>, or buy from <a href="https://www.victoriansecrets.co.uk/book/her-fathers-name/">Victorian Secrets</a>.</p>
<h2>Wilkie Collins: The Woman in White (1859)</h2>
<p>The celebrated mystery which launched a new type of story known as the sensation or enigma novel.</p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=960&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324082/original/file-20200330-146699-1ro77hd.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1206&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">One of the first classic thrillers.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Walter Hartright is startled by the sudden appearance of a mysterious woman dressed in white walking on the road to London late at night. She asks him for directions and he decides to see her safely to a cab. </p>
<p>On the way, he discovers that she is from the very town to which he is about the journey to start work as an art teacher. Little does he know how this mysterious woman and the family in Limeridge will change his life forever.</p>
<p>Read it free on <a href="http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/583">Project Gutenberg</a>.</p>
<h2>Bram Stoker: Dracula (1897)</h2>
<p>This may seem an unlikely choice but don’t let the TV and film adaptations fool you. This is a seriously good book. The adventurers who track and foil Count Dracula, led by Mina Harker and Abraham Van Helsing, are the epitome of organised and resourceful Victorian society.</p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=919&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324042/original/file-20200330-146699-1epx6tc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1155&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Sink your teeth into this classic read.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Wikipedia</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>This book is all about creating order from chaos: a reassuring ideal at the moment. Mina Harker’s way of life is doubly threatened by Dracula as he endangers both her fiancé, Jonathan Harker, whom he imprisons in his castle; and her best friend, Lucy Westenra, who is tormented by sleepwalking and mysterious illnesses.</p>
<p>Mina acts as the lynchpin for the five men who join together to defeat the count. The story that we are treated to is her collection of their accounts, creating a magnificent and lucid whole from diaries, cuttings, reports and letters. How will these rational beings thwart the supernatural power of the count?</p>
<p>Read it free on <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/345/345-h/345-h.htm">Project Gutenberg</a>.</p>
<h2>Charlotte Brontë: Jane Eyre (1847)</h2>
<p>Jane Eyre fights for what she believes to be right. She stands up to those more powerful than herself, whether it be for her own rights or the good of others. </p>
<figure class="align-left zoomable">
<a href="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=1000&fit=clip"><img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=932&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=1171&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=1171&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/324084/original/file-20200330-146683-8moj4.png?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=1171&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px"></a>
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Romantic melodrama at its best.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Amazon</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Orphaned and rejected by her guardian aunt, Jane trains to become a teacher at a charity school and then becomes governess to Adele, the ward of the wealthy and seemingly misanthropic Mr Rochester.</p>
<p>Slowly and unwillingly she falls in love with her master but he has a certain secret in his attic. What will this determined woman do to save herself from the temptations of his love?</p>
<p>Read it free on <a href="https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1260/1260-h/1260-h.htm">Project Gutenberg:</a>.</p>
<p>You’ll have noticed that I have stuck to books with happy endings, or at least tidy ones. There is no Thomas Hardy (you must take broadcaster <a href="http://www.bbc.co.uk/comedy/oldharrysgame/">Andy Hamilton’s advice</a> and read Hardy’s novels backwards to get a happy ending), and no George Eliot, whose wonderfully complex characters are very real and intriguing but not often comforting. </p>
<p>Some are old, familiar favourites, others lesser known but equally enjoyable. The list is by no means complete. It is intended to be the beginning of a journey back to familiar friends and an exploration of new ones. They are shared with love and care in the hope they will make you feel a little better for their company.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/135124/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Pam Lock does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>And every one of them has a happy ending.Pam Lock, Lecturer, English Literature (Specialist in Victorian Literature and Alcohol), University of BristolLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1291242019-12-30T08:49:08Z2019-12-30T08:49:08ZDracula: free movement of vampires a fitting horror story for the Brexit era<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307872/original/file-20191219-11939-3p89lp.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&rect=17%2C0%2C3976%2C2994&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bloody and unbowed: Claes Bang as Dracula.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Hartswood Films/Netflix/David Ellis</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Fictional vampires tend to reflect the politics of the times that produce them: “Because they are always changing, their appeal is dramatically generational,” says the late American scholar Nina Auerbach in her classic work of criticism <a href="https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ILOzzQFU8ooC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false">Our Vampires, Ourselves</a>. The figure of the vampire, she suggests, always tells us as much about ourselves as it does about vampires <em>per se</em>.</p>
<p>With this in mind, the first episode of the new adaptation of Dracula for the BBC and Netflix by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss is at first perplexing. Unlike Moffat’s previous, modernising adaptations of 19th-century fiction – Jekyll (2007) and Sherlock (2010-17) – the series returns to 1897, the year in which Bram Stoker published his novel. </p>
<p>The setting is high Gothic, featuring a crumbling, eastern European castle (Orava Castle in Slovakia) and a convent full of crucifix-toting nuns. Eschewing the sentimental romance of <a href="https://www.headstuff.org/culture/literature/literature-on-film-part-1-francis-ford-coppolas-adaptation-of-bram-stokers-dracula/">Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 adaptation</a> or the wildly successful <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/film/2018/nov/02/ten-years-of-twilight-the-extraordinary-feminist-legacy-of-the-panned-vampire-saga">Twilight franchise</a>, Moffat and Gatiss appear – initially at least – to take us back to the horror of the original text.</p>
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<iframe width="440" height="260" src="https://www.youtube.com/embed/IC9TjMNqPEo?wmode=transparent&start=0" frameborder="0" allowfullscreen=""></iframe>
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<p>But as the episode progresses the European setting becomes more than just spooky window dressing. One of the most famous arguments about the novel, first made by <a href="https://www.jstor.org/stable/3827794?seq=8#metadata_info_tab_contents">Stephen D. Arata</a>, is that Dracula enacts “reverse colonisation” – Stoker’s vampire expresses the threat that imperialism might not be a one-way operation. From his home in eastern Europe, the count travels to Britain to buy up its real estate and add its women to his harem, bypassing the need for a passport or immigration documents and threatening British manhood in the process.</p>
<h2>‘Brexit Gothic’</h2>
<p>Seen in this light, Dracula offers a clear application to our times. In an article for The Guardian on “<a href="https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2019/feb/11/project-fear-what-will-brexit-gothic-fiction-look-like">Brexit Gothic</a>”, Neil McRobert points out:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>When Nigel Farage expresses concern about <a href="https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-27459923">Romanian men moving in next door</a>, it makes one wonder if he has read Dracula – the story of a Romanian man who literally moves in beside some stuffy British people.</p>
</blockquote>
<p>Moffat and Gatiss are too canny to give us a straightforward metaphor for Brexit – and yet there are clear nods to contemporary anxieties in the first episode. Dracula quizzes Jonathan Harker on English language and culture out of a desire to “pass among your countrymen as one of their own”. He will be the good immigrant who assimilates, who blends invisibly with the host culture. There is a moment of discomfort, however, as he promises to “absorb” Harker – this immigrant is a parasite who feeds off its host.</p>
<p>There is no direct correlation with itinerant agricultural workers, however, as Dracula seeks to infiltrate the highest echelons of society. In a warped version of late 19th-century eugenics, we discover that Dracula’s choosiness about his victims is the secret to his vampiric success – consuming only the blood of the best enables him to retain his human qualities. Hence his appetite for the British Empire. “Vampires go where power is,” says Auerbach. “You are what you eat,” quips Claes Bang’s Dracula.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/307873/original/file-20191219-11904-1o5nl8n.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">Dolly Wells as Sister Agatha with Joanna Scanlan as Mother Superior.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">BBC/Hartswood Films/Netflix/Robert Viglasky</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Moreover, this is a tale of two Europeans. Sister Agatha, the Dutch nun who questions Harker after his escape from Dracula’s castle (a significantly expanded role from the book, played with exquisite exasperation by Dolly Wells), scoffs at Jonathan’s English masculinity when he fails to realise the incongruity of a secret message written to him in English in a Transylvanian castle: “Of course not! You are an English man! A combination of presumptions beyond compare.” British exceptionalism looks set to take a tumble as Dracula reaches England in the second instalment.</p>
<h2>Dark humour</h2>
<p>The episode displays the acute self-aware characteristic of vampire films, which are what <a href="http://sensesofcinema.com/2013/book-reviews/new-vampire-cinema-by-ken-gelder/">Ken Gelder calls “citational”</a>, constantly referring to previous examples of the genre. There are multiple moments when viewers anticipating romance have their expectations rudely shattered. Twilight in particular comes in for some sharp debunking, with Mina playing the role of Twilight’s heroine Bella, appealing to her lover’s higher moral fibre and coming in for a shock as she discovers that true love does not trump bloodlust after all. Instead of Twilight’s lingering shots of gleaming male torsos we get intimate body horror in excruciating close up – a fly crawling across an eyeball, a blackened nail flaking off a finger.</p>
<p>One of the most striking features of Moffat and Gatiss’s adaptation is its humour. Comedy has always been a crucial element of Gothic literature, which continually teeters between terror and laughter. “King Laugh,” a metaphorical figure invented by Professor Van Helsing in Bram Stoker’s novel to explain his own hysterics, is a version of death, leading the characters in a kind of <em>danse macabre</em>. The novel exhibits black humour in the character of the lunatic Renfield, in particular, who calculates how many lives he can consume, starting by eating flies and trading up the food chain.</p>
<p>As I argued in my recent book, <a href="https://irishgothichorror.files.wordpress.com/2018/10/catherine-spooner.pdf">Post-Millennial Gothic</a>, a distinguishing characteristic of contemporary vampires is their increasing comic agency. The first self-conscious vampire joke is the iconic one-liner first spoken by Bela Lugosi in Tod Browning’s classic 1931 film: “I never drink … wine.” Moffat and Gatiss get this out of the way in the first few minutes – and even add a callback later in the episode.</p>
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<p>There are more zingers to come as Bang quips his way across Europe like an infernal James Bond. When Harker spots him with a glass and queries that he never drinks, I almost expected him to clarify: “Shaken, not stirred.”</p>
<p>The comparison between Dracula and Bond is not a casual one. Bond props up a crumbling British Empire – Dracula aims to infiltrate it and use it to his own ends. They emerge from the same social and historical concerns, two sides of the same coin. Both reflect us back in multiple ways, and neither offers a flattering picture.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/129124/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Catherine Spooner does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.</span></em></p>The latest version of the Gothic vampire chiller is brought to you with the trademark humour of writers Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss.Catherine Spooner, Professor of Literature and Culture, Lancaster UniversityLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1108462019-03-28T21:19:21Z2019-03-28T21:19:21ZPerverse passions that will not die: The modern vampire first walked among us two centuries ago<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265995/original/file-20190326-139364-1md2pk2.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula in Tod Browning's 1931 horror film is influenced by John Polidori’s tale of terror, 'The Vampyre,' first published — suggestively — on April Fools’ Day 1819.
</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Universal Pictures</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>Vampires have stalked humans for thousands of years, but it was just two hundred years ago that a young English doctor named <a href="https://global.oup.com/ukhe/product/the-vampyre-and-other-tales-of-the-macabre-9780199552412?cc=us&lang=en&">John Polidori introduced the modern version of the ancient demon</a>. </p>
<p>Although far less well-known than <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/first-edition-of-dracula">Bram Stoker’s <em>Dracula</em></a>, Polidori’s <a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-vampyre-by-john-polidori"><em>The Vampyre</em></a> was first published — suggestively — on April Fools’ Day 1819. This brief tale of terror set the pattern for all future representations of the vampire, including Stoker’s, and it launched a vampire craze that after two centuries still retains its ability to grab us by the throat. </p>
<p>It is hard to imagine, but <em>The Vampyre</em> as well as <em>Frankenstein</em>, two of western literature’s most enduring myths, were the results of the same ghost story writing contest.</p>
<figure class="align-left ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265944/original/file-20190326-36270-1xdwkb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265944/original/file-20190326-36270-1xdwkb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265944/original/file-20190326-36270-1xdwkb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265944/original/file-20190326-36270-1xdwkb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=739&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265944/original/file-20190326-36270-1xdwkb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265944/original/file-20190326-36270-1xdwkb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265944/original/file-20190326-36270-1xdwkb7.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=929&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A portrait of John Polidori by F. G. Gainsford, circa 1816.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/person/mp03596/john-william-polidori?search=sas&sText=Polidori">F G Gainsford/National Portrait Gallery</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Vampires today inhabit a wide realm of the popular imagination in everything from novels, films and television shows to cartoons, video games, comic books and advertisements. They are also a powerful metaphor for conceiving and representing all manner of cultural practices and social problems, from the spread of sexually transmitted disease, through the mental and bodily pains of drug addiction, to the many ways in which technology and social media penetrate our daily lives.</p>
<h2>The writing contest</h2>
<p>Handsome, arrogant and hot-tempered, <a href="http://www.keats-shelley-house.org/en/writers/writers-john-polidori/john-polidori-the-vampyre">Polidori</a> was educated at a Catholic boarding school and then at the University of Edinburgh, where in 1815 he received his medical degree at the age of just 19. Less than a year later, the course of his life changed dramatically when <a href="https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/lord-byron">Lord Byron</a>, the most famous literary man of the day, hired him as his travelling companion and personal physician. </p>
<figure class="align-right ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265942/original/file-20190326-36276-x4552d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=237&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265942/original/file-20190326-36276-x4552d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265942/original/file-20190326-36276-x4552d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265942/original/file-20190326-36276-x4552d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=400&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265942/original/file-20190326-36276-x4552d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265942/original/file-20190326-36276-x4552d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265942/original/file-20190326-36276-x4552d.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=503&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The poet Lord Byron, oil on canvas, circa 1835, based on a work of 1813.</span>
<span class="attribution"><a class="source" href="https://www.npg.org.uk/">Thomas Phillips/National Portrait Gallery</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Quick to see the commercial potential of the arrangement, Byron’s publisher, John Murray, commissioned Polidori to keep a diary of his time with the notorious poet, whose passionate interest in young men and scandalous love affair with his half-sister Augusta had hastened his departure from England. </p>
<p>Polidori immediately saw the predatory side of Byron’s personality. “As soon as he reached his room,” Polidori wrote from Belgium in April 1816, “Lord Byron fell like a thunderbolt upon the chambermaid.”</p>
<p>Shortly thereafter, Byron and Polidori took up residence at the Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva. Polidori saw himself as a rival to Byron and relations between them soon deteriorated. “What is there excepting writing poetry that I cannot do better than you?” Polidori demanded. </p>
<p>“First,” Byron snapped in reply, “I can hit with a pistol the keyhole of that door – Secondly, I can swim across that river to yonder point – and thirdly, I can give you a damned good thrashing.”</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265949/original/file-20190326-36270-coifqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265949/original/file-20190326-36270-coifqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265949/original/file-20190326-36270-coifqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265949/original/file-20190326-36270-coifqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=338&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265949/original/file-20190326-36270-coifqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265949/original/file-20190326-36270-coifqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265949/original/file-20190326-36270-coifqc.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=424&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The site of the ghost story writing contest: Villa Diodati at Lake Geneva, 1833.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Edward Finden/British Library</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>The aristocrat and his doctor were soon joined by a like-minded trio of literary and sexual renegades: the radical poet and free-love advocate Percy Bysshe Shelley, his 18-year-old lover Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, and Mary’s stepsister Claire Clairmont, also 18 and Byron’s most recent amour. It was an extraordinary meeting of minds and bodies.</p>
<p>Bad weather kept the group indoors, and in mid-June <a href="https://publicdomainreview.org/2014/10/16/the-poet-the-physician-and-the-birth-of-the-modern-vampire/">Byron challenged each of them to write a ghost story</a>. Claire defaulted. Shelley may have produced a brief verse fragment as his contribution to the competition. Byron started but did not complete the short tale of terror now known as <em>Augustus Darvell</em>.</p>
<h2>The winners are…</h2>
<p>Godwin (the future Mary Shelley) and Polidori each produced a finished and immensely influential work. She created <em>Frankenstein</em>. He composed <em>The Vampyre</em>. </p>
<p>These spectacular results make the competition the most famous in all of English literary history. It is a striking thought that the same writing contest gave us both <em>Frankenstein</em> and <em>The Vampyre</em>, the two most enduring myths of the modern world.</p>
<p>Before Polidori, vampires were very different creatures. Shaggy, fetid and bestial, they preyed on family members, neighbours or livestock in nocturnal raids that in many accounts approached both the risible and the revolting. Polidori changed all that. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265993/original/file-20190326-139356-8dhpdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265993/original/file-20190326-139356-8dhpdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265993/original/file-20190326-139356-8dhpdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265993/original/file-20190326-139356-8dhpdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=381&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265993/original/file-20190326-139356-8dhpdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265993/original/file-20190326-139356-8dhpdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265993/original/file-20190326-139356-8dhpdk.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=479&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">After Polidori, vampires became handsome predators, creatures of polite society.</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>His vampire was highly resourceful and haunted, not the village or the district, but the drawing rooms of polite society and the pleasure dens of international travellers. What is more, instead of the peasant-turned-ghoul of ancient folklore, Polidori elevated the vampire to the ranks of the aristocracy, where as a hypnotically handsome predator he seduced beautiful young women and sucked their life away.</p>
<p>Polidori’s tale centres on fatal vows, paralysis, isolation, betrayal and the return of the dead. <a href="https://www.penguinrandomhouse.ca/books/605410/the-regency-years-by-robert-morrison/9780393249057">He clearly models his vampire, Lord Ruthven, on Lord Byron, for the two have in common good looks, callousness, high rank, mobility, wealth and keen sexual appetites</a>. Aubrey is Ruthven’s friend and travelling partner, and his relationship with Ruthven is usually read as Polidori’s own complex fascination with Byron — a fascination that both attracts and appals him.</p>
<p>In the tale, Ruthven sucks strength from Aubrey as their relationship declines, but he takes a much more deadly interest in Aubrey’s unnamed sister and Aubrey’s close friend, Ianthe, both of whom he dispatches with his insatiable fangs:</p>
<blockquote>
<p>“Upon her neck and breast was blood, and upon her throat were the marks of teeth having opened the vein: – to this the men pointed, crying, simultaneously struck with horror, ‘a Vampyre, a Vampyre!’”</p>
</blockquote>
<h2>A 200-year-long fascination</h2>
<p>There have been many more sophisticated and explicit renderings of vampiric lore in the two centuries since Polidori’s tale first appeared. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu popularized the female vampire in his tale of terror <em>Carmilla</em> (1872), Stoker took the lordly fiend to new heights in <em>Dracula</em> (1897) and over the course of the last 100 years novelists, poets, playwrights, artists, movie makers and screenwriters have returned obsessively to vampires.</p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265894/original/file-20190326-36252-1egxpdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/265894/original/file-20190326-36252-1egxpdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265894/original/file-20190326-36252-1egxpdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265894/original/file-20190326-36252-1egxpdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=415&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265894/original/file-20190326-36252-1egxpdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265894/original/file-20190326-36252-1egxpdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/265894/original/file-20190326-36252-1egxpdg.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=521&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">A scene from the 1922 silent horror classic, ‘Nosferatu,’ influenced by Bram Stoker’s ‘Dracula.’</span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<p>Polidori’s tale touched off this fascination. Two centuries ago he corrected the drastic deficiencies of the folklore and reimagined the vampire as a suave, mysterious, sexually dynamic elite who defies time and place, who consumes ravenously and without guilt, and who represents perverse passions that will not die.</p>
<p>But the spread of vampirism does not end there. Vampires terrify us now because, in the hands of the countless writers and artists who have drawn their creative lifeblood from Polidori’s reincarnation, they serve as potent and protean representations of whatever we most fear about foreignness, sexuality, selfhood, disease, the afterlife, history and much else. They represent our undying urge for gratification. They embody the monstrous return of what we bury both in ourselves and in our collective past.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/110846/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Robert Morrison has co-edited an edition of Polidori's The Vampyre for Oxford University Press. He has received funding from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.</span></em></p>One of the reasons the myth of vampires endures and captures the popular imagination is that vampires are a powerful metaphor for a wide range of cultural practices and social problems.Robert Morrison, Professor of English Language and Literature, Queen's University, OntarioLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.tag:theconversation.com,2011:article/1052382018-10-25T15:55:30Z2018-10-25T15:55:30ZOlder than Dracula: in search of the English vampire<figure><img src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242277/original/file-20181025-71032-1t7uont.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=496&fit=clip" /><figcaption><span class="caption">The Premature Burial.</span> <span class="attribution"><span class="source">Antoine Wiertz (1854)</span></span></figcaption></figure><p>The story of Count Dracula as many of us know it was created by Bram Stoker, an Irishman, in 1897. But most of the action takes place in England, from the moment the Transylvanian vampire arrives on a shipwrecked vessel in Whitby, North Yorkshire, with plans to make his lair in the spookily named Carfax estate, west of the river in London. </p>
<p>But Dracula wasn’t the first vampire in English literature, let alone the first to stalk England. The vampire first made its way into English literature in John Polidori’s 1819 short story “<a href="https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/the-vampyre-by-john-polidor">The Vampyre</a>”. Polidori’s vampire, Lord Ruthven, is inspired by a thinly disguised portrait of the predatory English poet, Lord Byron, in <a href="https://thegothicwanderer.wordpress.com/2013/07/10/lady-caroline-lambs-glenarvon-and-the-byronic-vampire/">Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon</a> (1816). So the first fictional vampire was actually a satanic English Lord.</p>
<p>It is nearly 200 years since this Romantic/Byronic archetype for a vampire emerged – but what do we know about English belief in vampires outside of fiction? <a href="http://researchprofiles.herts.ac.uk/portal/en/projects/open-graves-open-minds-vampires-and-the-undead-in-modern-culture(f33cf31d-ae78-44e5-b8a7-88dc6a1a7a0f).html">New research</a> at the University of Hertfordshire has uncovered and reappraised a number of vampire myths – and they are not all confined to the realms of fiction. </p>
<p>The <a href="https://www.historicmysteries.com/croglin-grange-vampire/">Croglin Vampire</a> reputedly first appeared in Cumberland to a Miss Fisher in the 1750s. Its story is retold by <a href="https://talesofmytery.blogspot.com/2013/12/augustus-hare-vampire-of-croglin-grange.html">Dr Augustus Hare</a>, a clergyman, in his Memorials of a Quiet Life in 1871. According to this legend, the vampire scratches at the window before disappearing into an ancient vault. The vault is later discovered to be full of coffins that have been broken open and their contents, horribly mangled and distorted, are scattered over the floor. One coffin only remains intact, but the lid has been loosened. There, shrivelled and mummified – but quite intact – lies the Croglin Vampire.</p>
<p>Elsewhere in Cumbria, the natives of Renwick, were <a href="http://www.strangehistory.net/2016/06/18/the-renwick-cockatrice/">once known as “bats”</a> due to the monstrous creature that is said to have flown out of the foundations of a rebuilt church there in 1733. The existence of vampire bats, which sucked blood wouldn’t be <a href="http://www.nsrl.ttu.edu/about/Outreach/Exhibits/Vampire%20Bat%20exhibit.pdf">confirmed until 1832</a>, when Charles Darwin sketched one feeding off a horse on his voyage to South America in The Beagle. The creature in Renwick has been referred to as a “cockatrice” – a mythical creature with a serpent’s head and tail and the feet and wings of a cockerel – by <a href="https://www.cumbriacountyhistory.org.uk/renwick-cockatrice">Cumbrian County History</a>. But it’s the myth of the vampire bat that has prevailed in the surrounding villages and is recorded in conversations in local archives and <a href="http://archive.spectator.co.uk/article/21st-november-1952/19/crack-a-christ-luck.">journals</a> </p>
<p>What picture emerges then in this history of the English vampire? The Croglin Vampire has never been verified – but it has an afterlife in the 20th century, appearing as The British Vampire in 1977 in an <a href="http://vaultofevil.proboards.com/thread/814/daniel-farson-hamlyn-book-horror">anthology of horror</a> by Daniel Farson, who turns out to be Stoker’s great-grandnephew. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=487&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242308/original/file-20181025-71032-1swjmhe.JPG?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=612&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">The Nightmare.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">John Henry Fuseli (1781)</span></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Nightmare in Buckinghamshire</h2>
<p>But there is one case that has no connection to fiction, the little-known Buckinghamshire Vampire, recorded by William of Newburgh in the 12th century. Historical records show that St Hugh, the Bishop of Lincoln, was called upon to deal with the terrifying revenant and learned to his astonishment, after contacting other theologians, that similar attacks had happened elsewhere in England.</p>
<p>St Hugh was told that no peace would be had until the corpse was dug up and burned, but it was decided that an absolution – a declaration of forgiveness, by the church, absolving one from sin – would be a more seemly way to disable the vampire. When the tomb was opened the body was found to have not decomposed. The absolution was laid inside on the corpse’s chest by the Archdeacon and the vampire was never again seen wandering from his grave.</p>
<p>The Buckinghamshire revenant did not have a “vampire” burial – but such practices are evidence of a longstanding belief in vampires in Britain. Astonishingly, the medieval remains of the what are thought to be the first English vampires have been found in the Yorkshire village of <a href="https://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/archaeology-scientists-find-medieval-remains-english-vampires-yorkshire-wharram-percy-a7663121.html">Wharram Percy</a>. The bones of over 100 “vampire” corpses have now been uncovered buried deep in village pits. The bones were excavated more than half a century ago and date back to before the 14th century. They were at first thought to be the result of cannibalism during a famine or a massacre in the village but on <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/03/medieval-villagers-mutilated-the-dead-to-stop-them-rising-study-finds">further inspection in 2017</a> the burned and broken skeletons were linked instead to deliberate mutilations perpetrated to prevent the dead returning to harm the living – beliefs common in folklore at the time. </p>
<figure class="align-center ">
<img alt="" src="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&fit=clip" srcset="https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=1 600w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=2 1200w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=600&h=412&fit=crop&dpr=3 1800w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=45&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=1 754w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=30&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=2 1508w, https://images.theconversation.com/files/242281/original/file-20181025-71042-1u7icnb.jpg?ixlib=rb-1.1.0&q=15&auto=format&w=754&h=517&fit=crop&dpr=3 2262w" sizes="(min-width: 1466px) 754px, (max-width: 599px) 100vw, (min-width: 600px) 600px, 237px">
<figcaption>
<span class="caption">‘Vampire graves’ have been found at the abandoned village of Wharram Percy in Yorkshire.</span>
<span class="attribution"><span class="source">Paul Allison via Alchemipedia</span>, <a class="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/">CC BY</a></span>
</figcaption>
</figure>
<h2>Vile bodies</h2>
<p>The inhabitants of Wharram Percy showed widespread belief in the undead returning as <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/apr/03/medieval-villagers-mutilated-the-dead-to-stop-them-rising-study-finds">revenants or reanimated corpses</a> and so fought back against the risk of vampire attacks by deliberately mutilating their own dead, burning bones and dismembering corpses, including those of women, children and teenagers, in an attempt to stave off what they believed could be a plague of vampires. This once flourishing village was completely deserted in the aftermath. </p>
<p>Just recently at an ancient Roman site in Italy the severed skull of a ten-year-old child was discovered with a large rock inserted in the mouth to prevent biting and bloodsucking. Then skull belongs to a suspected <a href="https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2018/10/181012093005.htm">15th-century revenant</a> which they are calling locally the “Vampire of Lugano”. </p>
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<p>There has been a wealth of other stories from the UK and other parts of Western Europe – but, despite this, thanks to the Dracula legend, most people still assume such practises and beliefs belong to remote parts of Eastern Europe. But our research is continuing to examine “vampire burials” in the UK and is making connections to local myths and their legacy in English literature, many years before the Byronic fiend Count Dracula arrived in Yorkshire carrying his own supply of Transylvanian soil.</p><img src="https://counter.theconversation.com/content/105238/count.gif" alt="The Conversation" width="1" height="1" />
<p class="fine-print"><em><span>Sam George has received funding from the Arts and Humanities Research Council </span></em></p>New research is uncovering medieval legends about the undead in Britain.Sam George, Senior Lecturer in Literature, University of HertfordshireLicensed as Creative Commons – attribution, no derivatives.