Vampires in Fiction: From Villains to Heroes in 2 Centuries

Lobby card for "Dracula," with Dracula (Bela Lugosi, R) and Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan). (Public Domain)

There’s a hidden threat within much of our contemporary fiction, slipping past our defenses like some stalker in the night.

As a culture, our understanding of the monstrous has been turned upside down. Creatures that were traditionally considered the quintessence of wickedness, symbols of genuine evil, and the spawn of hell have become in our day heroes and role models, especially for the young.

How did this happen? The history of vampire fiction from the 19th to the 21st century demonstrates the transformation as well as its implications for society.

"The Vampire," 1897, by Philip Burne-Jones. (Public Domain)

The Origin of Vampire Stories

Vampires or vampire-like creatures have existed in folklore since the time of the ancient Greeks. There’s a long tradition of reanimated corpses that suck blood or some other life force from victims, who were often attacked in their sleep. The myth of the vampire developed further in the medieval era, particularly during times of plague, which was associated with vampires. It continued all the way into the 19th century, particularly in Eastern Europe. Archeologists have found skeletons buried in ways that were thought to prevent the dead from rising again as vampires.

It’s possible that some aspects of the vampire myth have their origin in the symptoms of certain diseases, such as porphyria (which causes sensitivity to light), pellagra (which thins the skin), and rabies (which causes biting and sensitivity to light and garlic).

Whatever the precise origins of vampires, a look at the tradition makes one thing clear: Many cultures throughout history viewed the vampire with terror, as a being of pure evil sent from hell to terrorize the living.

A runestone with an inscription to keep the deceased in its grave. (Roberto Fortuna commissioned by National Museum of Denmark/CC BY-SA 3.0)

Classic Vampire Fiction

The modern idea of the vampire grew mainly out of Gothic European literature in the 19th century. As Tori Godfree relates in “Vampires: The Ever-Changing Face of Fear,” John Polidori’s 1819 story “The Vampyre,” which was the result of the same horror story contest that produced “Frankenstein,” was one of the first of these Gothic tales that would bring the folklore demon into the modern age and onto the pages of modern books.

Polidori’s vampire was not just a mindless bogey from tales told to frighten children but also a more sophisticated, aristocratic figure. This type of vampire appeared again in the 1847 work “Varney the Vampire” by James Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest, the 1872 “Carmilla” by Sheridan le Fanu, and most famously in 1897’s “Dracula” by Bram Stoker. “Dracula” had much more success and became more well known than these other 19th-century works, and it helped spawn the modern vampire genre.

Cover from one of the original serialized editions of "Varney the Vampire." (Public Domain)

The Transformation

In 19th-century literature, the vampire had emerged from the shadows of folklore as a kind of ghoulish gentleman rather than a mere animal, but he was still a diabolical being, worse in some ways than his folklore predecessor because of the veneer of humanity on the surface. He was still viewed in the traditional way—as evil to the core.

But then, in the 20th century, something shifted.

Godfree writes that W.E. Ross (under a pseudonym) “set the trend of vampires as tragic heroes rather than as the epitome of evil” with his Barnabas Collins series, inspired by the TV show “Dark Shadows.” Next came Anne Rice’s “The Vampire Chronicles” in which two vampires living in New Orleans are presented not as the antagonists, as in Victorian Gothic vampire stories, but as the protagonists of the tale.

This trope of sympathetic or even heroic vampires continued with Laurell Hamilton’s “Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter” series, Kim Harrison’s “The Hollows” series, and, of course, Stephenie Meyer’s global sensation, the “Twilight” series, which in turn unleashed a whirlwind of other paranormal romances in the early 2000s.

These contemporary depictions of vampires ushered in a whole new perspective. As Fred Botting writes (quoted in “The Modern Vampire and Human Identity” by Deborah Mutch), the “focus on vampire subjectivity opens what was once a repulsive object of horrified speculation into a creature of extreme sensitivity and pathos.”

This sympathetic understanding of vampires (and other villains) has even been imposed retroactively on obviously villainous figures such as Dracula. I was astounded to read this recent interpretation of the fiend from Stoker’s novel: “It’s about Dracula having intense loneliness and a desire to rejoin humanity,” says Leah Davydov.

Bela Lugosi as Count Dracula in the 1931 film "Dracula." Universal Studios. (Public Domain)

Lonely, Dracula may be—there’s a sliver of textual evidence for the claim—but desirous of rejoining humanity as some sort of good, law-abiding human? Unlikely. And regardless, these traits don’t make his actions any less evil, nor do they transform him into the hero of the story.

A Dying Culture?

But all this begs the question: Beguiling as it may be, ought we to put ourselves in the shoes (or boots, or hooves) of beings that have traditionally been considered evil? Are we playing with fire when we do this?

More and more, contemporary movies and books rehabilitate evil characters, presenting them as forces for good or at least as characters to be identified and sympathized with. Take, for example, the “Maleficent” films, in which the evil queen from the traditional “Sleeping Beauty” story is presented as a misunderstood and mistreated hero. The trend of writing books and making movies about antiheroes or creatures traditionally considered evil (dragons, witches, zombies, and so on) has mushroomed.

Some of these creatures are millennia-old symbols of darkness and malice, even Satan himself (in the case of the dragon), built into the very foundation of our civilization. You don’t flip that symbolism on its head without serious psychocultural consequences.

Lithograph showing townsfolk burning the exhumed skeleton of an alleged vampire, 1864, by R. de Moraine. (Public Domain)

Some might object that “villains are people too,” that the traditional symbolism is too black-and-white, too simple. All people have moral complexity to them, a mix of good and evil. That may be true, but these traditional monsters from folklore aren’t human, and the tellers of those tales were looking for images not of the complexity of the human soul but rather of the reality of good and evil and the battle between the two.

Wiser, perhaps, than we, they knew that there exist in the world certain forces for which we can have no mercy and with which we can make no compromise. Monsters from folklore are meant to represent sin, temptation, and the demonic—not the struggle between good and evil within an individual person’s heart. The old stories externalize that internal struggle in a way that makes it clearer and in a way that we can learn from.

If we pretend that even a vampire can be ultimately good, we run the risk of explaining away evil completely. This is a mistake. As Gandalf says to Frodo in “The Fellowship of the Ring,” regarding the Dark Lord Sauron, “There is such a thing as malice and revenge!” We dare not forget it.

There’s something ghastly about The Associated Press’s flippant assessment of modern vampire stories (when the paranormal genre was near its peak in 2008):

“The dead used to be a world away, far beyond the realm of mortal existence. If they walked the earth at all, they inhabited the night. But the coffins and long black capes are gone. The destructive haunting is over. And forget about menacing the living—these days, the dead are just like us. Hollywood’s dead, circa 2008, wear jeans, type obsessively on their BlackBerries and fret over relationship woes. They solve crimes, they give advice.”

But if the dead are just like us, doesn’t that mean we are like the dead? Has our art, which is a mirror of our society, metamorphosed from art of the living to art of the dead? Are we part of a dying culture? Are we dead to the notion of evil?

At the very least, this is a cultural sickness, nigh unto death.

Van Helsing (Edward Van Sloan) showing Dracula (Bela Lugosi) a mirror, in "Dracula." (Public Domain)

In “Dracula,” much of the vampire’s power comes from remaining undetected, unsuspected, hidden in the shadows. His triumph over Lucy occurs mainly because it takes the other characters a long time to realize what is happening, and who is draining the life (and moral character) out of their beloved Lucy.

This power of the vampire—a power of stealth, secrecy, disguise—has, unfortunately, escaped the pages of novels and become a reality in the sense that Dracula and his ilk slink through our books and movies under the guise of heroes. The real nature of a vampire never changes—only his disguises do. The idea of the monster can now feed on the minds of readers who have been lulled into an unholy admiration for him, deluded into believing him a trustworthy and admirable literary friend.

We are witnessing the triumph of the vampire.