M.J. Trow - A Brief History of Vampires

M.J. Trow studied history at university, after which he has spent years teaching. He is also an established crime writer; a biographer, with a reputation as a scholar who peels away legend to reveal the truth. Originally from Rhondda, South Wales, he lives on the Isle of Wight.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF

M.J. TROW

Constable & Robinson Ltd
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First published in the UK by Robinson,
an imprint of Constable & Robinson, 2010

Copyright M.J. Trow, 2010

The right of M.J. Trow to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs & Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A copy of the British Library Cataloguing in Publication
Data is available from the British Library

UK ISBN 978-1-84901-336-9
eISBN 978-1-47210-773-2

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First published in the United States in 2010 by Running Press Book Publishers All rights reserved under the Pan-American and International Copyright Conventions

This book may not be reproduced in whole or in part, in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system now known or hereafter invented, without written permission from the publisher.

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US Library of Congress Control Number: 2009943292
US ISBN 978-0-7624-3988-1

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Pace voua, morti nostri

Rest in peace, our dead.

I would like to offer my sincere thanks to everyone involved in the creation of A Brief History of Vampires: to Leo Hollis and his team at Constable & Robinson; to Andrew Lownie; to my ex-colleague Brian Bond; to the library staff at the School of Slavonic Studies, London University; to Taliesin Trow, whose knowledge of films on the undead is truly scary; but most of all, as always, to my wife Carol, a busy writer herself, who did more than anyone else to shape this book.

Over time we have become hardened to horror, especially when we watch it on the screen. A long time ago I watched Alfred Hitchcocks The Birds with a student friend who had not seen it before. When the credits rolled, he breathed a sigh of relief and pulled a steel comb from his pocket. So gripped had he been that he had bent the comb almost in half. Scroll back half a century to the time a great aunt of mine went to the pictures to see Lon Chaney in Phantom of the Opera. So terrified was she at the first appearance of the Phantoms unmasked face that her false teeth flew across the aisle and could not be found until the next day.

We love to be frightened. As long as the actual terror belongs to someone else, as long as we can get our kicks secondhand by reading a ghost story or watching a slasher movie, we are in our element. And we have a long list of fictional and cinematic bogeymen to leap metaphorically out from under the stairs: Freddie Kruger in the Nightmare onElm Street series of films; Michael Myers in the Halloween sagas; Frankensteins monster; Dracula...

And thereby hangs a tale. Because Freddie, Michael and the bolt-necked freak that was the new Prometheus created in a laboratory are all invention.

Dracula was real.

Long before man created celluloid or began to write fiction, long before he used horror stories as entertainment, bogeymen were real too. The anonymous Cornish prayer From ghoulies and ghosties and long-leggity beasties, And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us! is a reminder of the terror that once existed in all of us. When Reginald Scot produced his expos A Discoverie of Witches in 1584, he reeled off a long list of bull-beggars of which country people, in particular, were afraid. There were nearly 200 of them, although some were probably regional dialect variants of the same thing. To us now they are quaint and incomprehensible to our ancestors they were real. They came knocking on doors, curdling milk, destroying corn. They hid in haylofts and lurked in forests or the darkness of caves. Night was their time the time of blackness and the unknown; and generations of children were terrified into obedience by the mere mention of their names: Man-in-the-oak; Tom-tumbler; Dick-a-Tuesday; Jack-in-the-Wad; Peg Powler; Doppleganger; Gabriel-hound; Kit-in-the-Canstick.

Modern science has dispersed those demons; they have vanished, like will o the wisps in the face of cold logic and reason. But they have come back in other forms, not to haunt us, but to delight. We can laugh at them now because we know they were not there in the first place.

Dracula was there.

Eccentric cleric Montague Summers wrote in 1927:

In all the darkest pages of the malign supernatural there is no more terrible tradition than that of the Vampire, a pariah even among demons. Foul are his ravages; gruesome and seemingly barbaric are the ancient and approved methods by which folk must rid themselves of this hideous pest.

Reginald Scot, writing of English folkloric experience in the sixteenth century, would have been generally unfamiliar with the vampire, although he would have understood the stock from which he came. The Shorter English Dictionary today defines vampire as: A ghost, monster or reanimated corpse supposed to leave its grave at night to suck the blood of sleeping people, often represented as a human figure with long, pointed canine teeth. Most of the folkloric examples of vampires, which we will meet in this book, come from Central Europe, although many cultures worldwide have such creatures as part of their mythology.

In 1897, the Irish civil servant Bram Stoker wrote his best known work Dracula, introducing to the world the mysterious undead Count from Transylvania, a land of wolves and forests and dark horror. It was by no means the first fictional appearance of the vampire some would say it was not even the best but it struck a chord with a large readership wanting to be shocked by the storys sense of terror and sexuality, and it spawned a film industry which catered for its audiences in the same way.