With the release of Daybreakers and the current Twilight saga in full swing the vampire’s charm seems as enticing as ever for cinema goers, so here’s a not so little history of the evolution of this immortal creatures place in cinema.
From the Ancient Greek bloodsuckers Empusa and Lamia to modern day half human, soulless, zombie hybrids the idea of monsters living by night and sucking our blood seems to be woven into the collective subconscious. But the forms these fiends have taken and the ‘rules’ of their existence and possible demise are as varied as the hundreds of cultures they derive from. From having iron teeth to having the ability to turn into a firefly, any number of supernatural capabilities can be attributed to what we would call vampires. So the next time some smug know-it-all tells you that vampires don’t have a reflection or that they always sleep in a coffin or even that they can’t go out in the day feel free to don your best Stephen Fry manner and politely tell them to go suck themselves.
All that said it is generally accepted that the vampires of popular western fiction are based on the ‘vampirs’ of medieval Serbia and Bulgaria. This is certainly the basis for the two books that did such a huge amount to popularize the genre in the West, John Polidori’s 1819 The Vampyre and the better known Dracula by Bram Stoker from 1897, and it is from these that Hollywood takes its cues. (more…)
