A history to get your teeth into
At the mere mention of vampires, one’s mind invariably leaps first to Dracula, and then to tawdry 20th-century softcore cinema, where bloodsucking, sex and poor prosthetics have been remorselessly mined for cheap thrills for decades. While Dracula and vampires may be synonymous in popular imagination, the Count was far from being the original vampire. Quite the contrary: Dracula was perhaps the apotheosis of literary vampires. But the folkloric history of vampires goes much further back than Bram Stoker’s masterpiece – for millennia in fact: beyond 19th-century Gothic literature; beyond 18th-century vampire hysteria; beyond the revenant folklore of the Middle Ages; right back to the mythologies of almost all ancient civilisations.
