Of all the most familiar of horror creatures, vampires have a special meaning in my heart. Among the first horror movies I saw was The Lost Boys and while it is cheesy, you never forget your firsts. Yet nowadays, between Anne Rice and Stephanie Meyer, vampires have lost their original horror, by becoming the perfect romantic interest instead of the predator that they used to be. However, I still think there is still horror within the vampire’s fangs, but in order to find it, you must look at the old tales.
“There was a deliberate voluptuousness that was both thrilling and repulsive. And as she arched her neck she actually licked her lips like an animal till I could see in the moonlight the moisture. Then lapped the white, sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head. I closed my eyes in a languorous ecstasy and waited. ” - “Dracula”, Bram Stoker
When Bram Stoker penned Dracula, he famously based it on Vlad the Impaler’s legends along with Elizabeth Bathory. Yet there are a few older tales still of monstrous blood sucking fiends but one I am going to focus on, is a true tale of an American vampire story that happened just before Stoker wrote Dracula. It was called, simply, The New England vampire panic and it’s most famous story is that of a Mercy Brown.
Five years before Dracula was written, she and her family were all sick from what was then called “consumption” or now known as Tuberculosis. First her mother died, then her elder sister, and by the time she and her brother got sick, ideas of vampires took hold. Yet they did not call it that exactly, because the word was not familiar to New England at the time but the idea was the same: some creature of ill intent was preying upon a whole family. It was when Edwin got sick after Mercy had passed that the villagers convinced her father to dig up the family, to see who might be the cause. Her sister and mother were well decomposed but Mercy, having died recently and been stored in colder conditions, looked fresh and had blood still within her heart and liver. So, as was the method of the day, they took out her heart and burned it, mixing the ashes with water for Edwin to drink as a possible cure for a disease that felt like a curse upon the family. He did not survive more than two months and the rest of her body was put into the back of the cemetery.
Looking at this you can see the main theme that scares people about vampires to this day, a relative or kin preying upon their own long after their deaths. Yet that is only half of what you can take to make a vampire scary. If you read stories like Dracula, he does have a mild bit of what the modern tales overdose on: sexual appeal. The idea of fangs penetrating into the neck does almost sound sexual and plenty of people love kisses and nipping on the neck. Yet the original predators of Eastern Europe were ugly, gross things more akin to Nosferatu. If you'd like to shy away from the sexy vampire stereotype, go into another fear: the stalker. You've all heard horror stories of men or women being stalked at all hours, getting strange notes or seeing someone following them. What if that stalker was a monstrous predator instead of some human obsessed with another? If one were to take the vampire into this modern century of sparkles, use the creepy factor of someone following you at night. Just hanging around your place and waiting, waiting for the perfect opportunity to eat you alive.
You know, all this vampire talk gives me a few ideas for a story. It's certainly going into my story idea bank. How about you? Got any ideas from this venture into the cemeteries and the back alleys of the night? Please let me know below, I'd love to hear them.