The Vampire is the blood-drinking undead of European, especially Eastern European, legend: a corpse that rises from the grave by night to feed upon the blood of the living — spreading death and plague, draining its victims until they too become vampires — an immortal, soulless predator destroyed only by stake, fire, decapitation, or the light of day, and the most famous and enduring of all the undead. It is the blood-drinker, the undead of the grave.
The Undead of the Grave
The Vampire (a word that entered Western Europe from the Slavic lands in the 18th century, amid a wave of vampire-panics in the Balkans and Eastern Europe) is the archetypal blood-drinking revenant — the dead who do not stay dead, but rise from the grave to prey upon the living. The belief is ancient and widespread (with kin in the Greek vrykolakas, the Slavic upir, the Romanian strigoi, the German [nachzehrer], and demonic blood-drinkers like Lilith and the lamia), but it crystallised into the classic European vampire in the folklore of the Slavic and Balkan peoples, where the dread of the restless, blood-sucking dead was vivid and the rituals against them grimly real.
The Feeding and the Spread
The vampire’s nature is to feed on blood. It rises from its grave by night (lying as if dead, often fresh and ruddy and undecayed, by day) and seeks out the living — often first its own family and neighbours — to drink their blood, draining their life so that they sicken and waste and die. And the vampire’s curse spreads: those killed by a vampire, or otherwise tainted, may themselves rise as vampires, so that a single vampire could bring a chain of deaths and a plague of the undead upon a whole village — which is why vampire-belief so often flared in the wake of epidemics, the unexplained deaths blamed on the first-buried risen as a vampire. Vampires were thought to arise from many causes: the wicked, the excommunicate, suicides, the unbaptised, those improperly buried, or those over whose corpse an animal had leapt.
The Stake and the Modern Vampire
Against the vampire, the folk had grim and specific remedies: the suspected grave was opened, and a vampire found undecayed and bloated with blood was destroyed by driving a wooden stake (of ash, hawthorn, or aspen) through its heart, by cutting off its head, by burning the body to ashes, by filling the mouth with garlic or a stone, or by other means — rituals attested in real, gruesome historical accounts of grave-openings. The vampire was warded by garlic, by holy water and the cross, by running water it could not cross, and by the dawn (in much later lore, sunlight destroys it). From this folklore, the literary vampire was born — the seductive, aristocratic, immortal predator of Polidori’s “The Vampyre” and, supremely, Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), who gave the vampire its now-classic powers (shapeshifting into a bat or wolf or mist, hypnotic seduction, immortality, the need for native earth) and made it the most famous monster in the modern world. In the Vampire, Europe gave form to the blood-drinking undead — the corpse that rises to feed on the living and spread its curse, destroyed by stake and fire and sun, the immortal predator of the grave and the deathless king of the undead.