This is Halloween: Vampire

Halloween is pretty much upon us: scary films, crazy costumes and spooky stories. What’s scarier, a vampire or a zombie? Will you dress up as a witch or a werewolf? In this series, Muriel Bailly profiled a famous Halloween monster every day to manifest the myths beneath the masks and make-up.

Vampire

The Vampire, 1893. Edvard Munch. Courtesy of Munch Museum at Oslo.

Fact file

• Distinctive signs: Pale skin, sensitive to the sun, fond of drinking blood, sleeps in a coffin, not a fan of garlic
• Likely to say: “I have crossed oceans of time to find you.”
• Good points: Is immortal
• Bad points: Is immortal
• Heroes: The Cullens (Twilight), Angel (Buffy), John Mitchell (Being Human)
• Villains: Dracula, Lestat Lincourt (Interview with a Vampire), Nosferatu, The Master (Buffy), Kurt Barlow (‘Salem’s Lot)

When one thinks of vampires, Dracula is likely the first name that comes to mind. With it comes the image of an elegant, charismatic man with an otherworldly presence and pale complexion. Today, Dracula may be the yardstick against whom all other vampires are measured, but it used to be a very different story.

A lamia: a monster capable of assuming a woman’s form, said to suck humans’ blood; a vampire.

Until the 18th century, vampires or their folkloric equivalents were described as swollen and of ruddy or dark appearance. An origin of the vampire myth put forward in a scientific paper in the 1980s is porphyria, a condition affecting the skin, leading to photosensitivity, blisters and necrosis. This was rejected en masse, however. A slightly more convincing case has been made for rabies, although there are still too many inconsistencies to make it the likely inspiration for vampires.

Blood drinking creatures appeared throughout antiquity but the word “vampire” (from the Hungarian vampir) appeared for the first time in the 18th century. Previous to that, drinking blood was the matter of demons and other mythological creatures. Such as Lilith, Adam’s first wife in Hebrew mythology, who drinks baby’s blood. We’ve written about Lilith previously.

Lilith by John Collier, 1892.

Mass hysteria

Vampires in the classic sense appear heavily in folklore from Eastern Europe in the late 1600 and 1700s. It is these legends that form the basis of the vampire myth that later became popular in the UK and Germany, although they were significantly embellished.

The 18th century saw a widespread vampire scare throughout Europe, eventually leading to mass hysteria referred as the ’18th Century Vampire Controversy’. This allegedly started with increasing reports of vampire attacks in Prussia in 1721. A wave of paranoia swept Europe at the time with members of the population, including the authorities, digging up and staking individuals suspected of vampirism.

The Vampire, lithograph by R. de Moraine, 1864.

This paranoia even affected the cultural elite of Europe with authors such as Voltaire writing in his 1764 Philosophical Dictionary:

“These vampires were corpses, who went out of their graves at night to suck the blood of the living, either at their throats or stomachs, after which they returned to their cemeteries. The persons so sucked waned, grew pale, and fell into consumption; while the sucking corpses grew fat, got rosy, and enjoyed an excellent appetite. It was in Poland, Hungary, Silesia, Moravia, Austria, and Lorraine, that the dead made this good cheer. We never heard a word of vampires in London, nor even at Paris. I confess that in both these cities there were stock-jobbers, brokers, and men of business, who sucked the blood of the people in broad daylight; but they were not dead, though corrupted. These true suckers lived not in cemeteries, but in very agreeable palaces.”

Elegant bloodsucker

This idea that vampires can shroud themselves among the rest of the population may be the origin of the sophisticated and elegant image of vampires we have today. Although Bram Stocker’s novel Dracula, published in 1897, has become the reference for vampires, John William Polidori’s novel The Vampyre was published in 1819 and had already been an immense success. Both portray vampires as suave, charismatic and manipulating characters, although with an air of foulness about them.

Bela Lugosi as Dracula in the 1931 film of the same name.

Vampires were greatly popularised in such gothic literature, known as gothic horror: combining fiction, horror and romanticism. Since Polidori’s book, vampirism has been a clear metaphor for sex and sexuality. They both involve lust and desire; penetration; and the exchange of bodily fluids. Even the subsequent physiological effects are comparable: a short-lived adrenalin high and flush of colour giving way to feeling drained. It’s no surprise that from Buffy to Twilight and from True Blood to The Vampire Diaries, recent representations of vampires have focused on this in different ways: looking at first love, forbidden love, virginity, promiscuity and so on.

From the 1700s to the present day, vampires have spent centuries inspiring numerous novels, movies and TV shows. Although some of the specific characteristics might change between one iteration and another, the essence tends to be the same. Whether rank or rakish, shimmering or smoking in the sun, vampires will exert their powers on you and immutably attract you to your end…or a new beginning.

Muriel Bailly is a Visitor Experience Assistant at Wellcome Collection.

This is Halloween: Werewolf

Halloween is pretty much upon us: scary films, crazy costumes and spooky stories. What’s scarier, a vampire or a zombie? Will you dress up as a witch or a werewolf? In this series, Muriel Bailly profiled a famous Halloween monster every day to manifest the myths beneath the masks and make-up.

Werewolf

Werewolf, German woodcut from 1722.

Fact file

• Distinctive signs: Goes a little crazy around the full moon, tattered clothes, shedding
• Likely to say: “I used to be a werewolf but I’m alright NOW-OOOOOOOH!”
• Good points: Is in touch with its animal self
• Bad points: Might kill people once a month
• Heroes: Oz (Buffy), Professor Lupin (Harry Potter), George Sands (Being Human), Karen White (The Howling)
• Villains: Draugluin (Tolkien), David Kessler (An American Werewolf in London), Wilfred Glendon (Werewolf of London), Dog Soldiers, Wolfman, Eddie Quist (The Howling)

A werewolf, also known as a lycanthrope (from the Greek lykos: wolf and anthropos: man), is someone who can shape shift into a wolf, either at will or due to some kind of magic.

The first mention of people with the ability to transform into wolves appeared as early as the works of Herodotus, Pausanias and Ovid in Late Antiquity. In his “Metamorphoses“, Ovid tells us the story of the Lycaon, King of Arcadia, who was turned into a wolf by Zeus for trying to play a trick on the Olympian god.

Zeus turning Lycaon into a wolf.

There are many alleged ways to become a werewolf, besides the famous (but recently invented) method of getting bitten by one. You can be the victim of a curse as in the case of Lycaon; you can drink rain water from the footprint of a wolf; or you can sleep naked outside during a full moon.

France

Until the Early Modern period, werewolves were mostly considered to be the victims of curses and were met with a certain amount of empathy, such as in the 12th century French novel Bisclavret by Marie de France. Bisclavret was a nobleman who mysteriously disappeared for three days each month. Not even his wife knew what he was up to during this time. When she begged him to tell her, he finally confessed to being a werewolf. He foolishly (in retrospect) mentioned that when he transforms, he needs to hide his human clothes in a safe place to be able to return to human form. Bisclavret’s wife, shocked by this, arranged to steal her husband’s clothes with her lover to trap him in his lupine form.

In the western world, witchcraft and the supernatural were associated with satanic rituals. Witch and werewolf hunts were fairly common and the lines between them were sometimes blurred: witches were accused of being werewolves and vice versa.

Woodcut of a werewolf attack, 1512.

Trials and executions increased in 16th century Europe where mentions of werewolves intensified alongside sordid stories of murders. Some of the accused were arrested because villagers needed someone to blame for dead livestock, but others were accused for committing much more horrendous crimes.

Pierre Burgot and Michel Verdun were both executed as werewolves in 1521, ditto Gilles Garnier (known as the “Werewolf of Dole”) in 1573. Records indicate that all were serial killers. During his testimony, Garnier revealed that when out hunting in the forest he was visited but a ghost. Struggling to feed himself and his wife, the apparition offered him an ointment that turned him into a wolf, resulting in far more successful hunts. Sadly, Garnier was hunting and eating children. It seems that the term ‘werewolf’ almost describes the beast inside the man surging out when committing such despicable atrocities.

A human compared to a wolf.

Germany

A belief in werewolves had almost disappeared from French-speaking areas of Europe by around 1650. It was the Germanic, central area of Europe in which these myths persisted with any vigour. Werewolves were still being feared by people in the Austrian and Bavarian Alps into the 18th century.

The most gruesome werewolf story from Germany is the one about Peter Stumpp. He was known as the “Werewolf of Bedburg”, accused of being a serial killer and cannibal. His trial and execution were barbaric and after experiencing extreme torture, he confessed to killing and eating at least thirteen children, two pregnant women and many livestock. At his trial Stumpp stated that the Devil gave him a belt of wolf fur as a child that transformed him into:

“The likeness of a greedy, devouring wolf, strong and mighty, with eyes great and large, which in the night sparkled like brands of fire; a mouth great and wide, with most sharp and cruel teeth; a huge body and mighty paws.”

Woodcut of the execution of Peter Stumpp in 1589 at Bedburg near Cologne.

Were-animals

Before wolves were wiped out from large areas of Europe, their attacks on people were part of life, albeit a rare one. It makes sense that wolves, being the most feared predators in that part of the world, were catapulted into the folklore of demonic shape shifters. In parts of the world without wolves, their “wolf equivalents” have entered mythology in the same way: Africa has werehyenas and India has weretigers. Other werecats feature in South America.

Modern werewolves

Werewolves were popularised again by Gothic literature (on which the British Library has an exciting new exhibition, Terror and Wonder: The Gothic Imagination). It was at the beginning of the 20th century that the silver bullet motif first surfaced and is already inextricably linked to werewolf mythology. Lycanthropy being passed on via the bite from the monster is another relatively recent werewolf trope.

Not your classic “werewolf and young lady” image.

Whether they were true or not, the stories surrounding werewolves are among the bloodiest and goriest legends of the last 500 years or so. Today, like many classic monsters, werewolves have been glamorised in contemporary pop culture such as Twilight and Teenwolf. Has the beast finally been tamed?

Muriel Bailly is a Visitor Experience Assistant at Wellcome Collection.