BITE ME! The Truth About Vampires

I want to pierce to the very heart of this issue, which is mythology. If the little prince had been remembered by his real name, Vladimir Basarab Tepes , he would have been a lot less infamous. He might still have been reviled as Vlad the Impaler, or, in the same vein, immortalized as Vlad III,  Prince of Wallachia and defender of the Christian faith.... except he was such a hellian that in the end even the Christians refused to claim him. The bloody truth is that his own baptized appellation has so faded against his myth that you are far more likely to say, “Oh,  I know who that is. That is Dracula, the inappropriate Transylvanian phlebotomist.” But even then you would be dead wrong. Well, undead wrong,

Dracula is not a name. It is a title, and in Romanian means “Sons of the Dragon”. They were an order of Christian Knights, which included Vlad’s father  during the mid-thirteenth century, when he was the Prince of Wallachia,  not Transylvania. He ruled a tiny slice of the southern Carpathian mountains, as a vassal to the Sultan of the  Muslim Ottoman Empire.

At the tender age of five Vlad’s familiar bonds were severed when he was offered up as a hostage to the Ottoman Sultan,  Murad II (above). Vlad grew up a cruel little creature. At any moment he might be executed by Christians or Muslims because his dad was getting too close or not close enough to the Sultan.   During his six years in a Turkish prison, Vlad’s only playmates were bugs and spiders, who he tortured to his heart’s content, just as he had been tortured by being separated from his mother.

When he was eleven Vlad’s father and older brother were both murdered by Boyars, the local landlords. You can understand, then, that when Vlad was finally given the keys to the princedom, in 1456, he perforated every Boyar he could lay his bloody hands on. Unfortunately he skewered his economy as well, but you can’t have everything.

To hold onto this little kingdom Vlad (above, on the throne) had to lean first toward the Ottomans and then toward the Christians, but never to much or too long in one direction or the other.  So he laid claim to the Christian title of Dracula only at formal occasions, such as banquets and blood lettings, which were often the same events for him.  But Vlad's entrance into his victim's blood stream was about as far from the neck as you can get.

Legend has it that Vlad once sat in judgment of a wife suspected of adultery. He awarded the husband a divorce, and avoided burdening the man with child support by impaling the mother and child on the same spike. His social programs were saturated with the same carnassial logic. The invalids in his realm were invited to a feast, at which Vlad bolted the doors and windows and set the hall on fire. Once the flames died down Vlad announced he had eradicated poverty in his realm, like any good Republican.  

In 1462 the Sultan decided he had enough of Vlad’s savage vindictiveness, and the Ottomans invaded Transylvania with a 90,000 man army. Since Vlad only had about 30,000 men his cause seemed a dead letter. Still Vlad made it interesting by puncturing the 20,000 mostly Muslim men, women and children, of his capital city of Targoviste, and leaving the forest of their skewered corpses behind his retreating army. 

This particular act of mass murder managed to impress the Sultan,  who was no slouch in the mass mayhem department, himself. Still the outcome was the same; Murad II  forced Vlad into exile, and  placed Vlad’s half brother on the throne.

And it turned out that Vlad’s Christian allies were no more comfortable with the intemperate Prince  than the Muslims. Vlad was locked up in the 14th century equivalent of a mental ward for 12 years, by which time the memories of his murderous malignant management style seem to have faded. So, in November of 1476 he had mended enough Christian fences to be re-crowned Prince, but about month later Ottoman troops ambushed Vlad and his little band of sociopaths and butchered them all. Monks buried his body in the Monastery outside Comana, in what is today Romania. But to prove to the Sultan that Vlad was  was not merely dead, but certainly, assuredly and really most sincerely dead the soldiers  decapitated the corpse and sent his head ahead to Constantinople.

No doubt about it, Vlad Teppes  was a capricious and violent murderer, but no one thought he was coming back from the grave.  Vlad was never ever accused of being a vampire, not in his original lifetime, anyway.  He would not have even known what a “vampyre” was.  He might not even have known what a vrykolakas was. Because that was a Greek invention, a sort of Slavic vampire without dentures, one of the undead motivated by a necrotic sense of humor. 

A vrykolakas is created when a dog or a cat jumps over a fresh human grave. Should they pause to urinate on the crypt mid leap, the uric acid drives the new vrykolakas to clamber from their tomb and engage in a mortiferous game of “Knock, knock”.  In Slavic lands, a tap on the door after dark should never be answered. Not because Greeks fear Mormons will put the bite on them, but because it just encourages the vrykolakas to keep knocking. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vrykolakas)

The one thing Vlad would never have expected was to be connected with was bats. Bats eat insects, and although being warm blooded and carrying diseases which sometimes infect humans, European bats were never considered a threat. However,  in 1810, Frenchman Etienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire recorded the first vampire bat, captured in the New World.  By 1839 even Charles Darwin had written about the bloodthirsty little winged rodents.  

The closest real life version of  a human vampire are 3 species of air born rodents,  the common  Desmodus rontundus, the hairy legged Diphylla ecaudata, and the white winged Diaemus youngi. These are all the vampire bats there are.  These little south of the border blood suckers secret an anticoagulant in their saliva, called Draculin.  Very linguistically inventive, these biologists. Draculin keeps the victim's life's blood flowing as long as the sanguivore keeps drinking.  But vampire bats take only an ounce of blood a night, and unlike a lawyer or an investment banker,  they often share their meals with less healthy and successful bats.  But by the end 18th century, the elements of the vampire story were on the table, waiting for someone to assemble them.  Oddly, there is little evidence Bram Stoker did that.

Irishman  Abraham "Bram: Stoker, was the business manager for  London's Lyceum Theatre, and he supplemented his income grinding out popular adventure and horror stories.  And in 1897 conceived his most popular one,.  "A key was turned with the loud grating noise of long disuse, and the great door swung back…Within, stood a tall old man, clean shaven save for a long white moustache, and clad in black from head to foot, without a single speck of color about him anywhere….The old man motioned me in with his right hand with a courtly gesture, saying in excellent English, but with a strange intonation. “Welcome to my house! Enter freely and of your own free will!...I am Dracula…”

But was Stoker inspired by the Romanian  Dracula? Elizabeth Miller who has made a study of the issue (“Dracula: The Shade and the Shadow” – 1998) does not think so. She wrote. “…(Stoker's) research seems to have been haphazard (though at times fortuitous) rather than scholarly. What he used, he used “as is,” errors and confusions included….After all, Stoker was writing a Gothic novel, not a historical treatise. And he was writing Dracula in his spare time, of which I doubt he had much.”

It was Stoker's business to know what the public wanted and to give it to them. Obviously the public always wants sex. But if the deeply closeted Stoker had openly supplied sex to his Victorian audiences  he would have gone directly to jail,.like his close friend, playwright Oscar Wilde.  

Had Stoker not written "Dracula" he might have been famous as the man who married Oscar Wilde's ex-girlfriend. In fact, it was just after Wilde's conviction for "gross indecency" meaning homosexuality, that Stoker began writing Dracula,  In that story, Stoker sublimated the theme of suppressed sexuality, which has been part of every vampire tale which  followed. And none of that had nothing to do with Transylvania.

It turns out the Irish had their own blood suckers, the English absentee landlords who owned most of the property in Ireland.  Between 1845  (Stoker was born in "black" 1847)  and 1852 one million Irish starved to death because the potato crops the working poor depended upon failed, and because the British government refused to let the poor eat the wheat grown on Irish land, or replace it with cheap American grown wheat. Things were so bad that many were reduced to cannibalism, and a million were forced to emigrate to find food. And although Stoker's family were middle class Irish Protestants, they could not avoid the nightmare which had been unleashed on their island.

And there is a Gallic term, deach-fhoula - pronounced drac-ula - which means tainted or bad blood. There is even an Irish castle called Dun Drac-ula (above), or the castle of the tainted blood, which sits on property once controlled by a legendary 5th century Irish landlord and or warlord  named Abhartach (pronounced avertack) who was either a dwarf or a giant. Among his other crimes, and there were many, Abhartach required the village of Garvagh to yearly produce a bowl of human blood, which he then drank in their presence. A pretty nasty form of intimidation. He claimed it gave him supernatural powers.  

Legend says that eventually the villagers killed Abhartach. But once he was dead and buried - vertically as was the tradition - he came back, and they had to kill him all over again. After a second second coming of Abhartach, the villagers buried him upside down, and they erected a stone Dolman atop his gave, to keep him there. Locals still refer to it as as the Slaghtaverty Dolman (above), or "The Giant's Grave".  So maybe his mother's bedtime stories were Stoker's  inspiration for the bloodsucker supreme, in which case it was a political allegory instead of a sexual allusion?  The truth is, it could have been both. Stoker's name was on the title page, but there is evidence that his London editor cut the first one hundred pages off the book before publishing it, along with lots of other market driven changes..   

But Vampires on the page proved so bloodless they produced few progeny. And it was not until 1922 that the Prince of Darkness hit the silver screen. Suddenly sucking blood became a business model, able to even survive the misdirected anger of Stokers' widow,  the lovely Florence Ann Lemon Balcombe Stoker. 

After "Bram" died from tertiary syphilis in 1912, Florence (above) became the executor of his estate, such as it was. She managed to publish a collection of his short stories in 1914, but the sales were anemic.  Then, in 1922 she learned of a film claiming it was "loosely based" on her late husband's book, which had been released by a German organization called Parna films.  

Now Parna is a Sanskrit word meaning life force, as in "may the force be with you". Founded by a small group of occult affectionatos in 1920, they intended getting rich by making films about the supernatural.  They hired writer Henrik Galeen, based on his script "The Golem: How He Came Into The World' (above). But a single minded Jewish mud monster failed to resonate with German audiences at least in 1914. However the occultists were certain a film version of Dracula would be hit, but to avoid sharing royalties, Galeen changed the name of his undead vampire to Count Orlok, and named the entire effort "Nosferatu".

 In the spring of 1921 they hired Friedrich Murnau (above) to direct, and after rewriting the ending, he started shooting in July.  

And on 4 March, 1922, "Nosferatu" opened to rave reviews from everybody except Florence Stoker. With the backing of the British Society of Authors, Florence  demanded the producers pay her royalties, and that they turn over to her the negative of the film, as well as every copy made so far. In a ploy as old as business, Parna declared bankruptcy under the legal theory "you can't sue me because I no longer exist".  The film about the undead had become a zombie movie.

It didn't work. In 1925 the German courts ruled in Florence's favor. The single negative of Nosferatu, and all distribution prints were handed over to her lawyers. Whereupon, Florence burned the lot. Maybe she should have seen the film before she burned it.   Some partial prints were discovered later, and slowly over the last century, film lovers cobbled much of the film back together.  Their success with the reborn "Nosferatu" helped sell a lot of copies of the book "Dracula".

Still since then Dracula has been to Hollywood and Berlin and Moscow and back, in almost 200 retellings of the myth of Dracula and his pups. We all know how to annoy a vampire - garlic or a cat - how to kill a vampire - sunlight or a stake through the heart. and a Cross seems to cause them great pain, even of its two candle sticks held at right angles.  And it never seems to bother fans of the bite movies that we allot brain space to all of this vital information about a mythical creature we are never going to meet.

The disconnect in these  ensanguine exhibiionists is that central issue of sex, which makes no sex, er sense.  To the  un-dead, any exchange of bodily fluids is what you call counter productive. For a vampire, it can only be a one way street. Believe me, there are no vampires out there watching porn on the Internet.

An actual human vampire would require a similar anticoagulant in their saliva to Draculin, else their nightly siphoning would form a huge clot of hemoglobin in their tummies, which they would vomit up periodically like a big stinky full ball. And a few of those around the property should make Vampires stand out like a sick cat. Has anybody given this any thought?  Obviously, I have.

But the human fascination with fangs seems to have been all about the sublimation of sex. Who would have thunk that?

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