Vampire Stories Research Articles

Vampires and Those Who Slay Them

Psychodynamic concepts are frequent themes throughout popular culture. For this reason, movies, books, and even television shows offer rich opportunities for the examination of important psychological constructs. Given the current popularity of vampire stories within adolescent groups, the psychodynamic themes woven throughout the vampire myth deserve special attention. In particular, the television program Buffy the Vampire Slayer uniquely displays key adolescent developmental challenges. In discussing the psychodynamic significance of vampires, with special attention to the characteristics of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this article demonstrates both the use of displacement in adolescent therapy, as well the utilization of the Buffy’s story as a means of teaching important psychodynamic concepts.

Speculative Fiction and Black Lesbians

W H H EN IRISH WRITER Sheridan Le Fanu published his vampire story Carmilla in 1871, he could hardly have known he had created a classic lesbian tale in the genre of speculative fiction. In fact, neither the word lesbian nor the term speculative fiction was likely to have crossed his mind. As Dennis Altman discusses very articulately in his book The Homosexualization of America, the realization of a lesbian (or gay) group identity occurred historically only in the presence of a complex set of circumstances. The social upheaval of war, the development of technology, and the creation of municipal centers all helped to create the possibility of a lesbian or gay identity, as differentiated from individual homosexual acts. Altman suggests that such self-definition was only possible under the particular social formations of urbanization and industrialization (1982, 48). In his drawing room Le Fanu might have used any one of several Victorian terms for women who love women-Sapphists and inverts among them. But it is more likely he used none at all when in decent company or when thinking of the central relationship of Carmilla. The story is about an isolated young girl who becomes enchanted by another girl, one who visits the first girl in her dreams and who turns out to be a vampire. The affection between the two is passionate and loyal until the vampire's destruction. Carmilla seamlessly weaves together the poignancy of the relationship between adolescent girls and the mythology of vampires. The obsessive nature of youthful passion seems naturally wedded to the grand passions of an immortal. The phrase speculative fiction is used here to encompass the broad range of writing that includes science fiction and fantasy. Speculative fiction writers are as varied as writers in any genre: H. G. Wells, Stephen King, Anne Rice, Guy de Maupassant, Ursula Le Guin, and Edgar Allan Poe are a few. But what is essential is that all such writers speculate a

The Vampire on Stage: A Study in Adaptations

As described in Augustin Calmef s Traite sur les apparitions des anges . . . et vampires de Hongrie, published in Paris in 1751 and translated into English in 1759, the vampire was simply a bloodthirsty monster, an animated dead person who sucked the blood of the living (often relatives) and thus destroyed them. The vampire's literary debut in England, a passing reference in Book VIII of Robert Southey's Thalaba, the Destroyer (1801), added nothing to that portrayal except perhaps that the vampire could as well be female as male. An eight-page note appended by Southey and drawing heavily on Calmet suggests that the vampire was not familiar to the literary scene in spite of the accumulation of Gothic specters in the form of Walpolian castle haunters and Burgeresque ghostly bridegrooms. The character of the vampire, as we know it today through Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) and its many stage and film versions, owes its definition indirectly to Lord Byron, more directly to his personal physician, John Polidori, and significantly to early nineteenth-century melodrama, the influence of which has been infrequently recognized. In fact, the stage adaptations of Polidori's tale, then thought to be Byron's, establish the paradigmatic characters, atmosphere, and plot of the vampire story.

Coleridge's "Christabel" and Lefanu's "Carmilla"

SEVERAL years ago in a study of Coleridge's poem Christabel' I advanced the then novel theory that the unfinished tale is essentially a vampire story, one of the first and by far the subtlest of the many such stories in the English language. The theory was received with considerable interest and general approval, though there were, of course, some partial or complete skeptics. I now wish to suggest that the long prose narrative published with four other stories in In a glass darkly in 1872 by that once famed master of the Gothic, J. Sheridan LeFanu, contains so many strange parallels to that it seems possible that LeFanu had either made the same interpretation of Coleridge's poem as I was to make, and had reflected it, consciously or unconsciously, in his story; or else he had been reading more or less the same sources as Coleridge read, and applied them with often surprisingly similar results. For Carmilla is openly and admittedly a vampire story, and its author makes much of the way in which he, or at least one of his characters, Baron Vordenburg, has steeped himself in vampire lore. First of all, the antagonists in both stories, Geraldine and Carmilla, are female vampires; and female vampires are comparatively rare, at least in the earlier period of vampirology. More than this, the main victims, Christabel and Laura, are women; and such restriction of sexwomen to women-is even rarer. Kipling's version of the vampire, with her exclusively male quarry, is a purely modern refinement.