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From Bram Stoker's monstrous, bloodsucking count to Stephenie Meyer's supernatural teen heart-throb, vampires have long exercised a powerful grip on our imagination, says Leslie Klinger
“The Dead Undead” was Bram Stoker's working title for Dracula, but the living undead would be a better description of the current state of the vampire. On the page and on the screen, the creature who defies death but depends on the living for sustenance - your basic blood-sucking fiend - is back with a vengeance. Stephenie Meyer's supernatural romances, which occupy the top three slots in this week's bestsellers charts, are at the peak of a new surge of vampire lit - a movement that includes Darren Shan's Demonata horror tales, Charlaine Harris's Southern Vampire mysteries, and Charlie Huston's series about an undead private investigator. Although fanged monsters have fascinated us for more than 2,000 years, their shape has shifted, and the modern vampire, more often than not, is a sexually-charged, seductively attractive and heroic figure.
The origin of the term “vampire” is clouded in mystery. Before the 19th century, vampires were viewed as monstrous - literally, the dead risen from the grave. The 1888 edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica described a typical 17th-century vampire sighting: “When the vampire's grave is opened, his corpse is found to be fresh and rosy from the blood which he has thus absorbed. To put a stop to his ravages, a stake is driven through the corpse, or the head cut off, or the heart torn out and the body burned, or boiling water and vinegar are poured on the grave.” In 1751, the Bishop Augustin Calmet wrote a treatise explaining the Church's view on how these “revenants” with incorruptible bodies were different from saints with incorruptible bodies.
In 1819 the vampire entered English popular literature. Dr John Polidori, friend of and physician to Lord Byron, wrote a thrilling tale of Lord Ruthven, a gentleman vampire with power over women, titled The Vampyre. The book was an immense success and was adapted several times for the stage. In 1847 Varney the Vampire, or The Feast of Blood (by James Malcolm Rymer, the probable author of Sweeney Todd), similarly captured the public's imagination. Again, the central figure was a nobleman, although described as cadaverous, cold and clammy like a corpse, with fang-like teeth. Then, in 1897, Bram Stoker published Dracula, the classic tale of the powerful, hypnotic Transylvanian vampire-noble who travels to England to 
While Dracula has remained in print since its first appearance, the iconic vampire gained its modern power from film. While no copy remains of the earliest known vampire film, the 1921 Death of Drakula, it reportedly depicts the familiar theme of a powerful, dynamic man hypnotising (literally or figuratively) a pure, innocent girl.
In March 1922 arguably the most artistically successful film of Dracula yet made - certainly one of the scariest - opened in Berlin. Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens, directed by F.W. Murnau, has achieved the status of legend. In particular, Max Shreck, who portrayed Count Orlok (the renamed Dracula), is magnetic as the vampire, although not in a handsome or seductive style. Orlok is rat-faced, ugly, emaciated, and horrible, radiating powerful evil.
Despite the importance of Nosferatu as a work of art, however, it was really the last major depiction of the vampire as monster. Tod Browning's 1931 “talkie” version of Dracula, made for Universal Studios as the cornerstone of its series of horror classics, was the most successful, and fixed the public's vision of the vampire. Based more on the popular stage play of Dracula from the 1920s (the Broadway production of which starred the handsome Bela Lugosi) than on the Stoker narrative, Browning elicits a stunning film performance from Lugosi as the stylised but compelling vampire. Wide initial distribution, constant rereleases and airing on television, and an unending stream of exploitative licensing of the film's images have made the movie the only version ever seen by many, and Lugosi has been fixed in the public mind as the only “real” Dracula.
Subsequent Dracula films have starred such charismatic, compelling, and romantic figures as Christopher Lee, Louis Jordan, Frank Langella and Gary Oldman in the title rôle. Other vampire films and television series have featured a multitude of handsome actors, including Jonathan Frid (Bramwell Collins in the TV series Dark Shadows), Tom Cruise (Lestat in Interview with the Vampire), David Boreanaz and James Marsters (in Buffy the Vampire Slayer). Many blame the trend on Anne Rice's splendid series of ten tragic novels, beginning with Interview with the Vampire (1976), in which soulful vampires prey only on evildoers and struggle to find redemption, chaste love and meaning among their own kind.
In current popular fiction (and especially romance fiction), vampire lovers seem to occupy an immense portion of the bookshelf. Charlaine Harris's series of Southern vampire-mysteries has been made into HBO's very successful True Blood (2008). The series imagines vampires living on artificial blood and contrasts a romantic, lonely gentleman vampire and beast-like rogue vampires. Stephenie Meyer's hugely popular Twilight series of books (the first was filmed last year) introduces glamorous “vegetarian” vampires who shun the drinking of human blood. Super-strong, super-fast and apparently indestructible (except when another vampire tears them apart and burns the pieces), Meyer's vampires don't eat, don't breathe and need no sleep (and no coffins). However, their primary occupation (with the exception of the clan's sire, a highly-skilled physician) seems to be attending high school.
An early critic of Dracula said that a summary of the book would “shock and disgust”, but owned that “though here and there in the course of the tale we hurried over things with repulsion, we read nearly the whole thing with rapt attention”. Victorian audiences probably saw the book as soft-core pornography, reeking of sexual innuendoes with several highly-charged scenes of kissing, sucking, and biting. Certainly the subsequent film versions - even the horrifying Nosferatu - all emphasise the powerful sexual aspects of the vampire. The application of lips to body parts and the subsequent exchanges of fluids are simple metaphors for sexual intercourse . But the appeal of the vampire seems to go well beyond the voracious appetite of the creature.
The contemporary vampire represents the sensitive, lonely outsider, apart from “normal” society, moving among humans, appearing human, but never really fitting in. Anne Rice's Lestat, who struggles to find heaven while playing at being a rock star, is a modern (only a few hundred years old) version of Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Count Saint-Germain, a 2,000-year-old vampire who seeks to live the path of righteousness. Of course, many - especially teenagers - like to see themselves in such an outcast rôle. In this respect, the vampire has come to resemble the romanticised cowboy, riding off into the sunrise with a canteen filled with blood.
Ulitmately, the vampire has become the embodiment of the “bad” boy or girl; the sensitive, beautiful rogue, deliciously frightening yet attractive. He is a James Dean (Stephenie Meyers's hot male teen heart-throb Edward) or a waif-like Bardot (Geneviève Dieudonné, the creation of Jack Yeovil). In Laurell K. Hamilton's Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter series, Blake - despite her job-description - seems to spend as much time in bed with vampire- lovers as she does fighting the creatures of the night, and the same may be said of the wildly successful television heroine Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
Today's vampire is not inherently evil, he or she is - like a boyfriend or girlfriend of whom mum and dad won't approve - merely misunderstood. Perhaps my tastes were fixed by an early exposure to Bram Stoker, but this modern breed leaves me cold - not with terror, but with boredom. For the thrill of a real literary horror story - for the ancient monster in all its homicidal glory - only Dracula will do.
The New Annotated Dracula by Bram Stoker, edited by Leslie S. Klinger with an introduction by Neil Gaiman Norton, £28; 672pp
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