Wanted Undead or Alive:. Джонатан Мэйберри

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      Alan F. Beck, Draculmouse

      “The image of the old classic black-and-white horror movie characters being portrayed is charming and hilarious. Imagine little mice dressed up in little suits acting out the scenes of grand horror films. I can hear Draculmouse saying in a squeaky voice: ‘I do not drink…wine.’ And…vampire bats are essentially flying mice, so it’s not even that much of a stretch.”

      —Alan F. Beck is an award-winning artist and illustrator whose work is exhibited at science fiction and fantasy conventions coast to coast.

      FANGS A LOT

      Along with ghosts and demons, vampires are incredibly common in the beliefs and legends of cultures worldwide. Even today there are people who believe that vampires exist, and people who believe that they are vampires. However, here in the modern twenty-first-century Western world we tend to have a somewhat distorted image of what exactly a vampire is.

      In world myth and legend, vampires come in all shapes and sizes, from the stereotypical pale-skinned risen corpse to fiery balls of light. Even the label “vampire” is only used here for convenience because vampirism isn’t limited to the bloodsucking living dead. In fact barely a third of folkloric vampires are hematophagous (bloodsuckers).

      With each cultural twist on the vampire model the vampire hunter is also tweaked. Rarely are the hunters sophisticated and learned scholars like Abraham Van Helsing. More often they’re clerics of one kind or another, or family members who are driven to heroic extremes in order to put their risen relative to final rest and thereby protect the rest of the family. There are also professional monster hunters and even monsters who hunt other monsters. It takes all kinds to spin this weird world.

      NATURE OF THE BEAST

      So what is a vampire?

      About the only overarching similarity between the disparate vampire types is that they are, by their nature, takers of something precious that we do not want to share. The blood drinkers are the most famous of this group, but many vampires attack humans in order to feed off life essence, breath, or sexual essence. A few feed on emotions, others on faith, fidelity, and even knowledge. And quite a few vampires are necrophagous (flesh eaters).

      Many vampires spread disease and pestilence. In fact the word “nosferatu” means “plague carrier”—not “undead” as Bram Stoker mistakenly insists in Dracula. It’s very common for plagues and diseases to be blamed on some evil spiritual force.

      Some vampires can affect the weather, causing mists and storms. The Romanian Varcolaci was reported to be able to cause eclipses, though this would involve forceful rearranging of the solar system and would probably result in the destruction of Earth…so we can discount that as one of the taller tall tales.

      Not all vampires are dead. Some are risen corpses, sure, but there are living vampires, vampire gods, and otherwise ordinary humans who transform into vampire-like creatures at certain times.

      About half of the world’s vampires are theriomorphs, or shape-shifters. Funnily enough, it’s exceedingly rare for any vampire to turn into a bat. More often they turn into fireballs, birds of various kinds, insects, dogs, dragons, cats, and a host of other critters. But bats? Not really. Shape-shifting in wolves is also rare, and is probably an overlap with werewolf legends.

      It’s impossible to create a definitive list of vampiric powers or vulnerabilities because they vary from culture to culture. Most vampires from folklore do not fear sunlight or the cross. Stakes won’t kill them, they can cross running water, mirrors are irrelevant, and they don’t have to obtain permission before entering a house.¹ Those qualities were added to the lore of the vampire by writers in order to make the vampire more mysterious, more directly tied to universal good and evil, and in some ways more vulnerable.

      The connection between vampires and religion varies, too. When fiction writers began telling tales of vampirism, they took the position that supernatural beings were in direct opposition to the church and established new “traditions” to retell the stories of vampires in relation to purely Catholic concepts. For example, the idea of a vampire trading blood with its victim to create a new vampire was a twisted variation on the ritual of communion, where Christians drink wine that symbolizes the blood of Christ and as a result are “reborn.” The transformation from human victim to newborn vampire taking three days is clearly modeled after the three days it took Jesus to rise from the dead after his crucifixion.²

      Such concepts have since been adopted as established legend largely because most people learn about vampires through books and movies rather than from a study of folklore. As a result, the classic elements of the “Hollywood” vampire have become the new folklore, and since folklore itself is mostly a collection of stories told and handed down, an argument can be made that these changes are as valid as anything told around a campfire or spoken of in folk songs. No argument. Writers have long been called the new mythmakers.

      These new myths are nicely thought out, too. Dracula has more or less become the Bullfinch’s Mythology of vampirism for the modern age. This is not to say that were no connections between early vampire beliefs and religion. There certainly were and they took very many forms. Using religion as a weapon against evil is not confined to Christian countries or even to the Christian era. Vampires are tied to various religions around the world, from widespread religions like Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, and Islam to the less common religions of the druids and Native Americans. In every country, vampire stories have been influenced by religious beliefs and popular fiction so that the original folkloric beliefs are often muddied, and in some cases, entirely lost. This makes it very difficult for the vampire slayer to know the nature and specifics of his unnatural enemy because he cannot trust most of what is “popularly” believed.

      And, before we get hate mail…the vampires discussed in this chapter are subtypes of the monster paradigm. Our remarks here do not refer to those persons who embrace vampirism as a real and valued part of their lifestyle. Our focus is strictly on the supernatural monsters that prey with malicious intent upon humans.

      On Mythology

      “Humanity created mythology to answer unanswerable questions, to give voice to our innate human vulnerabilities. Film, TV and Literature are just a continuation of that very basic human need to express ourselves and our fears.”

      —Amber Benson played “Tara” on Buffy the Vampire Slayer and is the author of Death’s Daughter (Ace, 2009) and Cat’s Claw (Ace, 2010).

      WHAT MAKES JOHNNY BITE?

      The process by which a recently dead body becomes a vampire is up for debate. Every culture has its own take. Here are some examples from around our dark planet:

      Animal interference

        In Chinese and some Slavic folktales a vampire is created when a cat or dog jumps over a fresh grave.

        Elsewhere in the world corpse-jumping is tied to humans strolling across a new grave, or birds, stray animals of all kinds, and even insects.

        In China, tigers are believed to possess what was known as a “soul-recalling hair” that hooks part of the spirit when it crosses over a grave.

        The corpse-jumping phenomenon stems from the belief that the spirit of the dead can snatch a portion of the life of any living creature and use it to rekindle its own unnatural life.

        In Western Europe if a black cat or a white dog watches a funeral, then the corpse will rise.

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