Far Worse Things Awaiting Man Than Death

So a bunch of people have been talking about vampires, 'cause of Twilight. But not a single person seems to know much about the concept. I'm sure by now you see where this is going.

• So some commenter on "What Would Toto Watch" repeated that old canard that vampires were all just a metaphor for sex, because apparently people in the past—farmers, even—couldn't talk to their children about sex.
  
  Now I'll give you that the vampire may sometimes, like the werewolf, be a metaphor for seduction ("don't trust strange men" has nothing to do with being ignorant of sex, just with being naive), but actually, there wasn't a strong sexual metaphor to vampires till the mid-19th century Romantic novels.
  
  Did you even know vampires come from legends, not novels?


• So a bunch of the commenters everywhere assert the old point, that Dracula wasn't actually harmed by sunlight, he just lost his powers. Well, that's as may be. But actually many Balkan vampires, including Romanian ones, have a trait they probably get from Greek goblins, of turning to stone in sunlight.
  
  Now Transylvanian vampires would probably be more Slavic/German than Balkan (Hungary is similar to Poland, Austria, and Bohemia in this regard), and just lose their powers in daylight, but I dare you to name a vampire type that's specifically Transylvanian, not from Walachia or Moldavia (of the three principalities united by Mihai Viteazul, of whom you never heard).


• Remember that thing in the X-Files about vampires not having fangs? Dude, what? We've got the court records of the 17th century Imperial investigations, that specifically looked for fangs.
  
  Also, the only vampire known for eating its burial shroud is the Prussian nachtzehrer. Maybe the other Baltic peoples' vampires do that too, I don't know. What is "vampire" in Lithuanian, anyway? "Upiras?" "Slap a Latin ending on a Polish word" is a good guess, with Lithuanian.


• So there's this strange idea that vampires never were sexy, and that Edward et al are the end result of the same evolutionary process "that reduced the mighty wolf to a wiener dog" (that's not mine, it's this guy's, isn't it a great line though?). I'm not denying that Edward is a de-evolution into Alan Alda town (that analogy ain't mine either), but vampires were actually always sexy. There are whole classes of vampires—moroi and dhampyr, just to name two—that are born to a living mother and a vampire father; those in Gypsy legend frequently become vampire hunters (no word on whether they do capoeira or have talking hands).
  
  Carmilla, anyone? Yeah. Sure, Dracula was ugly, and Orlok was worse, but what about Varney? Varney used all those "sympathetic vampire" things, though he was still an evil a-hole.
  
  But I kid. Nobody with a less-than-fanatical interest in the topic ever even heard of Varney. Polidori's "The Vampyre"? Nope, and Ruthven was the first aristocratic vampire in Romanticism. Frankly, Ruthven to Dracula is real progress, and Lestat is a throwback, albeit a little less evil.


• Still, though, I will give them that these moody, overly emotional vampires are nonsense—as Tycho Brahe put it, they "have to talk about how tortured their shit is before you touch up their coiffure with a shotgun, or some other type of gun." But what do you expect, with this "vampirism is contagious" nonsense? The second you do that, they automatically become helpless victims of a disease.
  
  See, and I've mentioned this before, in folklore vampires are people who die cursing the world, and they become the curse they lay on the living—they're more akin to the onryô from Japanese folklore. Think The Grudge. Oh, sure, a hate-filled spirit of calamity might be able to make a case for its hate—depends why they cursed the world—but see, at the point where they're lashing out at the living and drinking their blood, even after whoever might've wronged them is long gone, we're sorta outta sympathy.
  
  Then again, look at race and class politics in this country—"lashing out at the living...even after whoever might've wronged them is long gone" is a pretty good summary. Maybe folklorically accurate vampires (yes it's a word) would strike a little close to home, for too many people.