Am am sure a wooden spike would have worked on Dracula just fine.
I would criticize Buffy for having vampires coming out of the ground with instant kung fu abilities and are essentially immortal with the exception of the whole exploding into dust thing if it weren’t for the fact that they’re kind of goofy about the way they treat it. They’ve hung a lampshade on the kung fu part and the dust thing is a way to end a fight non-messily.
Are vampire books still popular? For the last couple months I’ve been thinking about writing a medieval story, and after starting this thread and thinking about this stuff, now it should maybe be about a vampire in the dark ages. I like fictional books with factual bases, so having real events taking place in it’s pages would be a must, but adding a vamp twist to it might be very entertaining. This would also give me the opportunity to impose my idea about vampires into society and get people back to thinking about them as being cunning and evil instead of this strange vamp do-gooder bull and the weird slasher-vamps. Instead of just complaining about the direction that the lore has taken, maybe I should try and do something about it. Thoughts on that? Would it just fail do to the load of vampire stories out there and I should just stick with medieval stuff and find another way to make it historic/fantasy?
That was fine back in the Victorian Era, when temptation itself was something to be feared. But I think at some point, people started saying “I meet a rich, handsome guy, have a moment of ecstasy, then get to live in a mansion and stay young forever; and I’m supposed to be afraid of this why?”
In most pre-1800 Slavic folklore, the vampire isn’t really mindless like a zombie, and many do have a great deal of power, but they do resemble a disgusting Romero-like creature more than they do Brad Pitt. They generally smelled pretty bad, though they did manage to impregnate their widows from time to time (especially if they were young and pretty, per Serb ethnographer Vuk Karadzic). The more powerful vampires of Russian tales could walk into a room and subdue dozens of people with a gesture, but it was more common for a few people standing guard to drive them away. Above all, the vampire existed to be killed; its function in folk belief was to be a scapegoat for disease and other misfortune. The idea of an immortal vampire would have been ludicrous to a pre-industrial Slav or Greek. If you’ve got a vampire, you kill it. You don’t let that stuff go for hundreds of years. They may have been lustful (though not sexy, unless you’re into decomposing flesh), but they weren’t suave. I’d bet on a vampire against a zombie in a heartbeat, but it wouldn’t be a real entertaining fight.
I agree, but at the same time I disagree. Just because the vamp lured you in and tempted you, doesn’t mean it’ll turn you, most likely it’ll kill you and it’s just playing with its food…maybe mother didn’t teach him about that :D.
Ah - I thought your objection was to the crumbling to dust bit, rather than the flailing, shrieking, blood-squirting death that Lucy had.
Did that ever happen though. I can only remember a few times where they fought freshly risen vamps and I don’t remember any instant kung fu.
Other than that, it was explained. Vamps in the Buffyverse have super fast reflexes making the kung fu a natural extension of a regular person’s fighting style. It’s like little kids in a backyard who think if they practice really hard they’ll be able to do spinning kicks and shit. With the vamp reflexes, they can. And their inner five year old comes out to play.
Yeah, but if the worst that can happen is getting killed, there’s no reason to be more afraid of vampires than anyone else. Ted Bundy killed people. The only reason to have a story about a vampire is because there’s something specific about him that’s necessary to the story. So writers have changed the rules of vampires to create the story they want to tell. We no longer fear the same things we used to.
Yes, but if you jab a knife into a modern vampire’s heart, they’ll just laugh. It has to be a sharp piece of wood. Why you need a wooden stake specifically, no one can seem to explain. I just wanted to point out where the whole “staking” mythology came from–as a way to nail the bloodsuckers in place.
In modern stories, vampires also rarely react to garlic anymore. The old mythology was that garlic was a powerful healing herb that would repel vermin. So if it keeps away rats and cockroaches, it would work against bad luck, witches, goblins, and all sorts of supernatural threats up to and including shambling corpses.
Okay, so I did a little research on vampire books…I think there’s plenty out there, a lot, actually, way more than I ever imagined, it seems everyone and their grandma has written a vampire book. Wow, good thing I wasn’t just wanting to write a vampire book, I think a nice, 758 A.D., Rome’s aftermath, Bizantine/Vandal/Visigoth kinda’ thing with twist of vampirism (the antogonist will most likely turn out to be a vamp) would be perfect. Still not sure if I’ll actually write it or not, like I said, I’ve been thinking about writing something for the last few months, and only just recently started doing some serious research into that time period. Seems the Wendier (wanderers) were the scourge of Europe around that time, perfect period to have a vampire get nervous about just how safe his cover is. Still, the vampire aspect would only be like a cherry on top kinda’ thing, in fact, I’ll probably leave some clues throught the book, and then somewhere just over halfway through, the reader will figure it out, then let them worry about the protagonists for a while as they scream at the book saying: “it’s a vampire you idiots!”. Of course, I may have to exclude the actual word vampire from the book, but everyone will know just what it is.
Maybe so, maybe so, either that, or writers are just running out of ideas and don’t have a better way of fixing the problem. I’m not trying to be an ass, so I apologize if it seems that way, but having something that kills and can’t be killed itself is really pretty scary, if you ask me, just sayin’. 
Just a note- since Dracula is identified as a Voivode by Van Helsing, if he wasn’t Vlad, he was still of the 1300-1400s family. I don’t know how long any descendants held the title after that. So Dracula would be at least 400 years undead by the time of the novel. Hence his turning into dust upon knifing & beheading.
Assuming of course, that he was killed & didn’t merely dematerialize as a ruse. G
Close. What happened was that one of the oldest vampires, who was the keeper for the “source” king and queen vampires while they were in a centuries-long sleep, got tired of the whole thing and dragged them out into the sun while they slept, hoping to kill them and all their offspring, himself included. Except they were already too strong, and it merely tanned them. Since they were the source, all vamps on Earth were affected by this. The oldest were simply tanned like they were, the middle-aged were seriously burned, and the youngest completely combusted. This was hundreds if not thousands of years ago, though, and Lestat was not around yet.
It’s not just wood for modern vampires. It always depends on the story. True Blood vampires and Blade vampires seem to be very vulnerable to silver, you stab them with a silver knife, it just might work, yet Buffy vampires never seemed to have any aversion to silver.
As for garlic, again depends on the story. On Buffy they didn’t use garlic because someone on the cast (Nicholas Brendan, I think) was highly allergic to it, but you do sometimes see it in Buffy’s trunk of supplies, indicating it might work, they just aren’t using it. On Being Human (US version) garlic doesn’t harm them but it makes their “vamp face” show up uncontrollably.
Some nits that might could use a bit of picking: while you’re right that daddy was called Dracul, it was not an epithet referring to the devil. It referred to the Order Dracul, an organization not unlike the Knights Templar, which consisted of daddy Vlad and some of his neighbour princes and dukes and tasked with protecting the borders of their christian kingdoms against the Ottoman Empire. Little Vlad called himself Draculya (son of the dragon) to further associate himself with his hero father. Nobody else really called him that, as far as I’ve read.
And while we would call the guy a cruel SOB, at the time he was considered harsh, but fair. Much of the atrocities attributed to him (such as the feast among the corpses) were largely propaganda from his peers, who didn’t like him that much. I forget why.
You might, I’m sure, be aware that he was in his time, and still is among modern romanians, considered a folk hero. Largely due to his attempting to follow is his dad’s footsteps, fiercely and successfully repelling border incursions and (at least one, to my memory) invasion from the Ottoman’s to the south.
So, I"m done now.
A valid nitpick - I knew this, and should probably have mentioned it. But I didn’t, so there it is.
Bolding mine. This part is new to me. Interesting.
Very true. This is why I referred to him as having been accused of the atrocities, not having committed them. As to the peers who spread the rumours, I’d guess you’re thinking of the Wallachian boyars (the noble class), who he rather detested, and therefore had many of them executed, and the rest for the most part had their power stripped away and given to soldiers and peasants who Vlad felt he could trust. IIRC, it was the boyars and his foreign enemies (primarily the Turks, although a quick look shows the stories were popular in Germany, too) who were behind most of the attacks on Vlad III’s reputation.
Ah, now I remember, I did get a little confused because the book went back in time and talked about previous events and so forth. There was a whole section in the middle that seemed to wander, and I think because in the story, Lestat was kinda’ wandering and sorta’ confused himself…or something like that, it’s been a while since I read it, it’s all a tad foggy…
I also thought this thread was going to be about Twilight!
IIRC, it’s at least implied that Carmilla couldn’t wake up before noon, and that this was one of the limitations of being a vampire. It don’t think there’s any suggestion that morning light would actually hurt her though, and you’re correct that she does go out in the sun during the afternoon without suffering any ill effects.
According to Wikipedia, members of the House of Drăculești continued to rule Wallachia into the early 17th century. The list on the linked page ends in 1600, but the list of rulers of Wallachia includes Radu IX Mihnea (Voivode of Wallachia off and on until 1623) as a member of the same family.
The title “voivode” apparently originally referred to a war leader, although it did come to mean the ruler of a province. In Dracula Van Helsing’s contact says “He must, indeed, have been that Voivode Dracula who won his name against the Turk”, so it seems possible that Stoker was using this title in the earlier military sense.
That is apparently what Bram Stoker thought though, and why he chose the name “Dracula” for his vampire. He wrote in his research notes that “DRACULA in Wallachian language means DEVIL.” (See Dr. Elizabeth Miller’s essay Filing For Divorce: Count Dracula vs Vlad The Impaler, where she argues that Stoker was only loosely inspired by the historic Vlad the Impaler.)
I’ll admit, I could be wrong on that bit. This is all out of memory, and I don’t have my handy-dandy cite that I got it all from on-hand, I’m sorry to say. But from what I remember, I’m pretty sure it was a bit of political spin with the name. Vlad III was rather unpopular, with his own own boyars, and with his peers in the neighboring countries (as you pointed out. The turks really go without saying). but everybody loved his dad, Vlad II. He was a hero. And like many other dynastic sons, he tried to fill his father’s shoes. Or perhaps more accurately, appear to do so.
Or perhaps not. I didn’t exactly major in the politics of middle ages E. Europe. So, there’s at least one grain of salt there.