Yes, the vampires of movies are far removed from the vampires of legend. Yet, the lineage is still apparent in many ways. For instance, although legendary vampires are not overtly sexy, one cannot help reading sexual undertones in the stories told about them: you yourself point out the similarity to incubi/succubi legends, about helpless victims receving mysterious nocturnal visits from supernatural beings who attack them while they are helpless in bed.
And yes, legends tend to overlap more than film lore, where different mythical monsters have fall into clearly differentiated categories with different rules for their behavior and their destruction. Vampires in myth overlap with werewolves and incubi/succubi; in the movies they are much more distinct from each other.
Okay, I’m convinced. I’ll never try to liven up a genetics class again with the porphyria/vamp dis-info. However. CFWEST says that hair and fingernails continue to grow after death. Hasn’t the stake been plunged through that particular idea as well?
No, I don’t think so–at least not that I’ve heard. If you have a reliable source, please let me know, and I’ll stop repeating this particular piece of info.
Loathe though I am to use the phrase, I read it somewhere. Slightly to my credit, I’m fairly sure it was in one of the older SD books. Alas, Cecil’s gems are packed away with all my other books so can’t check my library. Anybody got their TSD books at hand? (silly question)
[BTW, sorry for de-Q-ing you earlier.]
Loathe though I am to use the phrase, I read it somewhere. Slightly to my credit, I’m fairly sure it was in one of the older SD books. Alas, Cecil’s gems are packed away with all my other books so can’t check my library. Anybody got their TSD books at hand? (silly question)
As I recall, the idea of hair & nails continuing to grow was caused by the postmortem shrivelling of the surrounding skin, making them appear longer.
[BTW, sorry for de-Q-ing you earlier.]
Loathe though I am to use the phrase, I read it somewhere. Slightly to my credit, I’m fairly sure it was in one of the older SD books. Alas, Cecil’s gems are packed away with all my other books so can’t check my library. Anybody got their TSD books at hand? (silly question)
As I recall, the idea of hair & nails continuing to grow was caused by the postmortem shrivelling of the surrounding skin, making them appear longer when folks got dug up after moldering for a while.
[BTW, sorry for de-Q-ing you earlier.]
Praise be my mom doesn’t have to be a vampire anymore–she can be a garden-variety porphyriac. Porphyria is still no walk in the park…too much sun and she blisters quite badly…SPF doesn’t help…only gloves, long sleeves, and sun avoidance…it is a genetic condition and hopefully won’t manifest in myself or sibs…
I revive this thread because the porphyria=vampire connection was the focus of a recent episode of the excellent fictional TV series CSI: Crime Scene Investigators. Investigating the killing of a jogger by a dog, they discovered the dog’s owner was a woman with porphyria who was using the animal to kill people so she could extract their internal organs (liver and heart especially) and grind them into “protein shakes” to drink to try to alleviate her symptoms.
Were the other posters here correct in saying this would actually have done her no good at all?
Greek word for “purple” or “dark”. And “purple”, of course, has associations of “royal” (because before the late 19th century, good purple dyes were very expensive).
I saw CSI. At least they didn’t overtly make the connection to vampires. According to the story, she ingested the organs for their hemaglobin/iron. As to whether this would work, I don’t know.
For a connection of source, I could see linking rabies to werewolfism. But that would just be more speculation on my part, so I won’t advocate that.
Yeah, CSI never explicitly said the woman was a vampire, but it seems to me that that’s what they wanted the audience to think. (Or, at the least, to think she was LIKE a vampire.)
Not to get TOO far off the topic, but Max is right, CFQWEST is wrong, regarding the hair and fingernails hooey. Unca Cecil himself has debunked this myth, as have Brunvand, the underappreciated and sorely missed Achenbach, et al.
Sorry to fight one myth by perpetuating another, but my original point still stands, whether or not the hair and fingernails grew after death: i.e., descriptions of allaged vampires are based on corpses that were exhumed, not on living people suffering form a disease.