Since today’s vampires are sparkly emos, Dracula-like movies may have to move away from vampires for a bit. In the game Vampires: The Masquerade: Bloodlines, there’s a character which is much like vampires but eats flesh. I don’t remember the species being mentioned.
So, is there such a thing as a recognized flesh-eating equivalent to vampires in books, movies etc? I had never heard of that type of monster before playing the game but I can see how it would make for an effective monster if it has to eat humans to survive instead of drink their blood. Except for transmission of the condition whose mechanism isn’t clear to me, it can have all the characteristics of vampires and then turn it up to 11.
Zombies are certainly monsters which eat flesh but zombies usually aren’t anything like vampires. Vampires are often powerful individually, smart, secretive, often sophisticated and have a sexual subtext.
Vampires are the 1%/liberal elite. Zombies are hobos.
Gouls (from the Arabic Ghul, as in Ra’s al Ghul) are the most well–known monsters of this type.
Joe Abercrombie’s books have the Eaters, human beings - originally - who receive great and varied powers from eating human flesh, but are forced to consume huge amounts of it to survive.
Hmmm. There’s also the Indian mythological creatures called Rakshasa; according to the Wiki article they “feed on human flesh and spoiled food”. I’ve seen variations of them in several works, including Dungeons and Dragons.
I haven’t played the computer games, but am a huge fan of the old World Of Darkness. It sounds like you’re talking about a Nagaraja. The Nagaraja happened when some Euthanatos Mages were experimenting with kindred vitae and managed to accidentally embrace themselves. The Nagaraja bloodline is strongly tied to the Shadowlands (the plane inhabited by Wraiths) has the Nihlistics discipline (later changed to a Necromancy path- IIRC the Ash Path) and serves the True Hand.
Back To The Rest Of The OP
A lot of EC stories (Tales From The Crypt, etc) depict ghouls as being just like vampires but feeding on flesh instead of blood. OTTOMH So does the short story Disturb Not My Slumbering Fair.
I have to disagree. In folklore and popular fiction, the werewolf is a monster who does bad things based on primal urges. But, he is not particularly known for eating human flesh. He does not need human flesh to survive etc.
I think the point with werewolves isn’t that they kill people so they can eat them, they kill them so they can kill them. And then, it’s like, “hey, tasty…”
An odd coincedence had it that I picked up a book of assorted short stories and it had some stories from India and one of them was about a rakshasa about a week or so after the Night Stalker episode aired. I was a regular watcher when it was in first run. Excellent series for the time. I really do like ‘monster of the week’ format shows.
It’s been a while but I don’t recall the Lon Chaney Universal Studios versions of werewolves eating anybody. That was possibly due to censorship of the cannibalism taboo, but maybe also because the stories they used for sources didn’t feature human-eating.
Are there examples of werewolves that explicitly do have to eat human flesh? The closest I can think of is the ghoulish habit of European werewolves to eat corpses, but I don’t know if they did it for survival.
It seems a little funny that there could be a “cite” on fictional creatures, beyond the most basic features, like there is a book somewhere with a list like
Monster Eats People?
Ogre Yes
Nessie No
Yeti Sherpas
Wendigo Yes
OEOHFPPE Yes
Kelpie Yes
Leprechaun No
Der Trihs and Alessan have it. The meaning of the term “ghoul” has changed through the years, but, at least by the 1950s, uit meant a flesh-eating creature. At that time Zombies weren’t meat-eaters – they were simply walking dead people (or possibly really drugged live people). It wasn’t untiol George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead that zombies became predators, which added considerably to their value as monsters.
Ghouls, bu compsarison, wereintelligent, thinking creatures that might be mistaken for ordinary living folks. One EC comic from the 1950s featured a man who stops at a farmhouse in the rain and meets the weird old couple who live there. She tells the man to beware her husband – he’s a vampire, and the bottle of red “wine” he has is really blood. The man, on the other hand, tells him that his wife is a ghoul. The guy spends part of a restless night before they both break into his room and reveal that they are a vampire and a ghoul. Apparently they were just messing with his mind, before they ate him. The husband got all the blood and the wife got the rest, so there was no waste.
An interestng sidelight is that before Polidori wrote The Vampyre 9and possibly before Goethe’s The Bride of Corinth), vampires were imagined to be much the way we view zombies now – speechless, mentally-challenged, obsessive-compulsive* creatures who were pretty obviously not normal living people. Polidori gave us the passing-for-human, cultured, and titled vampire – probably modeled on his friend Lord Byron himself.
So maybe one of these days – if it hasn’t happened yet – we’ll get the titled, cultured Zombie character, as well.
*One way to “defeat” a vampire in those pre-Count days was to upset a container of sesame seeds in its path. The vampire would feel compelled to count them all, and you had plenty of time to get away.
I think the Morlocks deserve a mention here, dining on the flesh of the Eloi. Perhaps my memory is tainted by the film but ISTR they were basically raising the Eloi for meat.