What does a Vampire look like?
I’d tell you, but I can’t see my reflection in the mirror. 
Thank you. Are any of them more worth picking up than another? I did enjoy Klinger’s Dracula.
This is one of the vampire features that’s getting played down these days. When it was new to stage and movies (and the original novel) it was an intriguing, creepy idea. It’s used in the Universal films – not just the original Dracula (both English and Spanish), but in House of Dracula John Carradine’s Dracula isn’t reflected in the mirror.
But nowadays it just seems silly, and is often played for laughs (see Dracula: Dead and Loving It or Van Helsing). Furthermore, even before this vampires were frequently shown reflected in mirrors. Nosferatu is, for instance, in the original silent film. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula is pretty blatantly shown in a mirror in Abbott and Costello meet Frankenstein. And a couple of movies show vampires reflected from water.
The idea looks like a bit of old folklore – Mirrors are said to reflect the soul of a person, or can capture souls. But vampires don’t have souls, so they cast no reflection.
But there is no such old tradition. Bram Stoker invented the trope for Dracula. Before then there was no suggestion that vampires didn’t appear in mirrors. It’s Fakelore, not Folklore.
I did a whole webpage about this on my site:
I seriously did not know that. Thanks! I did know that werewolves being vulnerable to silver was introduced in Universal’s original Wolfman movie. Folklore says you can wound a werewolf or cause them to revert to human form by-
Touching them with a church key (not a bottle opener! the actual key to a church!)
Drawing three drops of blood from them with an iron dagger
or calling them by their Christian name- the folklore is silent on what to do about Jewish lycanthropes.
Originally posted by Bram Stoker:
His face was a strong—a very strong—aquiline, with high bridge of the thin nose and peculiarly arched nostrils; with lofty domed forehead, and hair growing scantily round the temples but profusely elsewhere. His eyebrows were very massive, almost meeting over the nose, and with bushy hair that seemed to curl in its own profusion. The mouth, so far as I could see it under the heavy moustache, was fixed and rather cruel-looking, with peculiarly sharp white teeth; these protruded over the lips, whose remarkable ruddiness showed astonishing vitality in a man of his years. For the rest, his ears were pale, and at the tops extremely pointed; the chin was broad and strong, and the cheeks firm though thin. The general effect was one of extraordinary pallor.
This is a pretty good description of the historical Vlad III, Voivode of Wallachia
It’s also a decent description of Bram Stoker’s employer, the actor Sir Henry Irving, particularly when he was made up to play historical figures such as Richelieu or Charles II.
There is some speculation that Stoker hoped to turn the novel into a stage play, with Irving in the title role. (Irving apparently nixed the idea.) A number of contemporaries noted that the relationship between Dracula and Renfield bore a striking resemblance to the relationship between Irving and Stoker.
Although that trope-breaking could also be mostly for reasons of comedy, a nudge-nudge-wink-wink at the audience.
Overall though I completely take your point about the no reflections thing being a minor and increasingly optional feature of vampirism.
The werewolves being killed by silver bullets thing always bothered me – surely such a tradition couldn’t go back to, say, medieval times, when there were no guns. Did they use silver slingshot weights, or silver-tipped crossbow bolts?
I was VERY surprised to learn that the trope genuinely is an old one. But not with respect to werewolves. I found in some 18th and 17th century literature the notion that WITCHES could be killed with silver bullets! Its application to werewolves came much later, in the 20th century (despite claims that it’s older).
Considering that the traditional method of becoming a werewolf was to sell your soul to Satan in a black magic ritual, I think the conflation of witches and werewolves is understandable.
Not witches; but rather the Lone Ranger according to Curt Siodmak, the screenwriter.
I never understood the Larry Talbot wolfman. He could’ve built a stout iron cage for those full moon days and charged a pretty penny to witness the transformation. Then he could have compensated the victims he was moping about the whole picture.
In early drafts of the script, the writers wanted to be ambiguous about whether lycanthropy was a magical curse that physically transformed him, or simply a mundane mental illness. So, like a lot of mental patients, he dithered and equivocated, and set himself up for failure.
Also, in the 1940s, Britain still had capital punishment. So, admitting any connections to the deaths would have been dangerous.
Some people handle it better than others.
[Oz ]: [on the phone] Aunt Maureen? Hey, it’s me. Um, what? Oh. It’s, uh… actually it’s healing okay. That’s pretty much the reason I called. Um, I wanted to ask you something. Is Jordy a werewolf?
[pause]
[Oz ]: Uh-huh.
[pause]
[Oz ]: And how long has that been going on?
[pause]
[Oz ]: Uh-huh. What? No, no reason. Um… Thanks. Yeah, love to Uncle Ken.
Quite right. See my webpage Secrets of the Wolfman
“The screenwriters” was Kurt (or Curt) Siodmak, a man who deserv es to ne mucgh better known than he is, for all the cultural input he’s had. e’s responsible for much of the wolfman “fakelore” we have. He’s also one of the people responsible for popularizing the idea that vampires dissolve under sunlight. His novel “Donovan’s Brain” (and the three movies made from it) popularized the notion of the “disembodied brain in an aquarium”.
As I point out on the webpage, Siodmak later did write a movie script in which the question “is it a real monster? Or only a fake?” was answered “a fake”. The movie flopped fantastically. It was Curucu – Beast of the Amazon. There was a Universal movie with the same dilemma about a real transformation into a werewolf or if it was all in their mind – She-Wolf of London Again, it was all in her mind. If you haven’t heard of this movie before, that’s probably why.
I saw that on Svengoolie. Besides the extremely disappointing reveal ‘it was all stage magic trickery’ instead of finally seeing the monster on screen and having a battle to the death, it was just not a good movie.
Sadly, the way the Nosferatu character was designed, many people at the time would have instantly thought “Jew”.
The physical appearance of Count Orlok, with his hooked nose, long claw-like fingernails, and large bald head, has been compared to stereotypical caricatures of Jewish people from the time in which Nosferatu was produced. His features have also been compared to those of a rat or a mouse, the former of which Jews were often equated with. Orlok’s interest in acquiring property in the German town of Wisborg, a shift in locale from the Stoker novel’s London, has also been analyzed as preying on the fears and anxieties of the German public at the time. Professor Tony Magistrale wrote that the film’s depiction of an “invasion of the German homeland by an outside force […] poses disquieting parallels to the anti-Semitic atmosphere festering in Northern Europe in 1922.”
He looks like Barnabas Collins. Of course.
Truly scary.
I believe the stereotypical vampire has a Widow’s Peak hairline.
No Western movie, possibly. But that’s often how Chinese vampires are depicted.
That, and all the hopping around.