Hey, I’m not arguing. I was talking about the historical Dracula and nothing else. I mean, Stoker wrote a novel, not a historical treatise.
I just wanted to contribute to the thread in my own, sad way.
That’s not quite the implication I got from it. (Although my earlier post wasn’t either - it’s what Laura (the narrator) thinks, at first, so it was a safe spoiler-free explanation.) The implication I got was that Carmilla did her actual sleeping in her tomb (which wasn’t far from Laura’s estate) in the early morning (after her pre-dawn visits with Laura, or implied hunting in the village), which is why her bedroom was locked, and why they found it empty when Laura suddenly got worried about her. Which, of course, meant she had to travel between her tomb and the house in the morning.
Carmilla was definitely sleeping in her tomb, but I had the impression that she had to sleep at a particular time.
Aha, I found the passage I was thinking of. Right near the end of the story it says “How they [vampires] escape from their graves and return to them for certain hours every day, without displacing the clay or leaving any trace of disturbance in the state of the coffin or the cerements, has always been admitted to be utterly inexplicable. The amphibious existence of the vampire is sustained by daily renewed slumber in the grave.”
This isn’t totally clear, but it gives me the impression that Carmilla had to sleep during the day, and that she had to sleep at a fixed time (“certain hours”). But as you say she did have to get back and forth between the grave and Laura’s house, so that may have been at least part of the reason why she seemed to “wake up” so late every day.
It’s not invariably wood. In Carl Dreyer’s film Vampyr the vampire is staked with an iron bar (in full daylight, too – this predates the Curt Siodmak films I listed above, so “dissolves in daylight” hadn’t become part of the Canon yet). In Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend*, the hero uses wooden stakes until he discovers that he really doesn’t need them. Various alternate methods of killing vampires include non-wooden impaling objects, in particular nails.
In one of his stories (“What do you think of chocolate-coated manhole covers?” , I think), Larry Niven asks (but doesn’t answer) the question “Could you kill a vampire with a stake made of Plastic Wood?”
Adding to CalMeacham’s examples, in the Tim Powers novel The Stress of Her Regard the vampire-like beings are vulnerable to both metal (iron/steel) and wooden weapons. IIRC the reasons for this aren’t fully explained in the novel, but here’s what Powers had to say in an interview:
These silicon-based beings also try to stay out of the sun because their bodies start to crystalize in direct sunlight. (One character suggests this was the truth behind the story of Lot’s wife.) It’s explained that they originated during a much earlier time in the Earth’s history, when the atmosphere was different and protected them from more of the sun’s rays.
Just an interesting aside on the whole staking a vamp thing.
D&D, which originated back in the late 70’s, had Vampires, where a stake through the heart wouldn’t kill the vamp outright, but would render it immobile. You had to cut off the head and burn it to truly kill the vampire.
It’s an interesting data point I think that the fact it needed to be wooden was still important, but wasn’t tied to staking it in it’s coffin. But also that it still didn’t kill it outright.
I personally try not to get too hung up on the actual ‘abilities’ of vamps, as it changes in popular culture all the time, even before it was counted as ‘popular culture’ 
[Having said that I think making them sparkly has taken them out of the realm of vamps into something else]
As someone who has written and sold a reasonable amount of vampire stories, I use the genre because I can pick and choose from the legends as I see fit. My most successful short story was based upon the premise that all the legends get things wrong.
That’s hard to say. According to Raymond McNally, “Dracula” was Vlad’s preferred name in life. If that’s how he introduced himself and signed his name (and it is documented that he did this), I’d be surprised if his contemporaries didn’t call him that, especially given that Vlad III was, like his father, a full member of the Order of the Dragon.
Political propaganda. Vlad was the last of the fiercely independent Wallachian princelings. Both the Turks and the Saxons had reason to villify him post-mortem. Russian tracts about Dracula were much more evenhanded. This might say more about the Russian tradition of (sometimes brutal) autocracy than it does about Dracula’s better side, however.
It bears mentioning that every Wallachian prince after Vlad Dracula was essentially a client of the Ottoman Empire. In The Romanians 1774-1866, Keith Hitchins posits that Dracula’s deposition was the de facto end of any pretense of real Wallachian autonomy.
Just adding my take on the vampires being night creatures thing. It would seem that a lot, if not most or all monsters were originally creatures of the night, and this may very well be because: (a) people, until recently (with the invention of the lightbulb), have always been terrified by the night due to the difficulty of seeing just what is making that spooky sound or being mugged/killed by theives/bandits. (B) Because people needed to have a time when they were completely safe from monsters (in this case vamps), and naturely the daylight makes the darkness go away (physically and metaphorically). I’m sure everyone already knows this, heres the other thing though, monsters (vampires, ghosts, zombies, etc) all came from the imagination, but were inspired by something that was real. The undead were most likely given a serious boost during the middle ages, specifically with the black plague I’d imagine. Death would be everywhere, bodies just lying around sometimes, you’d walk by one and suddenly the damn thing moves…the undead!! This would be many times more scary if you were hurrying to get home after the sun had already gone down, you’re getting spooked by various noises, then you remember that body you saw moving, and now all you can think about is “what if it’s coming after me!” Trust me, I’d think just a thought along those lines would push reason aside and the hair on the back of your neck is now about as stiff as that corpse. Just for fun, imagine starting to run home, super freaked out, you trip and fall on a dead body, and right at that moment it’s arms jerk up in the air…trying to hug you :eek:…I’d think that happening just once would be plenty to start a whole bunch of scary stories and stuff. Of course, the black plague wouldn’t be the only source for such stories, people have been dieing since the beginning of time, it just seems to me that during the plague, the stories would told a lot more and people would be thinking about it a lot more, thus coming up with a lot more lore.
Anyway, probably stupid to mention those points, this is all well known I’d imagine, something to think about I guess, I just remembered that the undead were, in fact, somewhat a reality, if only a reflection of peoples lack of understanding.
I must say that I’m truly disappointed with so many people giving so much credit to Vlad, I had no idea he wasn’t even a real part of vampire legend that much at all. If History Channel was hosting the Deadliest Warrior show and not Spike, then I’m sure they would have busted the myth about Vald starting it all, but those Spike morons went right ahead and gave full, 100% credit to Vlad, as if he was the father of vamps. I knew he wasn’t the real source so even at the time I thought them naming Vlad was a bit much, I went along with it though, thinking they weren’t too off base, but thanks to you fine people, I now know that that whole boat doesn’t even float ;). DAMN YOU, SPIKE!
I don’t think it’s just something that kills you. It’s something that charms you and even takes away your conscious control, only to kill you. And if you have to have them turn, you can make their lives an undead hell.
And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. You can still do a lot with conventional vampires.
I think you’re giving the 2011 iteration of the History Channel too much credit. Time was when they would–very convincingly–blow the top off such nonsense as crop circles or ergot poisoning causing the Salem Witch Trials. Nowadays, they may not hop on the bandwagon with the same relish as other outlets, but they can’t be counted on to come down on the ration side, either.
On the nocturnal nature of vampires: Paul Barber’s postulate is that vampire folklore springs from popular interpretation of physical signs around graveyards in preindustrial societies. In cultures without vaults, or even caskets in some instances, corpses do indeed get out of their graves. Specifically, animals dig them up. Since this usually happens at night, it would not have been uncommon for mourners to bury a person one day, then return the next morning to dress the grave–and find a hand (or more) emerging from the ground. If you see a bit of this while there is a deadly disease going around, it’s not hard to put two and two together and conclude that the recently departed has been up and about dragging the living toward their ultimate fate. It’s a simple enough thing: when something happens in the daytime, people generally see it and there’s no real mystery. When something happens at night, when it’s too dark to see and most everyone is asleep, conjecture takes over. That said, there ARE some Balkan folktales of vampires who are active during the day, but they are more removed from daily life than the accounts that inspired people to dig up graves. It’s not that folkloric vampires COULDN’T move about in the day, they just didn’t.
RationAL side, dadgummit! Oy, veh.
For anyone who’s interested, **StusBlues **is referring to Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality, one of the few good, scholarly books on this subject.
In addition to corpses being dug up by animals, Barber also argues that people’s lack of understanding about the decomposition process was a factor in vampire folklore. It would have been fairly common knowledge that corpses become stiff (rigor mortis) after death, but in a time when most bodies were not embalmed and were buried quickly fewer people would have known that rigor mortis isn’t permanent. If burial were delayed, or a corpse was exhumed, observers might take the lack of stiffness in the body to mean that the person wasn’t truly dead.
Some tales about exhumed “vampires” found to be bloated and with blood around their mouths also seem to be descriptions of normal decomposition.
Yep. Ditto the erections that corpses often sport.
If you’re not up for Barber’s full text, he summarizes his main findings in a Skeptical Inquirer article here. He had a better one in *Natural History *(October, 1990), but it doesn’t seem to be online.
In the Buffyverse, silver is shown to work against werewolves and some demons. Not vampires.
You also see garlic hung on students’ lockers in the Buffyless alternate version of Sunnydale in “The Wish.”
There was one fresh vampire I can recall with martial arts skills, in the (excellent) episode “Conversations with Dead People,” and the vampire himself explains that he had gotten pretty good at taekwondo before his death.
Dracula(George Hamilton): No, no, silver bullets are for werewolves. I’m a vampire.
Van Helsing (Richard Benjamin): (still holding the smoking gun) Are you sure?
–** Love at First Bite**
Actually, silver bullets wrere originally for witches, as I learned a couple of years ago. They were switched to werewolves only in the 1930s. The effectiveness of silver against vampires might derive from a philosophy of “it works against one monster, so it might work against another”, or conceivanbly might be related to the close connection between vampires and werewolves (Dracula can turn into a wolf, after all).
In any event, there’s no tradition of silver working against vampires, as far as I’m aware, before the 20th century.
Agreed, History Channel is off their rocker on some things, specifically the “Ancient Aliens” nonsense. I think they’re just trying to get the ratings up with stuff like that, and since it can’t be proved one way or the other, they’ve decided to go out on a limb. Of course all it takes is someone to come along behind them and cut that limb…then where would they be :D.
Right, the graveyard bit, I know if I lived back in the day and saw some body sticking out of the grave it wouldn’t take much convincing to get me to believe the undead were roaming around willy-nilly.
That applies to a lot of stuff, much of which has already been mentioned.
What surprises me is that no one in recent fiction (as far as I know) has gone after some of the more interesting vampire apotropaics that *do *have a traditional basis. The whole idea of the simple cross being effective, for example, is pretty scarce in folklore, and may not have existed at all before Dracula. Orthodox icons, however, *were *effective. I think a good storyteller could do well weaving in all the prayer and fasting invested in making an icon a holy thing capable of bending the undead fiend to the hunter’s will.
MUch of it by me.