The Ultimate Vampire Resource and Directory

People are regularly asked what they found so appealing about the vampire. The answers reveal incredible diversity. Qualities mentioned include: eroticism, immortality, power, victimization, beauty, elegance, romanticism, the supernatural, mystery, and the unknown.



Of these, three were mentioned most often, the first of which was sexual attraction. People found the biting and blood-sucking element of the vampire extremely sexual. They also found the fact that vampires are immortal quite appealing. The third major appeal of the vampire is power. The vampire's dominance in the biting of its victim was especially highlighted in this category. All three of these appeals are supported with extensive testimony by vampire fans.



With its original association with evil, disease, and death, it is surprising that this creature of the dark has garnered the appeal it has in American culture today. Indeed, our fascination with something that was once feared seems to indicate that the vampire's function in today's society is fundamentally different from that which it was originally.



Many scholars have attempted to explain the vampire's appeal in psychological terms literary scholar James Twitchell claims that psychoanalytically speaking, the vampire image is so popular because it represents a "complete condensation of problems and resolutions of preadolescence." He claims that children must deal with first time feelings of sexual energy and hostility, and that the vampire image acts out these situations, through its blood sucking and preying on the living.



Kirk J. Schneider, a faculty member of the California School of Professional Psychology, offers a vastly different explanation. He maintains that the vampire figure, specifically Dracula, is appealing because it is horrifying. Schneider states that true horror is when we are unexpectedly immersed in the infinite. Seeing this boundlessness is analogous to the boundlessness of that which is sacred, and thus dealing with the horror allows us to get a feel of what it would be like to deal with the holy. Dracula seems infinite is his power -- and the characters in the story as well as the audience must deal with that endless power. In regards to Dracula, Schneider states that "Dracula is not simply about a monster, it is about the mysterious force which permits monstrosities."



Perkowski claims that the figure of Dracula the Vampire functions as a symbol of evil. He states the Vampire "is a focus of fascination for forbidden, proscribed feelings and acts rife with guilt and fear, a focus for venting one's secret desires to surfeit." To support his claim, he contrasts Dracula's role with that of Santa Claus, claiming that they embody elements that make them polar opposites.



There are many reasons that vampires are so popular. The vampire has the appeal of immortality, which has been a goal of man for ages. Men built the pyramids in an attempt to gain immortality, yet it comes naturally to vampires. Vampires have the appeal of power over others, which is very alluring to someone who feels that they have no power of their own. Finally and most importantly, vampires have a sexual appeal. This sexual appeal ranges from the more normal (dominance, charming, and innuendo of oral sex) to the strange (blood fetishes, sadomasochism, and necrophilia). All claims can be justified in some way or another.



The vampire usually is seen as a metaphor for the dark side of humans: our greed, lust, obsession, predatory natures, desire for eternal life, the tragic quality of being boxed in by fate. On another level, the vampire has the qualities of the dark rebel, the outcast, the ultimate opponent of the established order and the daylight world. Trapped in a half- world between the living and the dead, the vampire carries the tragic qualities of an outsider who does not fit in, a situation that many people can identify with.



Whereas the vampire was needed in the past as an outlet of fear and anxiety by being a scapegoat for unexplainable calamity, today not much seems to remain from his original essence. The vampire has freed itself from the contingencies of its social role to become a true archetype. Earlier in history, the associations of fear with the vampire were inseparable in its transmission, whereas today the image can stand alone, making it subject to a much broader scope of interpretation. As a multifaceted creature, the vampire is able to fulfill a wide range of elements in the individual psyche.



One thing, however, is known for sure: the image has withstood the test of time and change of cultures. In doing so, it has shown that, real or unreal, the vampire seems immortal with its continued presence in our society.

Freud and Jung, the major thinkers of our time, have based their work on the book from Stocker which was published in 1897. Count Dracula posed many threats to Victorian social, moral and political values: he changes virtuous women into beasts with ravenous sexual appetites; he is a foreigner who invades England and threatens English book and superiority; he is the embodiment of evil that can only be destroyed by reasserting the beliefs of traditional Christianity in an increasingly skeptical and secular age; he represents the fear of regression, a reversal of evolution, a return to our more primal animal state.



Let us examine how the main school have analysed the emergence of the vampire as a central figure of human societies.



According to psychoanalysis and the Freudian school, any dreams about vampires or other forms of the undead, are a metaphor for the fascination and fear mankind has with the concepts of death and the dead



"All human experiences of morbid dread signify the presence of repressed sexual and aggressive wishes, and in vampirism we see these repressed wishes becoming plainly visible."



The first thing a Freudian will usually comment on in regards to a vampire story is how they are a metaphor for infantile and perverse sexuality.



For Freudian scholars, Dracula, is a combination of all the traditional myths of the vampire merged with what they consider to be the epitome of Freud's Oedipal complex concept. A Freudian will look at the sexuality combined with brutality of the feeding off of the living's blood and say it is suggestive a child's interpretation of watching his parents copulate for the first time.



Other topics of importance are how death coexists with the longing for immortality, showing man's love-hate relationship with both concepts, how greed, sadism, and aggression are intermingled with desire and a compulsion to possess and express said desire, and the consistent use of metaphor for virginity, innocence, and vulnerability and the overlapping of images of guilt.







For Jungians, the fact that the Vampire developed in nearly every culture in the world at the same time without contact amongst developing humans is both proof of the vampire as the archetype ("an inherited pattern of thought or symbolic imagery derived from the past collective experience"), but also proof of Jung's concept on the Unconscious Collective.



The concept of vampires and vampirism indicated that vampires are not mere stories or explanations created by personal experience or folk tales, but are in fact a species-wide psychological structure that all humans share in primitive thought



The Jungian interpretation of the vampire assumes that all humans have a vampire inside of them. What this means is that Jungian believe vampires are an intuitive concept to the human psyche. Something we understand in some way, shape or form, from the moment we exist into this world. Vampires reflect significant issues universal to all human life.



For Jung himself, the vampire was the representation of a psychological aspect he called, "the shadow." The Shadow is made of aspects of one's self that the conscious mind and ego were unable to recognize. The shadow was primarily negative concepts, such as repressed thoughts and desires, out anti-social impulses, morally questionable judgment, childlike fantasies, and other traits we normally feel shame for expressing or thinking.



Jung himself describes this shadow self as:



"The Shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort. To become conscious of it involves recognizing the dark aspects of the personality as present and real."



Jung interpreted the vampire as an unconscious complex that had the ability to taken over the conscious mind by means of "enchanting" the psyche or akin to what we might label a spell.



The vampire became a key fixture in society according to Jungians, because it became a mental scapegoat of sorts. It allowed humanity to project the negative aspects of ourselves onto something we could both openly revile and admire without actually acting out the desires and impulses ourselves. The vampire acts in the way humanity wishes it could, but can not due to social restraints.



Jung also added that there are other traits the vampire possesses, such as auto-erotic, and narcissistic traits, as well as a personality that is predatory, anti-social, and parasitic.

Of all the monsters of fiction, the only one primaly associated with sex is the vampire



Nonetheless, the vampire of folklore was not a sexually attractive figure; he was a dead man who fed on blood, a monster about as attractive as a zombie. Bram Stoker changed all that with his novel, Dracula.



Stoker used the vampire as a metaphor for the Victorian view of sex as innately dangerous. In Dracula, sex with the Count transformed women into seductive sirens and horrific baby killers – the opposite of the Victorian ideal of chaste and nurturing womanhood. Originally, only female vampires were especially beautiful. Lamias and other such spirit-like vampires were always ugly in their true form, but had the ability to shift their appearance to that of a beautiful maiden, in order to lure men to them.





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With the coming of the Victorian age, both the male and female vampire became beautiful and both exhibited a sexual appetite, though both vampire and vampiress retained the beauty as only a facade. The penetration of skin by sharp canine teeth easily evokes both violence and eroticism. In anger or distress the vampire still revealed its ugly, more corpse-like side.



In the modern psyche, women have unconsciously adopted vampires as an archetype for the dangerous male. When a woman has sex with a mortal man, she risks pregnancy and social shame. When she has sex with a vampire, she risks actual death. In both cases, women take the chance in trusting men who may not be trustworthy. In the vampire, so many male attributes are exaggerated, from physical strength to sexuality.

Today our vampires still retain those traits, played up even more. But still the vampire can show that evil, ugly side. The vampire, while always a nuisance and a evil to society, has grown even more callous in his vanity, perhaps to show the evil associated with pride and absolute power.