Medusa's Gaze and Vampire's Bite: The Science of Monsters (23 page)

So, a man strips naked, pees in a circle around his clothes under the light of the full moon, and transforms into a wolf. Was this a real wolf? Or was the man just snarling and howling as he lost some sort of mental control? The latter seems more likely in the event of a rabies infection, but the mention of a ferocious wolf attack could easily have been the work of a rabid wolf in the area. That the man is later found in bed under a doctor’s care suggests he is actually ill. This hints that the werewolf as a monster may be a simplified version of the vampire before the fear of rabies became blended with the fear of other diseases.
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There is another side to all of this, though. In poor regions, where bodies were buried without caskets in shallow graves, it was not uncommon for wolves, which act as both predators and scavengers, to dig up the graves. They would eat human remains and, if caught during their feast, be thought by terrified witnesses to be
the exhumed person transformed into a creature of the night. This might, in fact, be why some early vampire stories describe the monsters as being able to take wolf form, and why, during the 1100s, William of Newburgh specifically mentions a pack of dogs following the monster as it spread death around town. Although, in some cases, and this will no doubt warm the hearts of the previously irked
Underworld
and
Twilight
fans, these wolf-scavenging activities also led to the creation of folktales suggesting that wolves were the sworn enemies of vampires and stayed near cemeteries to attack them as they tried to rise from the grave.
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The fears behind vampires and werewolves are very much the same. With both monsters there is the transformation of a relatively mundane human into a killer. On the face of it, this fear of a human becoming a predator is similar to the fears behind the Nemean lion, but it is taken a step further. In ancient Greece, lions were nocturnal hunters often not seen until it was too late. However, they were not common in towns, and people often felt safer near their homes. Werewolves and vampires made the monster human and, to a reasonable extent, allowed it to move among us disguised as a mortal. So it seems plausible that werewolf and vampire fears stemmed from more than just the threats presented by wild animals. They might also have come from fear of other humans.

Murder is as old as humanity itself. While Western audiences are most familiar with the biblical tale of Cain and Abel, this story is far from an isolated one. Tales of murder are central to the ancient myths of all societies; the fear of being murdered was very much a reality for many people in ancient communities. So were early werewolf stories a way of expressing this fear? In the tale of Lycaon, in Ovid’s
Metamorphoses,
the connection seems obvious.

Lycaon, in an attempt to challenge the gods, presents Zeus with
a platter of the chopped-up entrails of a person he has murdered. He doesn’t tell Zeus this, though. Instead, he lies and declares it animal meat. Of course, with Zeus being a god, the ruse is detected. In a fury, the god slays Lycaon’s sons with thunderbolts and curses Lycaon as he flees. Ovid writes, “Terror struck he took to flight, and on the silent plains is howling in his vain attempts to speak; he raves and rages and his greedy jaws, desiring their accustomed slaughter, turn against the sheep—still eager for their blood. His vesture separates in shaggy hair, his arms are changed to legs; and as a wolf he has the same grey locks, the same hard face, the same bright eyes, the same ferocious look.”

As tightly linked as murderous behavior is to the werewolf in Ovid’s story, there is a question of timing. Ovid was born in 43 BC and is thought to have died in AD 17 or 18. Murder, needless to say, existed before then. It is possible that, because of relatively low population densities, the unique mix of fears associated with rabies and violence did not merge until this time. However, it seems more likely that these fears and the horrible tales they inspired were just not written down and preserved until
Metamorphoses
and
Satyricon.
Certainly, the Mesopotamian
Epic of Gilgamesh,
written more than seven hundred years earlier than these two works, relates a transformation, initiated by the gods, of a man into a wolf. This might be early evidence of a fearful awareness that people in the community could, under certain circumstances, become as dangerous as predatory beasts.

Regardless of their origins, vampires took a distinctly new form in Bram Stoker’s
Dracula
in 1897. Passages from the book, like those found in Mina Murray’s journal about her ill friend Lucy, show a connection between vampires and disease to still be present: “Lucy seems to be growing weaker, whilst her mother’s hours are numbering to a close. I do not understand Lucy’s fading away as she is
doing. She eats well and sleeps well, and enjoys the fresh air, but all the time the roses in her cheeks are fading, and she gets weaker and more languid day by day. At night I hear her gasping as if for air.”

Dracula, with his cruel, cunning, and elusive ways, took vampire fears far beyond those associated with disease. By linking Dracula to a coffin rather than a grave, Stoker made him remarkably mobile and thus capable of migrating from distant lands to places that were very familiar to his readers, like London. By being made fiercely intelligent and wealthy, he was very different from early vampires that were crawling out of graves. Dracula could buy whatever he wanted and manipulate those around him in the most subtle of ways. The vampire no longer had to scavenge like a ghoul; he could seduce the beautiful young women of the upper class. Instead of a mindless zombielike creature rising from the cemetery in a far-off land, the threat came in the form of a ruthless and brilliant murderer mingling with all classes of the city. It is a concept that must have been acutely terrifying to Victorians who were uncomfortably familiar with serial killers.

Yet above all else, Stoker made Dracula a charmer. He was eloquent, aristocratic, and exceptionally good at winning over women. This element of Stoker’s monster may well have had a connection to the hypersexuality associated with rabies, may have stemmed from fears of rapists, or may have simply been an attempt to play upon societal fears of innocents becoming sexually corrupted in cities through manipulation. Regardless, the result was the construction of a monster that chilled readers to the bone.

Today, werewolves, vampires, and zombies still hold a deep fascination for society on the whole. Books like Stephen King’s
’Salem’s Lot
and movies like
Zombieland, Lost Boys,
and
The Wolfman
(among many others) tie into the ancient fears of deadly corruption being contagious. Although rabies is no longer as much of a threat to the Western world as it once was, contagious disease certainly is. With the SARS, swine flu, and avian flu threats that have struck society in recent years, fear of disease is very high. Anyone can be a carrier… the plumber, the cabdriver, the waitress at the coffeehouse,
a spouse, a child. They mean no harm, but in this modern age of emerging diseases, everyone is a threat, bringing us very close to the concept of the innocent who has become infected with vampirism. This could be the reason for the continued appearance of vampires and vampire-like monsters that spread their curse as an infection.

But there is more. Diseases have appeared in recent decades that, because of their ability to make people lose control of their minds, are somewhat similar to rabies and the poisons used by zombie makers. Dementia and the hardening of the arteries in the brain are well known to cause mental malfunction, but among the most dreaded is Alzheimer’s disease, where the mind is slowly attacked, memories are destroyed, and identity is stripped away. Worse, Alzheimer’s causes people to forget not only their friends and family but also social rules. Indeed, it is common for sufferers of the disease to lose their inhibitions, make rude comments, and exhibit sexually inappropriate behaviors.

Admittedly, Alzheimer’s and other disorders that lead to mental degradation are not caused by a bite or even airborne particles, but the fact that they are becoming ever more common makes the fear of losing control of oneself a very real threat. Fears associated with these diseases are likely leading to a certain level of modern vampire evolution.

In the novel
Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,
the Dementors, which guard the wizard prison Azkaban, are ghostly creatures that cast a chill over all that surrounds them and attack by feeding on happy thoughts. They do not bite with fangs or drain blood; rather, they drain away their victims’ happiness. Alfonso Cuarón’s cinematic portrayal of them is distinctly vampiric in nature—they make sucking noises as they hover over their victims and siphon off happy memories.

While Dementors seem somewhat undead in nature, what is scary about them is not so much that they might have returned from the grave but that they can damage the mind to the point where a person is left with nothing but his or her worst experiences. They leave their victims as husks of their former selves, tainted individuals
who will never again be truly human. This is not much different from what happens to the victims of vampires who lose their humanity as they rise up as undead themselves, hinting that although the Dementor appears to be an entirely new monster, to some degree it is the vampire adapted to play upon the fears of today’s audiences.

Much of the discussion of how modern vampires terrify people leaves out a huge chunk of modern vampiric representation that is as popular as ever—the role of vampires as heroes.
Twilight, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, True Blood, Blade,
and
Interview with the Vampire,
to name just a few, all contain vampires that are partially or entirely good. Why establish a reversal from monster to hero? Nobody is putting Medusa, Chimera, or the Minotaur in the role of hero today. Why vampires? Part of the answer may be related to an ever increasing awareness of how easily corrupted we are that is leading us to be fascinated by heroes who must relentlessly fight their inner demons.

Unethical human behaviors are scientifically better understood today than ever before, and it is becoming increasingly obvious that there are not bad people and good people in society. There are just people who can, under specific conditions, be driven bad. As a zoological example, researchers can look at the behaviors of other species and predict what sorts of circumstances might make a typically helpful and devoted member of a couple give up on family responsibilities. Some marvelous work by Judith Morales and Alberto Velando at the University of Vigo in Spain and Roxana Torres of the National Autonomous University in Mexico looked at blue-footed booby males and worked out the precise conditions under which some males stayed to help look after the eggs and chicks that they fathered and others left the females to do all the chick rearing on their own.

The degree to which a male booby involves itself in family life depends upon two factors: how blue the feet of the female are and
how large and colorful the eggs are. Females with very blue feet are deemed healthy because vibrant blue means they are eating well and not particularly stressed. Large and colorful eggs are also considered a positive sign of health. You’d think males would stick around with healthy females raising healthy chicks, but you would be wrong. Males give up on family participation under these conditions, presumably because they know they are leaving behind a family situation that can manage itself. However, males also give up when they discover that their mates have inadequate foot coloration and have laid poorly colored eggs, presumably because they figure the chicks are doomed and there is no way for them to make a difference. So when do males actually help? When things are bad, but not too bad, meaning the mother has poorly colored feet
or
the eggs are unhealthy-looking, but not both.
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Something about this mix of stimuli triggers a damage control mechanism in the male’s head that leads him to stick around and do what he can to look after the young. And it isn’t crazy to consider that fatherly behavior in humans might be somewhat similar. The deadbeat dad phenomenon could very easily be a simple matter of some fathers being exposed to specific conditions that trigger a difficult-to-control evolutionary response.

Psychologists are also conducting studies to determine what sorts of conditions must be present for a normally law-abiding member of a community to engage in criminal activity. Rather remarkably, a 2008 study led by Kees Keizer at the University of Groningen and published in the journal
Science
found that people littered and trespassed far more often if they were placed in an environment where garbage and graffiti were present than if they were in a clean environment. Yet the effects generated by the filthy environment were not limited to these minor transgressions. During one part of the study, Keizer’s team secretly monitored people who discovered an envelope
with cash visible inside it (there was a small window in the envelope) that the researchers had placed sticking out of either a tidy and clean mailbox or a mailbox covered in graffiti and surrounded by litter. The envelope was stolen only 13 percent of the time when it was in a clean mailbox, but that figure rose to 27 percent in the filthy conditions. And these findings are not alone. A 2010 study led by Chen-Bo Zhong at the University of Toronto revealed that people are much more likely to behave selfishly when it is dark and they are unlikely to be seen. Similarly, a 2012 study led by Shaul Shalvi of the University of Amsterdam found that when people are asked questions, they are far more likely to lie if they must answer quickly than if they are given ample time to think things over. Indeed, just as the booby equivalent of deadbeat dad behavior is triggered by simple stimuli, it is becoming increasingly obvious that people tend to behave badly when specific conditions are present. In short, we are becoming sensitized to the idea that we are often in no more control of our lives than animals. And if a filthy alley can lead a person who would not otherwise steal to engage in acts of theft, and the wrong foot and egg colors can lead booby males to abandon their families, what conditions need to be present in a marriage to lead a husband or wife to enter an extramarital affair or resort to domestic violence?