Vampires Through the Ages (15 page)

In the series, a charismatic vampire named Barnabas Collins makes his entrance after being locked away in a sarcophagus on the Collinwood Estate for many years. Once he is accidentally freed by a Collins family servant who was in search of buried jewels, Barnabas masquerades as a distant family relative from England and insidiously works his way into the family's good graces. From there the storyline twists and weaves its way into fantastic plotlines that combine time travel, ghosts, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, witches, werewolves, and sinister cults. Throughout all of this, Barnabas falls in love, is cured of his vampirism, and in time is cursed to it again.

Like the similar tale of
Varney the Vampire
over one hundred years before him, Barnabas finds his character transforming over the course of the series from a run-of-the-mill bloodsucker to a star-crossed figure desperate for a cure to the curse that afflicts him. In 1991 NBC attempted to revive the series with a remake, but after only twelve episodes the show lost momentum and was canceled. Even now, at the time of the writing of this book, a film version of
Dark Shadows
is slated for release in 2012, directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp and Michelle Pfeiffer.

As serious traditional vampire dramas such as
Dark Shadows
were fizzling out on TV, lighter versions such as producer Joss Whedon's
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
were proving that viewers were still in love with the concept. Airing from March 10, 1997, until May 20, 2003, the show ran successfully for seven seasons with three Emmys and numerous other awards under its belt. Broadly based on Whedon's campy 1992 movie of the same name, the weekly series followed the exploits of Buffy Summers, played by Sarah Michelle Gellar, as she battled vampires, demons, and a host of other dark minions all the while attending Sunnydale High School. Aiding her quest are an assortment of teenage friends and a Watcher, who guides and teaches the group—who call themselves the “Scooby Gang”—in the subtle art of killing vampires. Given the show's trendiness, humor, and contemporary teenage themes, it was immensely popular and produced a host of spinoff books, comics, action figures, games, and even a second series titled
Angel
, making up what many fans and even some academic scholars have come to call the “Buffyverse.”

The times, it seemed, were again a-changing, and so too was the public's perception of the vampire motif in popular culture. Vampires were once seen by illiterate European peasants as bloated corpses feeding on the blood of the living, but modern audiences craved more from their monsters and demanded that their vampires become the heroes or even the love interests of the story. One case in point was the 1998 film
Blade
, which featured a vampire hunter by the same name, played by Wesley Snipes, who not only hunts down vampires with a vengeance but is part vampire himself. Based on a 1970s Marvel comic book character that first appeared in
The Tomb of Dracula
, this gun-toting, sword-welding superhero went on to appear in several sequels to the franchise, as well as in a television series in 2006.

Another example is the 2003 action-adventure film
Underworld
, in which bands of leather-clad vampires face off against packs of howling werewolves in a blood feud lasting centuries. The main character, a vampire named Selene, played by Kate Beckinsale, falls in love with a human and must in the end protect him from both sides in a sort of machine gun–blazing undead version of
Romeo and Juliet
.

The final and probably the most potent manifestation of this new obsession with vampires is the
Twilight Saga
, which includes the 2008 teenage vampire romance film
Twilight
, adapted from the popular novel by author Stephenie Meyer. In the film Isabella “Bella” Swan, played by Kristen Stewart, moves to the small town of Forks, Washington, where she falls in with Edward Cullen, a 104-year-old vampire who only drinks animal blood. Eventually another vampire named James arrives and tries to kill Bella for sport, but Edward intervenes and in a climactic battle kills James.

While critics gave the film mixed reviews, teenagers and even some adults went wild over the movie, which grossed an amazing $392 million worldwide, as well as spawning fan clubs, movie merchandise, and several sequels also based on Meyer's novels, including
New Moon
in 2009,
Eclipse
in 2010, and
Breaking Dawn, Part 1
in 2011. (
Breaking Dawn, Part 2
, the final movie in the
Twilight Saga
series, will be released in late 2012.)

By examining these and other works, we can find, within human history, literature, and even within the still relatively new medium of film, the ever-changing progression of humanity's view of the vampire. Yet not until the Victorian period of the 1800s did writers create the truly powerful and seductive blood drinkers we know and love today. From bloodthirsty menace to superhero and lover, the vampire has come a long way in the imagination of the public. But as is often the case, truth can be stranger than fiction, and as we will see in the next few chapters, real vampires are often much different from the ones we dream up.

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Listen to them … children of the night. What music they make!

—Dracula, 1931

7

Children
of the Night

On November 25, 1996, the bludgeoned bodies of forty-nine-year-old Richard Wendorf and his wife, Ruth, age fifty-four, were discovered in their rural home in East Eustis, Florida. Police officials arriving on the scene speculated that intruders must have entered the home through an attached garage, and after stumbling upon Mr. Wendorf dozing on the couch, beat him to death with a blunt object. Mrs. Wendorf, upon hearing the commotion, rushed to her husband's aid and was in turn killed with the same murder weapon. Panicking, the intruders then fled, taking the couple's credit cards and their 1994 Ford Explorer.

Yet despite the obvious
modus operandi
of the murderers, two key facts lent the crime a sinister aspect: the first was a cryptic letter
V
burned onto the chest of Mr. Wendorf with a cigarette, and the second was that the Wendorf's teenage daughter Heather was missing.

Four days later and over six hundred miles across the country, five disheveled teenagers, including Heather Wendorf, were apprehended in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, driving the Wendorfs' stolen Explorer. The arrest made headlines across the nation, and not for obvious reasons such as the youth of the offenders or the heinousness of their crime, but for the startling claim they made to authorities that they were a clan of modern vampires. During the investigation that followed, sixteen-year-old Rod Ferrell, the self-proclaimed leader of the “clan,” claimed that he was a five-hundred-year-old vampire with no soul, who preferred to be known by his vampire name “Vasego.” While he initially blamed the murders on a rival vampire group, he soon changed his story and confessed to beating the Wendorfs to death with a crowbar he found in their garage. Following the murder, he and another clan member named Scott Anderson burned the
V
into Mr. Wendorf's chest as a sort of macabre calling card.

Days before the murders, the teenagers had left their homes in Murray, Kentucky, and drove to Eustis, Florida, at the behest of the Wendorf's daughter Heather, who planned to run away with the group to New Orleans. Heather had been friends with Ferrell years before, when he lived in Eustis for a short time with his mother. After he moved to Murray, the two remained in touch, during which time, according to Ferrell, Heather constantly complained that her parents were abusive. When the teens arrived, Heather joined several of the female members at a nearby cemetery for a blood-drinking initiation ritual while Ferrell and Anderson went to her home to collect her things. Once there, Ferrell made up his mind to murder the Wendorfs in their home and leave his vampire mark on the body of Mr. Wendorf. Heather would later testify that she did not know of Ferrell's murderous intentions that night and that afterwards she was terrified to leave the group, fearing she would be their next victim.

On February 12, 1998, Ferrell pleaded guilty to the premeditated murders of Richard and Ruth Wendorf and was sentenced to death in the Florida state prison electric chair, making him the youngest inmate on death row until his sentence was later commuted to life without parole. Scott Anderson, his accomplice, was sentenced to life without parole, while the remaining teenagers received sentences of up to ten years. The only exception was Heather Wendorf, who was never charged in the case and who went on to cooperate with author Aphrodite Jones on her book,
The Embrace: A True Vampire Story
, about the sensational crime.

The Beginnings of a Movement

While stories of bloodthirsty teenage vampire clans roaming the countryside were few and far between in the 1990s, the “Vampire Cult Murders,” as they came to be called, did succeed in drawing attention to an underground movement taking shape in America and Europe of modern-day vampires. As with the vampire myth itself, the origins of the movement are shrouded in mystery, but some twentieth-century authors gave reports of its presence in London in the 1930s.

Elliott O'Donnell, an Irish writer, ghost hunter, and spiritualist, mentions one such group in his 1935 book
Strange Cults and Secret Societies of Modern London
, in which he describes witnessing a vampire gathering in the basement of an old building, the floors and walls of which the cult had painted blood red. During the ceremony, a group of women dressed in long red gowns with red fingernails filed in. After eating an unknown flower, which O'Donnell's host claimed was from the Balkans, the women fell into a deep trance. Hours later when they reemerged from their meditative states, each claimed that they had entered the bedrooms of the cult's enemies in their astral forms and drained their victims of blood.

Unfortunately, there is little proof that such nefarious groups existed at the time, and O'Donnell was a rather colorful character with a reputation for never letting a few pesky facts get in the way of a good story. But if nothing else, then such tales do show us that the idea of, or at least fear of, such groups prevailed. This was, after all, a few short years after the premiere of Tod Browning's 1931 movie
Dracula
. Blend that with a twist of new-age spiritualism, and it's no wonder Londoners were seeing vampires lurking in every dark alley.

The first legitimate stirrings of a vampire movement seemed not to have begun until the 1970s as an offshoot of the rising interest in neo-Paganism and the desire by many disillusioned with traditional religious structures to explore alternative forms of spiritualism. Though none of these groups saw themselves as vampires and would have abhorred the negative label, some did incorporate the use of human blood in their magical rituals and ceremonies, giving power and precedence to its consumption. For instance, one magical grimoire or book of spells claims that writing the name of an enemy in animal's blood on a piece of parchment and then burning it with a black candle will bring about the death, illness, or sorrow of the spell's target.

Interestingly enough, some love spells also depend on the use of blood to perform, and require the magician to prick the middle finger of his or her right hand and use it to write the name of the intended lovers on a plain white piece of paper in the form of a circle. Three additional circles are then formed around the names, and the paper is buried outside at exactly nine o'clock at night (González-Wippler, 164).

In addition to this popularization of alternative spiritual structures was a new and exciting wave of vampire fiction hitting the shelves, such as the works of Anne Rice, who cast her vampire protagonists in a more seductive and compelling light, making them more human than before. Latching on to the craze was a revival in vampire movies during the 1980s and 1990s that helped fuel the romantic appeal of the vampire myth. Now, vampire enthusiasts didn't just want to be scared by vampires—they wanted to be vampires. No longer as isolated by their interests, vampire enthusiasts began to form loose networks or groups around self-published newsletters and magazines devoted to vampirism and blood play, with names such as
Necropolis
,
VAMPS
, and
Crimson
.

Nightclubs started featuring vampire nights, and a new wave of vampire-styled musical groups burst onto the scene, creating a unique underground movement unlike anything seen before. Some groups were directly inspired by the works of Anne Rice, including the gothic industrial band Lestat, whose first release,
Theatre of the Vampires
, debuted in 1990. Many other groups caught the dark wave also and either featured band members who openly claimed to be vampires, like Vlad's Dark Theater, or whose lyrics resonated vampire-styled themes, such as Bauhaus, the Sisters of Mercy, Rob Zombie, and Type O Negative. Even some mainstream artists belted out vampire-inspired tunes, as with Sting's song “Moon over Bourbon Street,” about a vampire cruising the streets of New Orleans.

By the time the Internet rolled around, the community was ready to explode. Enthusiasm in vampirism soared to new heights as the age of information ushered in thousands of chat rooms and websites where vampires and those interested in them could meet, mingle, and exchange ideas. It also meant that to some degree the movement lost its underground edge to the voracious beast of consumerism. Amusingly, one indicator of its new status was the rise in vampire-themed weddings in Las Vegas. For the price of a few poker chips, a half-inebriated couple could stumble in off the Strip and be married by a guy with plastic fangs and a cheap vampire suit, all to the scratchy sounds of recorded organ music piped out of a loudspeaker.

Vampyres

When understanding the modern vampire movement, it is important to make the distinction that it draws very little from the creature's folkloric past, but rather relies on a reinvention of the myth to suit its own purposes—a thought that would make any eighteenth-century Eastern European peasant drop his pitchfork and torch in disbelief. Yet who could blame modern vampire enthusiasts? After all, no one wants to emulate a bloated, disease-ridden corpse stumbling about in the night covered in grave dirt and blood like some mindless zombie. In fact, when referring to themselves, many modern vampires prefer to spell the word
vampire
with a
y
, as
vampyre
, in order to separate themselves from the revenants of Eastern European tradition.

Outside of the obvious pop culture influences of film, television, and novels, two unique trends developed to help shape the image of the vampire in the twentieth century. The first can be found in the occult writings of earlier, nineteenth-century spiritualists who broadened the concept of the vampire from a primitive blood drinker to a being with an astral nature that fed off the energy of others. This in turn opened the door for those who wished to pursue a vampiric lifestyle but were far too squeamish to engage in the traditional blood play that qualified them as one of the new living undead. The second trend was the introduction of live action roleplaying games, or LARPs, onto the scene. As an offshoot of the popular Dungeons & Dragons roleplaying game, first published in 1974, LARPs took roleplaying to a new level, placing the gamer physically in the role of their character and requiring that they act out their responses in order to win the game.

In 1991 the LARP
Vampire: The Masquerade
by White Wolf Games was published, taking as its theme a world in which postmodern vampires interact with one another through various clans to which they owe allegiance. The result was twofold. First, it provided a venue by which those interested in a vampyre lifestyle could interact and play out their fantasies. The second result was altogether unexpected, in that the fantasy game began to inspire new traditions or ideals in the vampire mythology unlike anything seen before, proving that in some cases life does imitate art.

For instance, the game is based on a series of rules that govern the interaction of the players; taking their lead from the game, many modern vampires adopted an ethical system known as the
Black Veil 2.0
or “The 13 Rules of the Community.” As published in Michelle Belanger's book
The Psychic Vampire Codex
, these guidelines spell out how vampyres are to treat each other and members of mainstream society. Several of these rules emphasize that discretion should be exercised at all times—both when revealing one's self to the outside world and during blood play. Other rules state that donors should be treated with respect and never harmed either physically or emotionally, and that the utmost safety precautions should be used when drinking another's blood. Finally, each vampire community has its own rules and hierarchy, which must be respected by members of other communities (Belanger 2004, 265–68).

While some within the subculture have criticized the list as being too closely associated with the roleplaying game that spawned it, others claim it provides a systematic overview within the community, stressing qualities such as respect, safety, diversity, and responsibility.

Lifestyle Vampyres

Although the term
vampyre
in its modern sense is a catch-all phrase for a wide range of practices and beliefs, there are two important types that deserve further examination. The first is perhaps the most numerous, and participants in this group are known as
lifestyle vampyres
, because while they do not believe they are actual vampires, they are fascinated with everything associated with the topic. Many dress in dark or Victorian-style clothing, lighten their skin with makeup, or wear special contact lenses and prosthetic fangs. Some diehards even go as far as to sleep in a coffin at night to get the full effect.

While the majority do not consume human blood, some engage in the practice on occasion out of curiosity, as part of a group ritual, or as a form of eroticism. Lifestyle and other vampyres often claim that they live in two worlds or have two natures, consisting of a dayside and a nightside persona. During the day many hold regular jobs as teachers, construction workers, or doctors. At night, however, they don their vampire clothing, pop in their fangs, and mingle with others of their kind at vampyre clubs or other similarly themed establishments.

Real Vampyres

The second type of vampyre includes those who do not define themselves by their style of dress or may not even associate with other vampyres, but who believe that they must feed off the blood or energy of others in order to survive. Members of this group, whom we'll call
real vampyres
, see their vampirism as something inherent to their genetic makeup rather than a choice they make. While some resent their cravings and the social stigma it places on them, others have come to accept the need as a normal part of their lives. A few even believe that the act of feeding from another human gives them supernatural powers, including heightened awareness, night vision, premonitions, mind reading, and aura perception.