You are in a graveyard, one of the spooky ones with headstones that tilt and an overgrown wrought iron fence. The air is sharp and there seems to be an endless stream of noises from no discernable direction. The ground is soft under your feet and if you stand in one place too long, water starts to flood your shoes. Maybe all that’s too much for you, maybe you’re a little frightened. I’m the writer so, no worries, I can totally change things up. It sounds like something is…scratching? Yeah, something is scraping against wood. You turn your head in every direction, leaning side to side, trying to figure out where it’s coming from. Then you stop. You stop because you know where it’s coming from. The scratching is in the ground. Off to your right, just a few feet away, the scratching sound is coming from underneath the grass. Better?
That whole thing was a little unnerving, but there’s something much bigger at play: tuberculosis. Stay with me. Tuberculosis has been with human beings from our conception, which is really sweet if you think about it. It’s a pathogen’s job to find a way to live within us without killing us and tuberculosis has done marvelously. People can live for decades while tuberculosis wreaks havoc on their internal world. Back in the day, it was commonly referred to as consumption. Those infected with the disease would slowly start to wither away, their eyes sinking in and their complexion blanching. It’s said that as we entered the 19th century, tuberculosis had caused the demise of one in every seven people who had ever lived.
And then, in 1897 Bram Stoker published his novel Dracula and vampires were officially in print. What a lot of people don’t know is that the conception of vampires is a direct effect of tuberculosis outbreaks across Europe. In the 19th century, our knowledge of how germs spread and multiplied was…limited. Tuberculosis spreads through droplets in the air and repeated exposure greatly increases the chance of infection. Thus, over the course of several years, entire families would drop dead because they took no precautions to protect themselves when others were ill. What’s scarier than a Poe-esque tale about a cemetery told by a college magazine writer? Your entire family dying, one by one, and being left behind to wonder if you’re next.
The most macabrely interesting part of all of this is why we started to believe that vampirism was the root cause of this all-consuming pathogenic evil. Though we didn’t know how germs spread, the general public began to make a connection between family members who died in quick succession. Instead of germs being passed from one person to the next, people started to theorize that the dead were rising from their graves and infecting the living. It gets worse. As a body starts to decay, the skin begins to recede and reveal more of the fingernails, which take much longer to decompose. When bodies were exhumed, under suspicion of coming out at night and biting people to curse them with an equally miserable existence, the fingernails seemed like they had grown since burial. So, many believed that the dead were living a secondary, immortal life full of blood-sucking and other nocturnal shenanigans.
In Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula is an overbearing figure who has the ability to lure in his victims. He has no visible reflection and feeds on the blood of the innocent. Though vampirism had been floating around popular culture, it was now cemented in literature with a few dramatic flairs. Since then, we’ve seen significant pop-culture additions to the vampiric lore including Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922) and its adaptations as well as the book and movie series, Twilight. Considering the broad spectrum of vampiric existences, sparkling in the sun and running around the woods with your friends is a pretty charmed life.
Vampires can be scary, sexy, or emotionally complex characters. Every piece of media created about vampires adds to their presence and influence in modern culture. Monsters have been used in books and movies for a long time and there are a multitude of theories explaining why. Historically, monsters helped people to externalize feelings of xenophobia or racism by creating a distinct ‘other’ that could be hated and looked down upon in a way that wasn’t morally challenging. However, vampires serve a very different purpose.
Vampires are not a distinct ‘other’. They are not separate from human beings; they are human beings. Death is the single most terrifying aspect of being a person, especially when it’s coming for those you are closest to. Philosophically, immortality is not an attractive option but a belief in its legitimacy could mean everything to a person who has lost a loved one. Immortality meant there was an explanation for why so many people were suffering. It meant believing that at night your brother might come crawling back to you. That he might curse you with the same sick fate he has faced, but you would be together and no one would be gone forever. The fact is that a permanent and sterile death is a much harder monster to face than one with fangs and a thirst for what pumps through your veins.
Gabe Hendershot is a second-year film, photography and visual arts major whos fav film is definitely NOT Twilight. They can be reached at [email protected].