Are vampires possible?
Vampires are mythical beings that drink the blood of normal people to gain sustenance. It is this practice that has endeared them in popular culture because it has, in the case of a male sucking the blood of a female, intimated sexual overtones.
The charismatic nature of vampires is a product of a story published in 1819 by John Polidori appropriately called ‘The Vampires’ but the evil nature was made popular by Bram Stoker’s novel ‘Dracula’ in 1897. Of course this made the vampire persona a favorite theme of the horror genre, and spawned tons of novels, movies and TV shows.
The usual way that a vampire is created from a normal person is by the bite of a vampire, which transmits a vampire virus and causes death before conversion. The newly converted vampire must then suck blood to live and stay out of bright sunlight lest they become vaporized. There are all sorts of crazy beliefs about vampires. One is that they live forever unless someone drives a stake through their heart, usually while they are sleeping in a casket.
There are many ways to scare off a vampire, and they include garlic, a crucifix and, of course, bright light. Vampires are thought to be people who die and then come back to life and begin drinking the blood of the living. All of these ideas are part of medieval folklore, especially in the Slavic locales like Croatia, Bulgaria, and, of course, Transylvania. All of these weird attributes of vampires are related to their lack of a soul. They are essentially living corpses, but not like zombies. Superstitious people easily accept the idea of vampires. They are part of spiritualism, much like zombies are.
But, could such a thing be possible? The answer is maybe. The fact that vampire bats exist means that people could have evolved to be like them. The only problem I have with this is that vampire bats are endemic to South America, not Europe, but that still doesn’t preclude them from influencing humans. Who knows? Maybe there is a vampire virus that resides in vampire bats and it’s responsible for all of the mythology about vampires.
The person Dracula is based on Count Dracula, a real person by the name of Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia. He was a member of the House of Dracula, and he was instrumental in preserving Christianity in Eastern Europe in the fifteenth century. This was during the Ottoman conquest of the Balkans. Now, Vlad was not necessarily a vampire in the modern sense, but he had some very unusual traits. He liked to execute people by impaling them, and he did it to a lot of people. He had a reputation for cruelty. Bram Stoker promoted Vlad’s connection to vampirism by using the name Dracula.
Modern fiction pictures the vampire as a suave, charismatic villain. Think of the Adam’s Family. However, the Twilight movie series turned them into beautiful teens that seem to have blended into modern life. In my mind, this legitimizes the concept of vampirism. Vampires look and act like normal people, no longer wearing dark suits with capes and sleeping in coffins. In other words, they’re no longer villains. They have jobs, families and pay taxes. I say that we let them alone.
Thanks for reading.