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The Vampire Will Return

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Christopher Posey
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15 views4 pages

The Vampire Will Return

Uploaded by

Christopher Posey
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Christopher Posey

Editing Essentials

Dr. Deaver

April 16, 2014

The Vampire Will Return

With zombies taking over the limelight some vampire fans are hearing a lot of talk about

the end of the vampire craze, as if the current media enthrallment with the flesh-eating undead

is ringing a death knell for their blood-drinking cousins. This is simply not so.

When vampires stepped out of the folklore and into the popular interest they broached

the thresholds of mortals in the form of poems and stories. If one were to look closely at the list

of works, especially those that are noted for the immense popularity, one will find that a

pattern of sorts exists. There is a rise and fall in the interest of vampires. Each of these periods

cycle through a twenty year window, increasing in fame and public interest and then declining

to a nearly dormant state before rising up again as if from the satin-lined coffins of some

remote section of a fog-ridden graveyard.

The first stories that come to light in the search of vampires pop up around the 1750s.

This is largely due to the “vampire mania” that swept through eastern Europe some twenty

years prior. The folklore of vampirism got a booster during this period as villagers from all over

the region began reporting vampires haunting their hamlets and killing their populations. It got

so bad that eventually rulers, like the Hapsburg King, sent envoys to the areas to investigate.

Medical personnel, military officers and various officials descended on small towns from France

to Poland and in many of the cases found sufficient evidence to proclaim the deaths and
mischief to be the work of vampires. Bodies were exhumed, stakes were driven, fires were

burned, and the vampirism was defeated. Alexander Calmut, a Benedictine monk in France

wrote his dissertation on the subject. The list of cases is broad and far-reaching.

After two decades, the idea of vampires was suitably settled in the imaginations of the

populous, and stories and poems appeared. The list of works is too numerous to list all at once,

but special works work well to illustrate the cycle. In the 1770s, the famous narrative poem

Lenore stirs life into the revenant, followed by The Bride of Corinth in the 1790s. The nineteenth

century would see Byron, Shelley, and Polidori resurrecting the vampire in fashionable tales

that excited the reading world, in and around the early 20s. Varney the Vampire arrived in the

late 1840s, and it was in the late 70s that Camilla showed up. But what is more several French

authors were taking to vampire works during the intervening years. At the end of the

granddaddy of all vampire stories bared his fangs. Count Dracula launched a phenomena. The

1900s brought the advent of film and radio, and eventually television. But books and stories,

even comics kept the vampire alive. In the 20’s stories were everywhere, on stage and in the

theater, the 40s saw comics take up the charge, and by the 60’s everyone identified Christopher

Lee with the immortal count as he starred in half a dozen movies. With the AIDS scare of the

1980s, those blood-damned monsters rose up again, in books like The Vampire Chronicles by

Anne Rice, and movies like Lost Boys and Near Dark. The twenty-first century saw another

rising, and also a waning, as all those past periods had. But as we near the 2020’s media has

collected more and more blood drinkers to its legion.

This cycle continues to spin, and during the off years the vampire is less likely to be

noticed, as other creatures of nightmare and folklore find popularity. The ghost and the
werewolf have often made attempts to hold sway over the imagination, so it is of no surprise

that the zombie would attempt to bite off his fair share of the enrapt audience. But whomever

is in popularity now, the vampire will return, he always does.


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