Exploring the Versatility and Allure of Horror Stories Featuring Vampires

You’d think that it’d be quite easy to define what a vampire is, and yet, over the centuries of folklore and more modern entertainment installments, what it means to be a vampire is clearly quite vague.  Sometimes presented as terrifying, other times they're shown in a somewhat romantic light.

Regardless of the way the vampire is depicted, be it as a bat-like human or an eternally beautiful being, they never fail to draw in audiences. They are known entities for as much as they are incredibly varied these days, coming with the promise of supernatural power and monstrous behavior that forces humans into tricky situations and moral conundrums. Across all mediums, vampires are as varied as they are intriguing.

Modern Media Fluctuations in Vampire Depictions

In just about every section of entertainment media, stark contrasts in the depiction of vampires can be seen. This is even seen in the case of the less story-driven zone of online casino gaming. Among the hit slot games available, you can see the angle of the beauty in immortality and perpetual love affairs in Immortal Romance Mega Moolah’s character stories and game modes, as well as the secret society of vampires in Vampire: The Masquerade Las Vegas.

The game, keeping with Vampire: The Masquerade, shows how this setting is also popular in video gaming. Having the chance to enter the society of vampires and bend the human world to your will offers a potent gameplay experience, and one that has fans clamoring for Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines 2. On the flip side, there’s Code Vein: an anime-style souls-like game where you create a distinctly vampire-like character, known as a Revenant to fight other monsters.

For film and television, vampires are mainstays. This year will see the return of one of the most notorious vampires ever imagined. Robert Eggers, of The Witch and The Lighthouse, will release his faithful homage to the classic genre at the end of December, putting Nosferatu back on the cinematic map. You can contrast this eerie, creepy form of a vampire with the vampire romanticism movement of the previous years, spearheaded by programs like True Blood on television.

Vampire Stories of the Real World

In creating his pre-eminent work of vampire fiction, Bram Stoker drew inspiration from the Romanian leader Vlad Drăculea. Vlad the Impaler, as he’s better known, was both just and cruel, being a hero of his people fighting off the ever-growing Ottoman Empire while also known for his brutality.

While perhaps unable to transform into bats or being without long incisors, Vlad Drăculea was frightening and alluring enough to form the basis of what we now know as the quintessential classic vampire. Tracking back to before the 1897 novel captured the imagination of the public, there were plenty of supposed 'vampire' incidents. In the 1720s, there was a Serbian soldier who returned to his home in Medveđa claiming to have been bitten by a vampire. For a long time after he died, people would allegedly see him around the village. According to National Geographic, skeletons have been found in Eastern Europe with their teeth removed and iron rods hammered through their chests.

Beyond that, two full centuries after the Salem witch trials, the case of Mercy Brown terrified the townspeople of Exeter, Rhode Island. After the 19-year-old girl died of tuberculosis, neighbors were concerned that either she or her dead mother or sister were supernaturally causing the sickness in her brother, Edwin. When they exhumed Mercy’s body, they found blood in her mouth and heart, which they took to confirm their suspicions.

Across the horror genre, and even beyond, vampires have proven to be superbly versatile creatures, spawned from folklore and injected into stories for centuries, and will likely continue to grace our imaginations for centuries to come.

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