Vampires originated from something called a revenant in Eastern Europe. They had stories of what we would call zombies today where these revenants were basically reanimated corpses looking to feast on the living.
The creation of the modern vampire story as we know it started in the Romantic Age of poetry with the poet, Lord Byron being the inspiration.
1816 in English Literature, Lord Byron was a superstar of his time, much like our celebrities today. He was a playboy poet well lusted after, everyone wanted him at their parties, and everyone wanted to know him better. But one guy really hated him....John Polidori.
Polidori was a doctor at the time, but he was an aspiring poet and took the job with Byron to get his foot in the door. Unfortunately, Byron didn't think much of his writings and was constantly making fun of him.
One dark and stormy night (literally) at Lake Geneva in summer, Lord Byron, John Polidori, and Mary Shelley bet each other to write the scariest ghost story. Shelley wrote Frankenstein, and Polidori writes a story called, The Vampyre.
Polidori based his character completely on Byron. He was an aristocratic man who betrayed his friend and sucked the life out of young women. When word got around, everyone wanted to read it, because they thought it was a biography of Byron.
The most famous Vampire of all comes out in 1897. Bram Stoker writes his only best selling story "Dracula". Stoker was a writer and theatrical manager at the time.
The story was published during some great changes in Victorian England. People were afraid of the industrial revolution taking over and this story somewhat played into these fears.
Dracula is probably the most well known version of any vampire.
The rich aristocrat male who is mysterious and sexy, plus a little dangerous looking. He sleeps in a coffin, wears a black cape, and is pale in appearance. He finds lonely attractive young women to prey on and eventually sucks their blood until they're dead. He's a cold-blooded calculating killer and is never caught out in the sunlight or caught by authorities, though they may be suspicious of him.
More recently, people have been playing with this very successful formula to make up their own rules.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer is a character born to hunt and kill vampires. She falls in love with a sexy vampire who's been cursed by a gypsy to live as a tortured human soul; who can never experience true love or else he'll revert back to a mindless evil vampire. He currently has morality and is trying to do the right thing, but this is only because he's been cursed. He's still a vampire that needs blood and can't get caught in the light. He sleeps during the day and is definitely sexy and dangerous. My mom is in love with him, but I like the character Spike myself. Buffy provides a strong female role model for today's young girls, and the show was funny, scary, and entertaining to watch every week. They took what could've looked like pedophila (like Twilight) and made it acceptable and sexy. Twilight failed at this because they made a young actor look like a stoned creepy old man lusting after a young girl. Not sexy, not even close.
True Blood experiments with the idea that vampires are trying to integrate into society much like a shunned minority and have normal lives. Haven't watched this one so I can't elaborate.
Twilight has changed the vampire so much, he's/she's pretty much unrecognizable in my opinion. Take out the dangerous part, take out the sexy part, take out the sunlight rule and replace it with friendly vampires who want to date your daughter and oh yeah, their skin sparkles like diamonds in sunlight. How lame is that?! Sorry, I have some major beef with that whole phenomena, even though my friends and some family seem to eat it up. Can't wait until the movies are done coming out already!
The Vampire Diaries is apparently about a love triangle between 2 vampire brothers and a young human girl. There's a series right now on the CW network and a complete novel series written by a woman. It seems to be a lot like Twilight, so I don't know which one ripped off who, but they sound the same to me. I haven't watched the show or read the books so I don't know anymore than one who pulls up info on the internet for it.
Dark Shadows is a tv show from the good old days of the late 1960's. A family moves to a new town and lots of strange things happen there. They have all sorts of bad guys in this show, but I think the vampires stand out the most.
The Vampire Chronicles (Interview with a Vampire included) by Anne Rice is another version of the classic vampire story. I read the book, which, I thought, was incredibly boring. I watched the movie, which was an improvement on the book, but still pretty crappy. I didn't care or sympathize with any of the characters and the story is just too bland.
I am Legend is a novella from Richard Matheson. Many people might interpret the monsters to be zombies, but in the original story, the monsters can't come out into the light so night time is the most dangerous and they suck blood as well as eat flesh. I guess, depending on how you look at it, the monsters could be either one or a combo of the two. I personally like to think of them as vampires with zombie tendencies. One of my favorite scary tales of Mathesons.
Cirque Du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant was an ok movie, but this is based on a children's series of books too. A young boy loses his best friend to a gang of "bad" vampires, while he himself, becomes a member of the "good" vampires. Some of the ideas of the story are cute, but I wasn't too much into it.
Sesame Street's Count Von Count aka The Count. A CLASSIC icon of Dracula. Who hasn't seen him and loved him? I love the puppet bats on sticks that "fly" around him. They are sooooo cute!
I'd have to say the classic original Dracula is one that deserves a lot of respect. Without it, a lot of the other stories wouldn't exist. My personal favorites would be Buffy, and I am Legend (the book version).
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