In 2014, an archeological team in Sozopol, Bulgaria unearthed a skeleton in a stone tomb held down with an iron sickle, each one of the teeth from his open jaw pried out. Similar remains have been found decapitated, their cackling skulls now placed between their bony legs, looking upwards through absent eyes at the scholars who uncover them.
“Ways to protect against the return of the dead include cutting off the heads or legs, placing the deceased face down to bite into the ground, burning them, and smashing them with a stone,” explained archaeologist Dariusz Polinski of Nicholas Copernicus University, describing a different excavation to The Daily Mail in 2022. The Bulgarians called such beings Nachzehrer, but the undead are most iconically remembered as vampires, as cannibalistic revenants returning to feed upon the living.
The Sozopol find isn’t the only so-called “vampire corpse” from the Middle Ages to be discovered in this city by the Black Sea, or even the only one from Bulgaria. Several other supposed vampires, dating from the thirteenth through the nineteenth centuries, have been found throughout Sozopol and Bulgaria, and they’re not uncommon in Romania, Hungary, or the Balkans. Examples include a padlocked child entombed in Poland and a Venetian woman with a brick placed in her mouth. In 2023, roadworkers expanding a highway in northeast Poland uncovered a mass grave of Vjesci, as the local language calls them, containing around 450 decapitated women, men, and children dating back around four centuries.
The vampire is as iconic a monster as has existed, yet to look upon these piles of twisted bones is to remember their origins, for long before the revenant was a literary creation of Irish novelist Bram Stoker, it was something else, something less familiar. Something alien, strange, bestial, and feral.
To fear a vampire is to rightly fear the past, to see in the revenant the return of that which is buried and better left dead.Eastern Europe has always had the richest tradition surrounding fears of the undead, whether the Greek vrykolakas, the Polish upiory, or the Romanian pricolici and strigoi (there are differences amongst all these types). Variations abound—some legends accumulate all of the expected vampiric accoutrements, from the aversion to garlic and mirrors, to the allergy concerning sunlight and the stake through the heart.
James Frazer, in his 1890 anthropological classic The Golden Bough, notes that “in very obstinate cases of vampirism it is recommended to cut off the head and replace it in the coffin with the mouth filled with garlic” or maybe to rather “Extract the heart and burn it, strewing the ashes over the grave.” What all versions of these folktales share, however, is a sheer sense of the vampire’s otherness, its alien and inhuman alterity. Also crucial to remember that the vampire was never merely a motif, trope, metaphor, or symbol—the vampire was believed to be real.
For example, there’s one Jure Grando, a Croatian stonemason and rumored warlock who rose from the dead and terrorized his former neighbors until his corpse could be decapitated in 1672. Then there is Peter Blagojevic, a Serbian vampire who returned from the grave to murder nine villagers before his remains could be staked in 1725, that event being witnessed by a Hapsburg envoy from the distant, cosmopolitan capital. Or the incident of Miloš Čečar, from the same Balkan hamlet as Blagojevic, a retired soldier and farmer attacked by a vampire and cursed to return as the same.
Before any of those middling cases there was the fifteenth-century Wallachian tyrant Vlad “The Impaler” Tepes, he of the “Order of the Dragon” and son of Prince Dracule, Stoker’s inspiration for his 1897 Dracula. Sadistic, cruel, Machiavellian, and sociopathic, for as a Hungarian papal legate reported after a massacre that took 40,000 lives in 1464, Vlad was partial to “breaking…[victims] under the wheels of carts; others…were skinned alive up to their entrails; others places upon stakes, or roasted on red-hot coals placed under them,” and of course, others were “punctured with stakes.” An especially notable adept at cruelty in an age marked by the likes of Cesar Borgia and Ivan the Terrible, Vlad’s infamy includes tales of him nailing turbans to the heads of Ottoman diplomats and impaling a squeamish boyar above his compatriots so he wouldn’t be bothered by the stench, but ironically there were no accounts of Tepes being a vampire until Stoker’s fiction, though stories of him casually dipping bread into blood as if it were olive oil has the vampiric about it.
The vampire as it’s developed over the past century of popular culture, from Dracula onward, is different from the folkloric eastern European creature—a gloaming animal of the night, subaltern to humanity—though elements have obviously been preserved. Stoker’s titular count is arguably as super-human as he is monstrous. “I am Dracula; and I bid you welcome,” the Transylvanian count tells Jonathan Harker, the English solicitor organizing the sale of London real estate to the undead aristocrat. “Come in, the night air is chill, and you must need to eat and rest.” Where the skeletons in that Bulgarian basement were of people understood (fairly or not) by their neighbors as feral, rabid, and wild, Dracula is urbane and sophisticated, cosmopolitan and sexy.
Endlessly beguiling, evocative, intoxicating, and charismatic, Dracula is the rare monster whom somebody would actually want to imitate, actually want to be. Nobody desires to be Frankenstein’s monster, hobbled together from putrid, stinking cadaver sections, or a mummy wrapped in bandages, whereas Dracula remains a gothic touchstone for a reason. A blood drinker, for sure, but that’s in service of his eternal youth, an amoral selfishness based in Romantic ideas of art and beauty. Stoker’s vampire is less Vjesci than Miltonic Lucifer, less Nachzehrer than he is a Byronic Hero.
The original, folkloric vampire still endures, however, invited into our homes (as they must be). David Slade’s 2007 adaptation of the comic books 30 Days of Night in which shrieking, bloodied and empurpled vampires speaking in a guttural tongue descend upon an Alaskan town during the winter solstice to feed unhampered by sunlight—Mike Flanagan’s 2021 Netflix series Midnight Mass, a powerful meditation on faith that features a silent, demonic vampire—even the creatures in Joss Whedon’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer that ran from 1997 until 2003. The most enduring of such representations remains, of course, Count Orlok in German expressionist filmmaker F.W. Murnau’s silent 1922 Nosferatu, still the greatest horror movie ever made (and, to much excitement, remade this year by Robert Eggers).
An irony in claiming that Nosferatu preserved the substance of the original vampire in a manner that Dracula didn’t, as the former is based on the narrative of the later, to the point that Murnau’s character is only named “Orlok” because Stoker’s widow wouldn’t allow the (then copywritten) name to be used. Regardless of the plot, however, Orlok is a different beast from how Dracula would come to be depicted; this vampire—as played with chilling efficacy by Max Schrek—is gaunt and angular, creeping and corpuscular. Murnau never lets you forget the score when it comes to the vampire’s vocation—“Blood is life! Blood is life!” reads a title card, the white words floating in their black void. Orlok’s sharpened teeth, bald pate, pointed ears, and those long fingers tapered with talons is filmed in shadow and darkness while being framed in long, disorienting perspective. In his creaking ascent to pierce the throat of a virginal innocent, Orlok recalls as much of the Bulgarian burial field as he does Bella Lugosi or Christopher Lee.
Stoker’s source material didn’t obscure the regional specificity of the vampire, even while he greatly amended the original, so that the Irish novelist’s revision of that folklore would be the most audacious reinvention of a monster until George Romero discovered (Caribbean) zombies. Still, “We are in Transylvania, and Transylvania is not England,” as Stoker’s Dracula says, “Our ways are not your ways, and there shall be to you many strange things.” Never should it be in doubt that in borrowing from eastern European folklore, Stoker saw fit to maintain the original setting of those legends for a specific purpose.
To a western European audience, eastern Europe was a backwards, superstitious and mysterious region, whether on the flat plain of the Hungarian Steppe covered in fescue grass or the gnarled, craggy Carpathian Mountains, in the sunflower fields of Ukraine or the primeval darkness of Białowieża Forest between Belarus and Poland. In Stoker’s imagination, eastern Europe is a dark land of haunting carriage rides through steep passes, of gypsy wagons and astringent slivovitz. “The phrase Eastern Europe is an outsider’s convenience,” writes Jacob Mikanowski in Goodbye, Eastern Europe: An Intimate History of a Divided Land, “a catchall to conceal a nest of stereotypes.” For Stoker’s readers, and all those in his stead, this tremendously complicated region—encompassing languages Slavic, Germanic, Romance, Finno-Ugric, and Turkic (among others) and worshipping in sects Orthodox, Catholic, Protestant, Jewish, Islamic, and pagan (among others)—was a cipher for primitivism, savagery, barbarism, superstition.
The vampire is the cold hand of our ancestors, forcing us to reckon with them when their most charitable act would be to remain dead.Though, maybe more charitably, when Stoker, who grew up in British-occupied Dublin, looked east he may have understood much of what it is to be from a peripheral, colonized land. In that reading, eastern Europe is a broad gloaming place between east and west, pressed between the imperial ambitions of Austrians, Ottomans, and Russians, where Dracula’s final feeding on a decadent West as he traipses through London has its own anti-colonial implications. If that interpretation appears a stretch, at least reflect on how variable the ideology of the vampire legend has been, useful to both the right and the left. With its uncomfortable resonances with the antisemitic blood libel myths, the vampire story was often been appropriated by fascists, though a communist like Karl Marx could also be positively gothic, as in Das Kapital where he describes his subject as “dead labor which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labor.”
The original vampire, I would venture was about something different entirely, for if there is any fear that the returning dead embody it’s a fear of the past, of history, of tradition. Return to those reports of vampirism detailed earlier, because the year when Grando was decapitated, Isaac Newton was at work on his Principia; as Blagojevic and Čečar were staked, a young Benjamin Franklin was at work in his brother’s print shop.
As Voltaire had noted, there was a certain irony that the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century, the veritable Age of Reason, would see the greatest proliferation of the vampire legend, but maybe that indicates that the legend’s endurance has as much to do with modernity as it does with mere superstition. To fear a vampire is to rightly fear the past, to see in the revenant the return of that which is buried and better left dead.
Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, in their 1975 biography of Vlad the Impaler, argue that “we all know deep down that Dracula represents… that which should have remained hidden but does not.” The vampire is the cold hand of our ancestors, forcing us to reckon with them when their most charitable act would be to remain dead. Nicolas Ceausescu, the Stalinist dictator of Romania, was beguiled by Vlad the Impaler, seeing in him a model strong man, and honoring him (among other ways) by affixing his mustachioed visage to a postal stamp. During the 1989 revolution that toppled him, Ceausescu attempted to escape to Snagov, where Dracula was supposedly buried, “evidently seeking solace and support” as McNally and Florescu drolly note. Arrested by the revolutionaries, Ceausescu and his wife would be tried and summarily executed three days before Christmas; lacking a stake, the partisans simply used bullets instead.
