Getting Laid with Lamiae: The Origins of Sexy Vampires

I ran across a recent essay from The Brothers Krynn, which attempts to map common horror monsters onto the Seven Deadly Sins:

https://canadianculturecorner.substack.com/p/horror-monsters-and-vice

My interest, however, is not in the meat of the piece, but rather the opening paragraph:

It is an interesting fact that in recent decades, Vampires have become romanticized, quite why is a mystery. Likely it began with film where they were perceived to be sexy, when the truth is that they were never fully intended to be considered as such. In the greatest of Vampire tales, Dracula, the eponymous character is not presented in that light but rather as a monster.

The Brothers Krynn raise an interesting point – the phenomenon of the Sexy Vampire – but do not seriously attempt to explore its underlying rationale or origin. They dismiss it as a product of the cinema-age, and then move on. Well, today I am not moving on. Today I am looking at how popular culture has arrived at such an apparently counter-intuitive result – the sexualisation of walking corpses. And no, Bela Lugosi’s 1931 portrayal of Dracula aside, this romanticisation is not actually a product of the cinematic age, but rather something much, much older.

You see, what we consider the modern vampire is really a merging-together of two separate strains of story. The first is the blood-sucking revenant corpses from south-eastern Europe – a phenomenon that fascinated respectable mid-eighteenth century society, and led to Calmet’s famous 1751 compilation of vampire reports:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trait%C3%A9_sur_les_apparitions_des_esprits_et_sur_les_vampires_ou_les_revenans_de_Hongrie,_de_Moravie,_%26c.

Suffice to say, there is nothing remotely sexy about this variety of vampire (no more than the undead Draugr are in Norse sagas). To find the sexy component, one must instead venture back to the lamiae of Ancient Greece:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lamia

Here we aren’t dealing with the undead as such, but rather monstrous seductresses. Book IV section 25 of Philostratus’ Life of Apollonius (https://www.livius.org/sources/content/philostratus-life-of-apollonius/philostratus-life-of-apollonius-4.21-25/) gives an account of such a creature ensnaring one of Apollonius’ students, which she achieves via illusion – and all for the supposed blood of a nice young man:

But Apollonius insisted and would not let her off, and then she admitted that she was a vampire, and was fattening up Menippus with pleasures before devouring his body, for it was her habit to feed upon young and beautiful bodies, because their blood is pure and strong.

Delving around further in the material of Ancient Greece yields Phlegon of Tralles’ On Marvels. Here we have a story of a young woman rising from the grave to spend the night with another young man:

https://www.worldhistory.org/article/763/an-ancient-ghost-story-philinnion–machates/

This nocturnal visitor is not evil, nor is she ensnaring her victim for food – but she is most certainly undead, and not in the hideous rotting abomination sense. Between this and the Life of Apollonius, one can see a fair number of the elements that would later become part and parcel of the Sexy Vampire trope. The key would be to merge this story tradition with the corpse-tales of south-eastern Europe.

Fast forward to the mid-eighteenth century – the very time Calmet’s compilation of Walking Corpse Lore is causing such a stir – and one runs into Ossenfelder’s short 1748 poem, Der Vampir:

https://www.roleplaygateway.com/der-vampir-heinrich-august-ossenfelder-t105176.html

This is the first self-consciously fictional depiction of a vampire in the modern era. It is also erotically-charged, what with the kissing, the holding, the bodily fluids. Ossenfelder is not giving us a hideous revenant, but rather a nocturnal blood-drinking visitor from beyond the grave… who preys on an innocent maiden in her sleep. As such, The Brothers Krynn mistake Sexy Vampirism as a purely recent invention, when it has actually been present since modern writers began to tackle the topic. Also notable is that Ossenfelder’s vampire, unlike those from the old Greek sources, is male.

Later, one runs into a series of other Gothic and Romantic poems that tread upon similar ground:

And then one hits John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) – the vampire arrives in English prose. Lord Ruthven is a sexy, charismatic, blood-drinking aristocratic fiend, and, yes, is commonly considered to be Polidori having a go at Lord Byron. All the modern Sexy Vampiric tropes are now in place, albeit with the point that even the sexiest of vampires can only ever be villains or antagonists. Vampires as sympathetic protagonists is something that would have to wait until the 1970s and Anne Rice.

Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) takes the general ideas behind Christabel, and not only makes the vampirism explicit, but also adds much more overt lesbian themes. Why, yes, the lesbian vampire trope is older than Dracula – something that should again reinforce how sexualised these creatures were, well before the age of cinema.

And only then does one finally reach Stoker’s Dracula (1897). Stoker’s achievement was to tie all these previously-expressed ideas together, with an additional attempt to ground the vampire back in a south-eastern European setting – he is meshing Calmet’s Walking Corpse tradition with the Greeks-to-Polidori Sexy Seducer tradition. Stoker is also the one to tie all this vampire material in with Vlad the Impaler – though it is worth noting that the name Dracula (little dragon) merely appears as a footnote in Stoker’s source-material on Transylvania. Specifically, An Account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia, by William Wilkinson (1820).

But wait… surely Dracula the character is not the least sexy himself? The Brothers Krynn (correctly) see him first and foremost as a monster. Well, one might also note that Dracula has hairy palms, which in combination with the transfer-of-bodily-fluids would certainly imply something thematically. But Stoker most closely follows the pre-existing Sexy Vampire conventions with his female vampires – the beautiful brides in Dracula’s castle, and then later with Lucy. Seriously, the narrative spends much time and energy describing how attractive Lucy’s corpse is. One could definitely read Victorian sexual mores into this, and countless people have.

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So yeah. From this survey, one can definitely see that the romanticisation of vampires is not merely a product of recent decades, nor even of cinema – which, in fairness, is responsible for certain vampiric conventions, such as the Death By Sunlight thing. Rather, Sexy Vampires belong to a very old storytelling tradition indeed, at least insofar as one is making a connection between life-drinking, death, and sex. The problem, perhaps, is that (via Stoker’s influence) people generally consider the south-eastern European/Calmet version as the Traditional Vampire. It’s where the name vampire comes from, after all. True, but one really ought to see the revenant monster as merely one part of the puzzle, and remember that even when Calmet’s book was coming out, eighteenth century fiction still felt the need to express the vampire in noticeably romantic and erotic terms.

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