This time around, we’re going to talk about vampyrs. We’ll have a look at the folklore behind them, and I’ll even give you a little insight into vampyrs in my fiction. And yes, I am writing vampyrs specifically because that’s the spelling I’m going with. It’s my funeral pire, I guess.
I have one question to begin with – which vampire do you fancy most? Seriously! Do you like a sparkly, skinny Edward? An ethereally bonkers Drusilla? Exotically alluring Queen of the Damned? Nah, maybe the big eyebrows of Nosferatu really melt your heart?
Hey, I get it, throughout most of my youth the debate was over if Angel and Spike got into a wrestling match in jello, which would you let Sarah Michelle Gellar take to dinner after you were done with them both?
Good God, people, when did vampyrs get hot?
An Origin
The rain lashes down as the once-hard, solid ground begins to turn into thick sludge, shovel after shovel slamming into it. The men work hard in the cemetery, undoing the freshly interred earth to reach the prize beyond. They have to; the villagers demand it. Too many people have already gotten sick. Too many more are at risk of dying. And yet, death is not the worst thing they fear.
There it is, just shy of six feet. The thunk indicates they have reached the lid of the coffin. Continuing, though the cold bites their fingers, nibbling them into a kind of numbness, they work to prise their quarry free from the ground. Creaking wood, recently nailed down, is opened, and laid bare before them is their loved one.
The face is gaunt, the fingernails long, the hair still growing. Blood-red lips and a peaceful face. They look as if they could be sleeping rather than dead. With grim determination, the men know what they have found. They have found… a vampyr.
Now, I don’t know about you, but I do not find the prospect of spending a night in a cemetery particularly sexy. For one, it takes forever to get dirt from under your fingernails, even with a hot bath. And for another, having to then chop off a dead guy’s head, burn his heart and liver, and stuff garlic in his mouth hardly seems like a first date activity. A few years of marriage in, I might change my mind, but as long as there’s still Groupon, I doubt it.
But that’s what we’re talking about here, in terms of more common folklore. Perhaps the origin of the myths which eventually led to the book that blew vampyrs into the common consciousness in Bram Stoker’s immortal Dracula.
Of course, Bram had the great ol’ sense to make it a good story. And what was more of a good story to the Victorians than anything else? Why, flash me an ankle! He made Dracula sexy. Hot count from a foreign land, regal and in control. Seductive, slipping into young maidens’ bedrooms in the middle of the night and leaving them breathless. It could even be argued Dracula was the original sugar daddy, especially to the three Dracula babes he had in his castle. Or would that be ‘blood daddy’?
And then they had him played by Gerard Butler and well… no looking back.
Not the Only Vampyr!
The classic vampyr portrayal, rooted in what are very likely premature burials in Eastern Europe (and the reason some graves ended up with little bells on the gravestones), is a classic for a reason. It got the good press, but honestly isn’t even the best vampyr stories out there.
Revenant-like beings, returning from the dead in many cases, or sometimes simply existing as supernatural beings in their own right, are often focused on drinking blood. They have been around for thousands of years. Take Lilith, for example, the Babylonian demon who would consume the blood and life force of infants and women in ancient Mesopotamia. Bet she wouldn’t put that on her Tinder profile.
Some of the vamps have a lot of crossover with zombies instead. Vrykolakas of ancient Greece and Rome, the Strigoi of Eastern Europe, or even the Jiangshi of China are also variations on the theme of corpses returning to attack the living, primarily focusing on life force and blood. You definitely don’t see as many people romanticising zombies. Not none, unfortunately, just far less.
What about the Nukekubi? They’re just heads that detach at night and go flying around looking for blood. I mean, I’ve seen a few pretty faces before, but perhaps when they’re trailing organs and intestines behind them like the Penanggalan of Southeast Asia, it might, ironically, drain the blood from your face.
There are so many beings across so many cultures which are related to the process of drinking blood or draining the life force, that when we say ‘vampire’ in this day and age, we’re really narrowing down our options. And honestly, the story of vampyrs in modern-day times has become a little more Twilight than I think it deserves. But why?
It’s all about fear.
Why?
When our bodies are afraid, we, broadly speaking, activate our fight-or-flight system. Our sympathetic nervous system floods our bodies with adrenaline and a host of other hormones and neurotransmitters, triggering a remarkably predictable response. Our hearts thunder, our breathing rate quickens, and our eyes dilate. Butterflies in our stomach as digestion slows.
Sound familiar? Sound almost like… falling in love? Not surprising. Our body responds very much the same way to arousal as it does to fear. In fact, the word ‘arousal’ really links back to Middle English arousen – meaning ‘to awaken, stir to action’. Which is exactly what our body is saying when we encounter something dangerous. Wake up. Do something.
Is it any wonder then, if our bodies respond so similarly to danger and to attraction, that we’d confuse the two sometimes? That we are drawn to stories in which the mysterious stranger may or may not be something otherworldly? Of course, but it also means when we’re thinking about vampyr stories, we’re narrowing it down only to what we find attractive and missing out on so much weird, wonderful (and sometimes gross) folklore that demonstrates a much richer mythological tapestry than a brooding tween with control issues.
So, now you know where I’m coming from…
My Vampyrs
Vampyrs have just started to appear in my ongoing series, ‘til the End of the World, as some of you will know. They’re not going to be the whole focus – I mean Buffy had the term Vampire in the name, and we’re much broader than that – but they are going to feature. The key thing is, they’re not there to be sexy. Nor are they the only ones.
Vampyrs are an ecosystem. They’re a layer of the world we’re just beginning to explore. Some will be sexy, naturally; some characters always turn out that way. But some will be gross. Some will be incredibly evil; some may not always be. Some stalk in the dark as predators; some will prowl as scavengers. And some may even fly around as bodiless heads, as bizarre as it sounds.
I like the folklore; I like its breadth and depth. I think maybe we’re coming to the end of the vampyr love triangles – The Vampire Diaries managed to get eight years out of it, after all. Now we’re coming to the age of diversity, of variety. It’s exciting times, and I look forward to exploring it all with you in the future.
So if you want to read about vampyrs, not just for the simple titillation, but for the grim, dark reality, then maybe give ‘til the End of the World a go. Because it’s only going to get stranger from here…
‘til the End
Rick Rawes
Leeds, West Yorkshire
21st August 2026
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