Vampires are fictional mythological creatures said to subsist by drinking the blood of their victims. The best known tale about vampires is Bram Stoker 1897 story, Dracula, which drew on earlier mythologies of werewolves.
Literary historian Brian Frost speculates that the belief in vampires and bloodsucking demons is as old as man himself, and may go back to prehistoric times, although historian Susan Sellers places the current vampire myth in the comparative safety of nightmare fantasy.
Numerous modern science fiction writers since the 1950s have also used vampires in their stories where they have been described as products of such things as bacteria, evolution, and extraterrestrials.
The vampire has existed in the folklore of almost all cultures, according to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy.
Vampire characters exist in the records of Chinese, and Pre-Colombian cultures. Older references to vampires appear in ancient Assyrian legends, Talmudic texts, and Greek and Roman stories. The first vampires in literature were German, and influenced English Romantic writers such as John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lord Byron, who used the vampire as a tragic romantic figure.
The major development of the adult, male, sexual vampire began with John Polidori The Vampyre in 1819, followed by a lesbian vampire in Joseph Sheridan Carmilla in 1871.
These earlier vampire stories influenced the writing of Bram Stoker best known vampire myth, Dracula, which has caught and dominated the popular imagination, writes historian Jules Zanger, first with the 1887 novel, then on stage, and in the early 20th century in Bela Lugosi's film version.
By the late 1990s there began the commercial proliferation of recent and newer varieties of vampire images, from popular novels to numerous films, television serials, and illustrated books for children with some studies showing damaging effects of such media on children psychological and moral development.
The new vampire, notes Zanger, is presented as a more communal and family oriented vampire, relating to or living with other vampires, such as those in the numerous Anne Rice novels. Today vampires can be good, even a benevolent protector of his human friends, reflecting an emotional reaction to fictional vampires and a change in cultural attitudes toward the outsider or alien other.
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