In the run-up to the Oscars on March 15, all eyes are on Ryan Coogler’s Sinners, nominated for a record-breaking 16 Academy Awards. The horror film, set in the early 1930s southern United States, follows twin brothers who return to their hometown, hoping to start over by opening a place for the African American community amid the pressures of Jim Crow–era life. As the opening night unfolds, the celebration reveals that the brothers and their community are being targeted by vampires. Alongside the monsters, the story highlights the social and racial violence of the period, suggesting that the supernatural horror mirrors very real historical fears.
That’s exactly what the vampire has been doing for years: the figure represents the concerns of any given society. This role is crucial to understanding why the vampire holds an undying place in pop culture.
Vampire-like figures have long existed in myth, folklore and religion. There were stories of blood-drinking demons in Mesopotamia; in ancient Greek and Roman myth the strix was a bird of ill omen associated with feeding on blood; Hindu mythology described the vetala, a spirit inhabiting corpses. Later, vampires appeared in Slavic and Balkan folklore, featuring many traits now familiar: reanimated corpses vulnerable to stakes, sunlight and garlic.
The first vampire in English literature appeared in John Polidori’s 1819 short story “The Vampyre,” embodied by the aristocratic Lord Ruthven. It was followed by Bram Stoker’s 1897 Dracula, which solidified the vampire’s place as a true Gothic-era monster.
The vampire craze reached new levels with film. Hundreds of movies have featured the bloodsucking count, making him, by some counts, the most-portrayed literary character in films after Sherlock Holmes. Reasons for this are manifold, from our obsession with immortality to a darker truth: vampires endure because they’re the monsters that look most like us. “They act most like us — they’re greedy and destructive,” says Sorcha Ni Fhlainn, a professor of film studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, who has focused on vampires in cinema and literature. “Although we know roughly what they look like, they’re always changing, depending on the story they’re serving and sometimes the national mood in which we find the film has been released.”
Werner Herzog’s 1979 Nosferatu is an example of film meditating on national mood. Its vampire, who moves to a rural village to buy real estate, reflects on postwar Germany and the horror of the Holocaust. In the current context of political and societal upheaval in the United States, it’s not difficult to see why vampire stories resonate again.
The 1970s were another vampire-heavy decade, coinciding with intense social upheaval: Watergate, constitutional crises and the rise of nationalist parties in Europe. Early in that decade Dracula was often played as an older man — representing elder businessmen and entrenched power — as in Dracula A.D. 1972. By the decade’s end a younger, sexier Dracula emerged, notably in Anne Rice’s 1976 Interview with the Vampire. The figure of the vampire became explicitly sexualized in film adaptations and series such as Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula and HBO’s True Blood.
In the post–Cold War period, vampires grew more introspective: seductive, fallible, keeping their true identities hidden while examining their societies. “Vampires tended to go inward and look at their society, their group — almost like a national context of reexamination of who we are, where we’re going,” Ni Fhlainn observes. Vampire stories allow exploration of power dynamics and inequality through symbolism and fantasy. “Sometimes we can’t approach things head on; we have to be a little bit oblique in order to actually talk about the serious stuff that happens in our world because it’s too heavy otherwise,” she says. “Vampires give us that lovely opportunity to unpack it all.”
Edited by: Elizabeth Grenier
