Wapsi Square Forum

I'll just leave this here....

(slightly NSFWish)

Yup, sounds about right.

The original vampires, or werewolves for that matter, were not 'sexy'. That didn't really make an appearance until Bram Stoker came onto the scene. Before then, we had flicks like 'Nosferatu' in which the vampire was by no means attractive, and they went to great lengths to keep it from being that way.

The original werewolves were more an expression of bestial rage, and the idea probably came from someone afflicted by rabies (hence the biting spreads the affliction). It wasn't sexy, it was bloody and gruesome.

Both were 'terrors of the night', in the same vein as the Brother's Grimm tales (and read the originals some time, unlike the heavily sanitized versions Disney hijacked, they really lived up to the author's name!). They were reasons you 'don't go out at night'. They were in the horror genre.

Unfortunately, we all know what can sell a good book, and that is a good deal of titillation. So when starving horror writers needed to pay bills and looked up who were the most successful authors, and saw them to be the penny dreadful bodice rippers... hey presto, we've got a genre swap in the making.

From there, you had the two main categories of attractiveness: vampires were the suave and cultured high-class attraction, and the werewolves who were the more primal 'animal attraction' sort. The vamps were the 'bad boys' as in the ones who would simply use you and dump you, while the werewolves also fit into 'bad boys', but in a more 'greaser/biker gang goes out and does destructive things' kind of way.

What either sort has devolved into lately isn't even worth mentioning.

ShneekeyTheLost wrote:The original vampires, or werewolves for that matter, were not 'sexy'. That didn't really make an appearance until Bram Stoker came onto the scene. Before then, we had flicks like 'Nosferatu' in which the vampire was by no means attractive, and they went to great lengths to keep it from being that way.

Minor historical note: Bram Stoker's novel "Dracula" came first (1897). "Nosferatu" was made in 1922, and was found in court to be an unauthorized adaptation of "Dracula".

The "charming and sophisticated, aristocratic vampire" meme seems to date back as far as Polidori's "The Vampyre" in 1819.

You're correct that the original vampire folk legends (on which all of the above were based) were gruesome. The undead were often fearsome mass murderers. When vampires and revenants were portrayed as sexual in any way, it was because they were sexually harassing or raping women (sometimes the widows of the [un]dead, in fact).

(Tim Powers wrote an interesting novel The Stress Of Her Regard which focuses on vampirism, poetry and prose, artistic muses, and so forth. It gave me a whole bunch of new things to look for when Gwen and I visited Venice some years ago.)