Folklore vampires were bloated and ruddy; the pale, elegant version dates from 1819
Forget the gaunt aristocrat in a cape. The vampires Balkan villagers feared were swollen, dark-faced corpses in burial shrouds, often without fangs, blamed for deaths among their former neighbours. The suave version was invented by an English writer in 1819, decades before Bram Stoker made it famous.
Tales of blood-hungry spirits go back to Mesopotamia, ancient Greece and Rome, but the creature we call a vampire comes almost entirely from southeastern Europe in the early 18th century, when oral traditions there were written down. Austrian officials after 1718 noted Serbian and Oltenian villagers digging up bodies to kill supposed vampires, and English reports on panics such as a Serbian one in 1725 spread the story widely. That publicity introduced the word to Western Europe, first spelled Vampyre.
Folk descriptions were strikingly consistent. A suspect corpse looked bloated and purplish, with blood at the mouth and nose and its left eye often open, and people reported chewing sounds from graves. Hair and nails might seem to have grown. Many scholars link such beliefs to pre-industrial attempts to explain what decomposition does to a body. A 1982 proposal by the scientist David Dolphin tying vampire legends to the disease porphyria got heavy media coverage but has since been largely discredited.
Almost anything could turn the dead. In Slavic and Chinese tradition, a corpse jumped over by a cat or dog was at risk, and Russian lore blamed witches and rebels against the Orthodox Church. Families tried prevention: burying bodies face down, or leaving a scythe or sickle by the grave. In Greece, relatives set a wax cross and an inscribed shard of pottery on the corpse. Romanians spoke of the strigoi, Greeks of the vrykolakas, and Albanians of the shtriga.
The English word is almost universally traced back through Serbian or Bulgarian to Proto-Slavic, with a rival claim for a Turkic root meaning witch. Fiction then remade the monster. John Polidori's The Vampyre of 1819 created the charismatic type and was hugely influential. Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla followed in 1872, and Stoker's Dracula of 1897 became the model for the modern legend.
Source: Vampire
