VAMPIRE EVOLUTION - Review

Vampire Evolution – From Myth to Modern Day, E.R. “Corvis Nocturnum” Vernor and L.E. Corruba, Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., Atglen, PA, 2015, 144 pp. $24.99.

Vampire Evolution is a beautiful black hardcover book with a red vampire bat emblazoned on the front. That certainly sets the mood for a great read.

      The forward is written by Rosemary Ellen Guiley, who is well known to vampire aficionados, and Vernor and Corruba thank well-known colleagues and friends who offered guidance and encouragement, including Michelle Belanger, Martin Riccardo, Katherine Ramsland, Merticus, and Guiley. 

      Vampires are predators, and predators must evolve in order to survive. The vampire, likewise, has evolved over time from reanimated corpse to modern day teen heartthrob blood sucker with stops in between as wraith dressed in tattered burial shroud and well-dressed Victorian aristocrat.

     Vernor and Corruba (hereafter called V & C) believe vampire lore began in Mesopotamia around 4000 BCE, where improperly buried people returned as Ekimmu, rotting corpses hunting and killing the living. V & C then explore vampire-like creatures alluded to in the Bible: Estrie and Aluga, as well as Lilith, Adam’s alleged first wife who has various forms. As a succubus, Lilith attacks men in their sleep. As Lamashtu, she harms childbearing women and small children. As V & C relate myths and legends of vampires across Europe, they cover methods of dispatching the creatures, which like the vampire, have evolved over time.

     The vampire was actually beneficial to the spread of Catholicism. V & C explain that, as the Church sought to convert pagans, “church leaders declared pagan practices as heretical and its ardent followers as witches and demons and began eliminating them, aided by the first witch-hunter’s manual, the Malleus Maleficarum.” The Witches’ Hammer, as it was known, “established Christianity as the sole religious power that could repel or kill the undead”; thus, vampires fear the crucifix and burn when splashed with holy water.

      With the Church involved, the vampire evolved. Italian priest Thomas Aquinas decided vampires could transform into animals, which might have inspired Bram Stoker to have Dracula shift into wolf, bat and mist.

      As Romanticism became popular at the end of the 18^th century, the vampire evolved into “a seductive, androgynous creature of power and beauty”. The vampire’s bite now had sexual overtones in fiction and poetry. Johann von Goethe, John Keats, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Charles Baudelair wrote about the seductive vampire. Byron not only wrote about the vampire, but inspired the cold-hearted aristocratic vampire in works by Lady Caroline Lamb and John Polidori.

       V & C trace the vampire’s evolution to fiction, poetry, and stage plays, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, originally titled The Un-Dead, revived some of the former traits of the vampire and became an inspiration that we see even today in film. The vampire evolved as authors such as Anne Rice and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro brought it into the 20^th century.

        V & C’s research is astounding, showing the vampire’s evolution through film and TV from Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu, the Hammer films of the 1950s, lesbian vampires and Blacula in the 1970s, the subtext of AIDS in the 1980s, TV’s Dark Shadows and Buffy the Vampire Slayer and on to the present with films like Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter.

     The evolution continued as fans began researching the vampire mythos. Some became sanguinarians, consuming blood. Vampire clubs opened and the advent of the internet connected vampire aficionados worldwide. 

       The vampire has indeed evolved, and V & C trace that evolution marvelously through fiction, film, role-playing and video games. For those wanting to know more about vampires, or find vampire fans of like-mind, V & C provide a list of real vampire websites.

        I was amazed at how much information was packed into this average-sized book. The artwork and photos add so much to the atmosphere of the book. It is a treasure for any fan of the vampire, no matter what form the creature takes.

- Leslie Hardy