Vampires Used to be Grotesque. Why did they Become Sexy?

Vampire romance is all the rage. Countless books, movies, a tv shows have been made where predatory, demonic monsters of the past are made into an erotic turn-on: Stephenie Meyer’s The Twilight Saga, Anne Rice’s Interview with a Vampire, L.J. Smith’s The Vampire Diaries are just some of the most well known in this ever-expanding genre.

To borrow a line attributed to Stalin, if only one book or movie like this had been made it would have been seen as tragic, scandalous, and insane. But hundreds of vampire romances have flooded the market, so it’s normal no one questions it or bats an eye lash.

Shocking as it may seem, vampires weren't always seen this way. People didn’t always want to hook up with and/or settle down and live happily ever after with the undead.

In the beginning, the first vampires of legend were far more like grotesque zombies than James Dean. The folklore of the vampire really began in the middle ages when people started believing in things called revenants. A revenant was essentially a human being who had died and come back from the dead to prey on family members and friends, perhaps out of vengeance, or simple malevolence. In South Eastern Europe, these revenants came to be known as vampires, and by the time of the enlightenment, vampire panics were in full swing across the continent, attracting the attention of rulers like the Empress Maria Theresa of Austria, as well as the fascination of scholars and intellectuals like the French philosopher Voltaire.

The question is, How did we get from zombie to teen romance heart-throb?

It all comes down to one man, and one night in the summer of 1816.

That man was George Gordon, Lord Byron.

Sources
Byron’s Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition
http://www.public.asu.edu/~cajsa/thevampyre1816/polidori_bio.htm
http://www.unicorngarden.com/vamp5.htm
https://archive.org/details/isbn_9780571167920/page/108/mode/2up
news.bbc.co.uk/local/nottingham/hi/people_and_places/history/newsid_8517000/8517132.stm

Gagool by Kevin MacLeod is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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