The Witching Hour is upon us once again
With All Hallows Eve approaching, we invited our resident expert on ghouls and spirits and creatures that stalk dark cemeteries, Matthew Beresford, author of From Demons to Dracula: The Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth, to tell us what to beware of and how to stand guard against the blood thirsty phantoms of the night:
Very soon, strange and diabolical creatures shall arise once more. Along sidewalks and darkened streets Hell’s brood shall tramp their ghastly beat. Witches and warlocks, ghosts and ghouls, werewolves and vampires will stalk the night, visiting many of us as they come in search of, not blood as legend would have us believe, but candy! For on October 31st Halloween will be upon us once again, that age-old tradition where children don horror masks and costumes and venture out in search of treats. But although this celebration today is one of fun and good humour, and the creatures that haunt us on this particular night hold little fear over us, in the past it has been a different matter entirely. And of all the fantastical creatures evident at Halloween, none is more infamous than the caped and fanged harbinger of death, the vampire!
We are all familiar with the being made famous by Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula and brought to life on the big screen by Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee. But the history and the widespread belief in vampires can be traced back not some one hundred years to Victorian England with the birth of Count Dracula, but six thousand years into the Ancient World of Greece, Rome and Egypt. In From Demons to Dracula: the Creation of the Modern Vampire Myth I argue for a continuous evolutionary path for the vampire-being, from the very early demon and spirit forms such as the Empusas and the Lamia found within Classical Mythology and on through early ideas on death and burial in Prehistory, within the Anglo-Saxon and Viking Poems and Sagas, and through the revenants or Undead beings of Medieval Europe. These in turn aided the Vampire Epidemics that swept through much of Europe in the seventeenth century’s Age of Reason and Enlightenment and caused many learned thinkers, people such as Voltaire, Rousseau and Calmet, to join the great ’vampire debate’. The Gothic Literature of 19th century Victorian England then gave us such vampire classics as The Vampyre (1819) by John William Polidori (personal physician to the Romantic poet Lord Byron) and Carmilla (1872) by J. Sheridan Le Fanu, culminating with Stoker’s masterpiece Dracula.
But it was this final offering that changed the vampire’s image forever. Even those of us that are not familiar with Stoker’s novel will instantly draw up the same image at the very mention of the word “Dracula”. And all will describe him as being rather debonair, complete with cape and fangs, and having a penchant for virgin’s blood. He may sometimes be found fluttering around a graveyard at night in the shape of a bat, or perhaps prowling the shadows as a wolf, or even drifting towards us as an eerie fog, but nevertheless we all know the reason he comes, and it is not in search of candy. So this Halloween, if you see two glowing red eyes glinting at you mysteriously from the murky depths, just tell yourself it is merely a Jack O’ Lantern. For that’s all it is … surely?