A History of Vampires in Folklore and Art

From bloated corpse to brooding count - the true history of the creature that refuses to stay dead

A History of Vampires in Folklore and Art is a popular history in two parts:

Part One: The Folklore

The vampire of legend did not begin in Transylvania. It did not begin anywhere in particular, because it was not a single creature. It was an answer to a universal problem - death arriving in clusters, taking the young, moving through a village with something resembling intent, and leaving the living with no satisfactory explanation.

Across the ancient world, every culture developed its own myths. The Mesopotamians had Lamashtu. The Norse and Anglo-Saxon chroniclers recorded the draugr. The Chinese had the jiangshi. West Africa had the sasabonsam and obayifo. The peoples of the Philippines, the Caribbean, the Mediterranean, and the Americas each had their version of life-stealing monsters hard to keep in the ground.

Part One examines the historical records and folklore surrounding these myths and legends, and how they migrated from the ancient world to the new.

Part Two: The Art

The vampire emerges from the graveyards of ancient villages and enters popular culture via art and literature as a different creature. Writers and filmmakers sanitized these ancient beings, dressing them in suits and capes, giving them aristocratic manners and immortal weariness. They then put them to work as mirrors for whatever a given era feared or desired.

A History of Vampires in Folklore and Art is a full account of the most durable monster in the Western imagination - from village exhumations to the box office, from the corpse that would not stay dead to the creature that, across three centuries of popular culture, has refused to go out of style.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: Ovid Publishing Group
Published: 06/11/2026
ISBN: 9781972807187
Pages: 328
Weight: 0.97lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.69d