Scott's Rockeby and Coleridge's Cristabel (1804), in 1819 with Polidori's novel "The Vampire: a Tale- , vampires resurrected another time from their grave, free to run-amok in the dreams of millions of horror readers and writers. .
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Vampires as an archetype.
"Begin by considering that the tale of horror, no matter how primitive, is allegorical by it's very nature: that is symbolic."" (S. King, Danse Macabre) This allegorical nature is multiplied by the versatile character of the vampire: the general spreading of the social and/or religious taboos on which is based his figure is only one factor of his "everlasting- success. In fact, for a novelist or a scenarist, vampires come equipped with a solid, well-know background, but so large and versatile to leave always new paths to explore. For example, let's take the Romantic vampire of Goethe and Byron, the gothic one, take Varney the Vampire and Dracula, the modern vampire of King and J. Steakley. They have common traits that makes them recognisable as vampires, but their are very different in many way: in King's Salem's Lot, vampires cannot sustain daylight, while Dracula can walk in the streets of London at noon. But the Count have to rest in a coffin: in Steakley's Vampires, they can rest almost everywhere.
But what is that makes the Vampire a big hit in mass culture?.
First of all vampires are a great symbol: they embody at the same time desirable qualities like beauty, strength, immortality and taboo-breaking traits like being undead and feeding on human blood. These are the two sides of the same coin: they are contradictory, and a mirror of human most primitive state. Vampires have a cathartic function: a part of ourselves needs sometimes, at least emotionally, to share destruction and violence, in order to "keep the beast inside-, to maintain control over our irrational feelings. The dark forces are unleashed only until Light, Law and Order close the Pandora's jar.
