Vampires and vampirism

The ancient legend of the vampire, which mainly derives from Slavic folklore, came to dominate the gothic imagination of the Victorians for its emphasis on cruelty, barbarity, and a faraway world of dark superstitions and supernatural terrors. In the works of Polidori, Le Fanu, and Stoker the threatening figure of the Nosferatu, a lethal aristocratic seducer, was seen as an agent of disorder, degeneration, and transgression. A metaphor for uncontrolled individualism, excess, and disruption of established middle-class values, vampirism was couched in ambivalent terms, becoming the instrument for the projective identification of aggressive drives. Far from being a pretext to weave terrifying tales, it provided instead a tool for the exploration of psychological, cultural, and political concerns, such as identity, sexuality, class anxieties, nationalism, and ethnicity, and especially object loss and fantasies of corporal preservation which the legend of the undead fully embodies.