One of the most interesting and surprising things to hit our Google alerts lately is an article from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology of all places! They examine how the Twilight phenomenon has sparked debate over reinventing traditional myths about vampires.
The concept of the vampire has been around for centuries, and the Twilight series seems to incorporate very little of it. Fine, so Edward Cullen drinks blood, is sort of ancient, and has a mild allergy to sunlight, but then again, so does Ozzy Osbourne. Few would mistake Ozzy for a vampire, and much fewer would mistake him for the lead in a romance novel.
Read the full article over at The Tech website.
considering that most vampire lore is derived from the process of decomposing corpses i would say all vampire lore is a product of revamping (pun intended) air escaping from a corpse has to come out somewhere so the nose, mouth and anus are the usual suspects. so if a corpse suddenly moans its because the air is escaping from the mouth past the vocal cords. with the contraction of muscles as well as air trapped in the body some times corpses will move like sitting up. then there is all that bacteria living and eating the body which produce co2 which will bloat the body until it escapes.
when vampire myths first came out vampires were in fact fat, bloated and purple.. aka a decomposing corpse people would get it into their heads that the deceased was in fact a little strange in life or hung around a bad place that nobody dare go to before his/her death so they would beleive they had been converted to vampires dig up the body and find the bloated purple remians which when they punctured the body would release gas and make a noise as the body depresurised.
there is also the theory that those who suffered iron defficency would infact salavate at the smell of blood not just human blood but any blood due to its high iron content.
these poor souls would die of this deficency and because of their reaction to blood would then have their graves desicrated, stakes driven through their hearts, head removed or a brick shoved in their mouths…
the romantasism comes from a creature called a sukkubus which is infact a demon not a vampire but the two have had a cross over especially since bram stoker a sukkubus is a female demon where as an inkubus is the male equivilent.
so you see vampires originally were closer in apearence to zombies ugly purple things that moaned and wanted your blood…. doesnt Edward look sexier already
Good to know a little bit of vampire history. I say who cares! It’s fiction. It’s not like we are dealing with someting that has happened. I always say that if you are writting fiction, why not make your entire world up. So what if it can not happen, it’s about using our imagination. I mean when was the last time you saw someone flying on a broom.
yeah.. harry potter doesn’t exactly fit witch and wizard lore either.
Some people are a little uptight about the accuracy of vampire myths in Twilight…I mean they’re myths and its fiction. Why so serious, I mean vampires may be real or not but this is just a story. Its not like SMeyer is trying to make it out like fact.
haha.. a nerd boy that can’t get any action jealous of a fictional character. how sad.
um my problem with the article is this person is not familiar with the many many different incarnations of vampire fiction out there. Anne Rice vampires are a lot like Twilight ones. With the sun exception – which I thought was a clever twist on it. He just doesn’t realize not every vamp out there is Dracula. End of Story. Do your research, that’s all.
hahahaa i like that ozzy osbourne thing thats funny
What exactly IS the story of vampires, now? There are so many books and stories of vampires with different things. They all drink blood. Some can withstand sunlight, some are allergic to garlic. Some transform with just a bite. Some transform by giving their victim’s their blood. There’s many different ways to tell the story of the vampire. I’ve read several different books with vampires and each is unique in its own way. Who cares if the author decides to make their vampires sparkle? It makes that story unique. It’s a way to twist the ancient vampire legends.
why does it matter. it’s all fiction anyway, I say kudos to anyone who is creative enough to come up with a new version that captures the imagination. Stephenie certainly did that. personally before Twilight I was getting bored with the whole vampire thing.
I tend to agree with everyone here on this, as we are dealing with fictional characters, the vampire or werewolf can be anything they wish them to be. My only complaint with Steph though is that I wish she delved further into their mythology, as she did with her werewolves in Eclipse. I would have loved to know what function the sparkling was really used for. What causes their skin to sparkle, for example. If their flesh is smooth as polished marbel, then what is it that would cause the sun to reflect? Because if Edward’s skin sparkles like thousands of tiny diamonds, then technically speaking his flesh would be rough as sandpaper. Maybe I am over thinking it, but then again, I am a science/history/mythology nut, and my writings certainly reflect my tendency to go overboard with it.
As for the MIT article…
Wow… they may be mathematically inclined, but they really don’t know their vampire lore and really really don’t know their werewolf lore. Silver bullets, full moon transformations, being bitten… these are all contraptions created by hollywood, not original mythology. Allas I bet they don’t even know the story of the Beast of le Gevoudan, Beast of Cologne (the trial of Peter Stubbe)… I bet they never read the story of the Wolf and the Priest (Irish tale I believe), the Biscleveret… In fact, in all of my studies, a silver bullet appears only in the retelling of the Beast of Le Gevoudan. It is stated that a hunter had his crucifix melted down into a bullet, and killed the beast, by shooting the Loupe Garou in the heart. In reality nobody really knows if the guy ever killed the beast. It was widely believed that a wolf was killed and displayed just to satisify the worried peasants between the towns of Toulouse and Lyons… the are of the Gevoudan.
I believe I read somewhere that Stephenie stated that the reason they sparkle is because, as Stephenie states, “The Vampires are physically similar enough to their human origins to pass as humans under some circumstances (like cloudy days). There are many basic differences. They appear to have skin like ours, albeit very fair skin. The skin serves the same general purpose of protecting the body. However, the cells that make up their skin are not pliant like our cells, they are hard and reflective like crystal.”
“… which Edward Cullen violates in a manner both impossible for canon vampires and extremely illegal for everybody else.” LOL!
I think my favourite criticism of the Twilight series is that they’re not REAL vampires because they don’t die in sunlight/sleep in coffins/eat people/etc… I’m sure all this “incorrect” re-inventing of vampire lore is offensive to the culture of all those REAL vampires out there…
As was mentioned, it’s fiction, which means there are no bounds to the creative spin put on it by individual authors. I remember not believing my Vietnamese friend when he told me about a movie where vampires were defeated by putting stickers on them… but lo and behold, it’s out there (the MIT article mentions it.)
Thank you Danni for the information on early vampire lore. It’s interesting to see the evolution from the starting point to the MANY different routes the legend has taken today.
I agree with all the other comments. And I just wanted to add something, but it’s similar to what Nicolle already said…
There has never been a consistent version of the vampire in fiction. Never. And Bram Stoker’s Dracula came way too late, about a hundred years too late, to be the first piece of vampire fiction written in English. (And that’s just in English!) Earlier stories had vampires who could walk through walls like ghosts, or died and were reborn by the light of the moon. Every author of vampire fiction has changed and adapted the vampire myth to suit the individual needs of their story, whether they base it on traditional lore or not. Even Anne Rice had vampires who could eat animals, just like the Cullens do!
When someone singles out Stephenie Meyer for making her vampires different, I really have to question if they’ve done their research. (Or even read any vampire fiction.) No two fictional vampires are the same… Which is probably why vampire fiction is still so popular.