Getting it in the neck

‘What!’, railed Voltaire in his Dictionnaire Philosophique of 1764. ‘Is it in our 18th century that vampires still exist?’ Hadn’t his Enlightenment rationalism seen off such sub-religious voodoo? Well no, mon frère, it hadn’t. In fact, here we are, a quarter of a millennium on, and those vampires are still with us. Films, rock concerts, novels, TV shows, they’re full of fangs and dripping with blood. We’re suckers for those suckers — so much so that even academia is getting in on the act. As Nick Groom, an English professor at Exeter university says in his densely researched new book: ‘Vampires are good to think with.’

Well, there’s certainly a lot to be said about them. Symbols don’t come more labile. The earliest vampires, Groom tells us, were ‘reputed to have powers of shape-shifting’. The later ones shape-shifted like their producers’ lives depended on it. Take the Dracula of the Hammer Horror cycle.