‘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.
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