Egyptian history tells of a vampire spirit who like the Lillith feasted on children's blood. The winged Ekimu was a Babalonian creature who hunted humans for eternity, according to the legend. The "Lamia," disguised as a beautiful woman, would stalk young Greek men to drink their blood, and the ancient Romans feared a bloodthirsty demon called a Strager.
By the fifteenth century the bubonic plague, also called the Black Death, spread profusely throughout Europe killing twenty-five percent of the population. The disease was called the Black Death because it left victims discolored with black-and-blue faces. Many villagers who were only in a comatose state were pronounced dead and buried alive. Their hands and faces became drenched in their own blood as they frantically attempted to claw their way out of their coffins. Unable to explain the plague, much less find a cure for it, villagers blamed the "undead," and in so doing, fuled the fire of the vampire myth.
In 1897, the Irish writer Bram Stoker molded perhaps the most notorious beast of all time from the real life facts of a fifteenth-century Romanian prince named Vladislavs Dracula. Dracula literally means "son of Dracule," and the word Dracule, also his father's name, means either "dragon" or "devil." Later, Vlad Dracula became "Vlad the Impaler" when he impaled twenty thousand Turkish prisoners on stakes in a field in the path of his advancing enemies, the Ottoman Turks. Stoker blended the nocturnal versatility of the fanged bat with Vlad Dracula's incessant thirst for his enemies' blood and added for the first time the undeniable magnet of human attention - sex - to nineteenth-century vampire stories. Neck-biting became synonymous with sexual intercourse. Stoker's Dracula inspired some two hundred films, and the fictitious "long-in-the-tooth" Don Juan of the undead propelled a host of real bloodsuckers through history and into our recent past and present.
