The year was 1976. Jimmy Carter was on his way to winning the presidential election. A new computer company, Apple, was founded. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, starring Jack Nicholson, won the Best Picture Oscar. America celebrated its bicentennial. The American Basketball Association and the National Basketball Association merged. Family Feud debuted on television.Literature-wise, a number of now-famous books were published: Alex Haley’s Roots, Richard Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well, and Mildred Taylor’s Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry. Most enduring of all, perhaps, was the inaugural work by a New Orleans-born creative writing instructor named Anne Rice: Interview With the Vampire. It spawned 12 sequels—together, they’re called The Vampire Chronicles—not to mention comic books, a television series, and the classic 1994 movie.
The novel wasn’t just popular; it changed vampire fiction. Rice was “the first to popularly suggest that vampires are cool,” portraying her monsters as tortured romantics, not mindless bloodsuckers. Without Rice’s oeuvre, there might have been no Lost Boys. No True Blood. No Twilight.
In honor of a half-century of Louis, Lestat, Armand, and their ilk, here is a collection of vampire-related resources from around the web.
Read the other articles in the Halloween Information Sources series:
AnneRice.com
The official website of the author of Interview With the Vampire has a lot to offer, with photographs of Rice and her family, information about causes she supported (Hurricane Katrina recovery, naturally, was a big one), Rice’s musings on the art of writing, and more. One quibble: Her bare-bones biography on the site leaves out a lot of details that are relevant to her writing, such as the death of her daughter, Michele, in 1972. (Rice tells the Independent, “I didn't know it at the time but [Interview] was all about my daughter, the loss of her and the need to go on living when faith is shattered. But the lights do come back on, no matter how dark it seems, and I’m sensitive now, more than ever, to the beauty of the world—and more resigned to living with cosmic uncertainty.”)
‘11 Facts About Anne Rice’s “Interview With the Vampire”’
Big-time Interview fans will love the trivia found on this site, including Rice’s influences (one was Dracula’s Daughter, a 1936 film), her interactions with her publisher and editor, and what main character Lestat’s name was supposed to be.
‘Famous Vampire Tales of the French Quarter’
Interview was set in New Orleans, which is where Rice was born and where she returned later in life. The city is world-renowned for its legends of hauntings, and it should come as no surprise that some of these stories center on vampires. This page pulls together some of that vampire lore, including the tale of Jacques St. Germain, a wealthy European gentleman who never seemed to age. This could be connected to the long-standing legend of the Count of St. Germain, which is a favorite of YouTube conspiracy theorists. (The Why Files channel has devoted two episodes to him, “The Legend of the Immortal: The Count of Saint Germain” and “The Man Who Saw Christ Still Walks Among Us: Immortal Count of St Germain Revisited.”)
The Vampire Encyclopedia
This 1993 reference work is available in full text on the Internet Archive. It contains more than 2,000 entries on vampire-related topics. Some of these—Dracula; hypnotism; Lugosi, Bela—are self-explanatory. Others are more fringe, such as Potsherd, “a piece of broken earthenware, used in parts of Europe as a means of preventing the return of the dead.” Some entries point to lists such as the one on methods for becoming a vampire, which includes doozies like being born with a red birthmark, eating sheep killed by a wolf, or “wind from the Russian Steppe blowing on the corpse.”
‘Vampire History’
What are vampires? Are they real? Who are some famous ones? This History Channel article offers an excellent précis of vampiriana, with links to more sources such as Scientific American’s “A Natural History of Vampires.” I was interested to read about Mercy Brown, the 19th-century Rhode Islander who “may rival Count Dracula as the most notorious vampire.” We need a Mercy Brown movie, stat!
‘The Poet, the Physician, and the Birth of the Modern Vampire’
Many literature lovers know the story of how Mary Shelley, née Godwin, wrote Frankenstein: as part of a “ghost story challenge” during the summer of 1816, which Mary spent at Lake Geneva with her husband Percy in the company of England’s most famous poet, Lord Byron. What these fans may not know is that another classic monster has his origins in that summer. Byron’s physician, John Polidori, was also present, and he wrote English literature’s first vampire tale, The Vampyre, which later influenced Bram Stoker’s Dracula. This article by Andrew McConnell Stott in the journal The Public Domain Review tells the fascinating story.
The Official Website for the Bram Stoker Estate
The creator of history’s most celebrated vampire was an Irish lawyer who lived from 1847 to 1912. He wrote many books and articles besides Dracula, most of which, unlike the Count, have led desultory afterlives. The Bram Stoker Estate is committed to keeping these works in the public consciousness. The site is rife with images of places Stoker lived and worked, as well as lists of resources for additional research. A similar site is BramStoker.org, which purports to offer all 10 Stoker novels in full text, as well as a number of his short stories and other writings. (For Stoker’s take on a 21st-century concern, see his 1908 essay “The Censorship of Fiction.”)
Count Dracula and Vlad the Impaler
Did Stoker really base Count Dracula on the 15th-century ruler Vlad III, also known as Vlad the Impaler or Vlad Dracula? Scholars have mixed opinions of this. Yet Vlad was a real person, and the stories about him are similar to aspects of the vampire who shares his name. This page from a Romanian tourism site delves into the details of Vlad, offering descriptions of places associated with him.
‘The 100 Best Vampire Movies of All Time’
Stoker’s novel Dracula was, as everyone knows, made into a 1931 film starring the Hungarian-American actor Bela Lugosi. But Lugosi was not the first on-screen vampire, and he wouldn’t be the last. This list from Paste magazine ranks, in descending order, the 100 best vampire movies ever, starting with 1973’s The Satanic Rites of Dracula. What is #1? (Hint: Lugosi wouldn’t be happy.)
The Bela Lugosi Blog
Bela Lugosi, of course, did more movies than Dracula. In fact, during his 50-year-plus career, he donned the black cape only one other time: for the 1948 slapstick Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. This blog is a fantastic resource for all things Bela, with high-quality scans of old photographs, articles, letters, and other artifacts. Best of all are the videos of Lugosi culled from YouTube, showcasing the man’s singular talent.
‘The Science Behind Vampires’
Are vampires real? It’s a question many have asked: I asked it earlier in this article, in fact, and I’m still awaiting an answer. This article by Bloodworks Northwest, a Seattle-based blood bank, discusses real-life medical conditions that, centuries ago, helped feed vampire myths. These conditions include rabies, tuberculosis, porphyria (symptoms include light sensitivity, hallucinations, and red—i.e., blood-colored—urine), and pellagra, whose sufferers may exhibit erythematous glossitis: “inflammation of the tongue that may make the mouth appear bloody.”
