Vampires

It's Gothic Thursday again. Today's topic: Vampires. So my Gothic Fiction teacher got an expert on vampires to come in yesterday and talk to her classes. This expert was Dr. Micheal Bell. I had read a couple of interviews he had done so I was really excited for his presentation.

I think everyone, thanks to twilight (yuck, not necessarily a bad story, just really terrible writing.) has some kind of image of vampires in there head. I'm not interested in those kinds of vampires. I want the blood thirsty ones. I want the ones like Dracula. Those were, unfortunately, not the kind of vampires Dr. Bell discussed with us. He was more interested in talking about the ones that could be proven false with scientific facts. Not really a surprise but many people who were thought to actually be vampires just had, wait for it, tuberculosis. Kind of lame. So I'm not really interested in those "vampires" either.

What I was interested in was how people thought they could get rid of vampires. In the true story of Mercy Brown, a girl with, you guessed it, tuberculosis, died. Other people in her town started getting tuberculosis, so clearly that meant vampires. So they dug up her grave and she wasn't decomposed so, you know, clearly she was a vampire. So they took her heart out and burned it and then fed the ashes to her brother who was suffering from, well, do I really need to say what? Not surprisingly, he died.

It's just interesting to me how much the definition of vampire has changed. From something that doesn't even rise from the grave, to Bram Stoker's Dracula, to Twilight. Literature has changed vampires. Maybe not for the best. I personally would like to start seeing more vampire books about vampires that kill. I'm sick of the romanticizing that the creature receives. Lets leave the horror in the stories.