A Historian Explains Vampire Legends

With the new vampire movie in theaters, should you sleep with garlic and a crucifix?

Horror film fans will have a special Christmas. The third version of FW Murnau’s silent film ‘Nosferatu’ opened in Spain on December 25. Werner Herzog’s 1979 remake was excellent, and Doug Jones’ 2023 remake was weak but curious. Robert Eggers, author of ‘The Witch’ and ‘The Lighthouse’, preserves the expressionist classic with his meticulous history.

Like his previous films, Eggers’ vision is a feast for macabre culture fans: Eggers respects the vampire as a plague that ravages Europe like a shadow from hell and adds many references to the vampire myth. From unknown horror classics like ‘Svengali’ to countless versions of ‘Dracula’ (from Coppola to Hammer), through romanticism icons like Caspar David Friedrich’s paintings or historical references that reveal the vampire myth’s roots in European folklore.

Miguel de Lys, a historian and expert on supernatural deviations, explained Eggers’ vision. We had to ask him how the vampire, a monster from popular folklore, becomes a literary and cinematic icon, and what path he takes?

He says that this trek is “very interesting, because we imagine the vampire as a count in a castle, very elegant, but in reality the vampire is a social construct, like all mythology.” The vampire is made of “layers throughout history: in Ancient Greece there are figures related to beings that transform into birds and drink the blood of children.” From the Greeks is “the lamias, a figure who, as always, loses her children due to a lack of love with Zeus and out of revenge ends up feeding on the blood of others.” Around 7th century BC.

The historian says the Gilgamesh poem is the oldest literary work. But “The Greeks called it the Styx, and the Romans called it the Estrega or Estriga, a vampire-like creature. This being transforms into a bird, likely a bat, at night and feeds on children’s blood from buried bodies. Thus, it may have originated in fairy tales to scare children.”

This Estrega is most intriguing linguistically: “Estrega becomes Estrigoi: Ancient Rome reached Romania (which means ‘land of the Romans’), where ‘Estrigoi’ means ‘vampire’. Italian ‘Estrega’ means witch. In myths from the 5th century onward, vampires are not resurrected but black magicians.

The film sometimes depicts European folklore’s vampirism with morbid precision: “Archaeological remains have often been found of bodies buried with an iron bar stuck in the heart, with a sickle in the neck, or buried face down.” But what real events could make people think a corpse is a vampire? “It is known that graves were opened after a body had been buried, because there are records of this.”

The reasons? Many grave robbers. But once the coffins were opened, people found something surprising, even though science can explain it today: after death, certain unconscious body functions continue to be active, and a corpse can grow hair and nails, which the Romanian peasants of the time could not explain. After death, the body can hemorrhage and expel blood from the nose and mouth. They may have had epilepsy and been buried alive, finding the corpse moving in the coffin.”

What does Eggers’ new ‘Nosferatu’ take from this? De Lys says Eggers “loves history and detail. So his Nosferatu resembles the 15th-century Vlad Tepes, a man with a large moustache and a fur coat, of whom there are only two or three portraits. For these details, they examined 15th-century Romanian fashion.” He says, “Bram Stoker in ‘Dracula’ took advantage of Romanticism, when everyone was writing gothic horror, science fiction, and fantasy stories. He wanted to create a narrative that worked. However, this film is better planned.”

In Stoker’s Dracula, the Black Death cannot follow him, but in the three Nosferatu versions, rats do, and there are many of them. The first ‘Nosferatu’ was made four years after the First World War, during a terrible economic crisis, the Spanish flu epidemic, and famines, so they attempted to capture these fears on screen.” A realistic and historical approach makes this new vampire film spooky.

A Historian Explains Vampire Legends

By nr39r

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