Although almost every country in the world has some vampire element in its folklore, it still comes as a surprise to learn that Wales was once home to something called a Vampire Chair which bit anyone who sat in it. The Bulgarian vampire, however, is much easier to recognise, being possessed of only one nostril and given to emitting sparks at night. But if you should ever find yourself nostril to nostril with a vampire, there’s a lot to be said for hoping it hails from Germany.
As this handbook rather touchingly informs us, the German vampire clutches one of its thumbs while lying in its coffin. It can also be killed by the comparatively simple method of sticking an apple in its mouth. But perhaps it’s no wonder German vampires are a bit delicate; traditionally, their mothers are women who have ‘used horses’ collars to ease the pain of labour’. Yet another reason to opt for the epidural, I would have thought.
Ever since he was a child — a snarlingly disturbed child, one can safely conclude — Kevin Jackson wanted to be a vampire. Denied this modest ambition, he inched one rung up the evolutionary ladder and became a film critic instead. In Bite, he combines both obsessions, tracing the vampire from its earliest appearance and following its triumphant progress into movies.
After drifting around in a purposeless haze for several hundred years, vampires really caught the public imagination at the start of the 19th century. Here, with some measure of predictability, all roads lead back to Lord Byron. When Byron, Shelley, his fiancée Mary and their other house- guests wiled away rainy days trying to scare each other senseless in the summer of 1816, Byron came up with a fragment about a vampire. Expanded by his friend and doctor, John Polidori, it was published three years later. The book became a huge hit and spawned a host of imitators.
Then, in 1897, Bram Stoker published Dracula. This, as Jackson says, ‘is to vampires what The Origin of Species is to the theory of evolution.’ Hitherto, Stoker was best known for being the manager of Sir Henry Irving. Far from being supportive of his old friend, Irving was appalled by Dracula’s success. When Stoker staged a public reading of the book at the Lyceum Theatre in May 1897, Irving only hung around for a few minutes before uttering the single word, ‘Dreadful!’, and striding out.
Others, however, were more impressed. Various candidates were put forward as the inspiration for Count Dracula — among them Lord Tennyson and, even more bizarrely, Walt Whitman. In fact, Stoker doesn’t appear to have based Dracula on anyone, except possibly himself. But while the book’s gestation remains mysterious, its timing could not have been bettered — it arrived in America just as the film industry was starting to stir into life. The first vampire film appeared in 1913 and since then barely a year has gone by without some etiolated insomniac dutifully baring his fangs and swishing his cape at the moon.
Kevin Jackson has put his obsessions to excellent use. Bite is snappily written, erudite and extremely good fun to read. Personally, I could have done with more folklore and less of an exhaustive trawl through innumerable Dracula movies. If, however, you are one of those reprehensibly ignorant people who need reminding that Denis Waterman narrowly missed being eviscerated by a rampant Christopher Lee in The Scars of Dracula (1970), then this little book has your name spattered all over it.
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