Veins of Curiosity: How a Conversation Sparked a Lifelong Fascination

 

People often ask me how I got interested in vampires.

It started with a conversation, one of many I’ve had with my daughter over the years. We talk about everything: mythology, cultural customs, literary themes, and folklore from around the world. One afternoon, we found ourselves wondering aloud: Where did vampire stories come from? What made blood-drinking creatures so persistent across cultures?

I didn’t dive into research right away. The idea lingered in the background for about a year, until a professor encouraged me to apply for a research grant from the university. That grant led to a peer-reviewed article exploring how vampires evolved from monstrous figures into tragic, romantic ones. That’s when the obsession truly took hold. The more I studied, the more I realized that vampires weren’t just horror staples, they were cultural reflections of fear, power, morality, and desire.

Roots Deeper Than the Grave: Vampires Before Dracula

Bram Stoker didn’t invent the vampire; he merely gave it a Victorian wardrobe.

Long before Dracula emerged from his crypt, blood-drinking beings haunted the mythologies of Slavic villages, Chinese graveyards, and Mediterranean folklore. The upir, strigoi, and jiangshi were not smooth-talking aristocrats; they were bloated, reanimated corpses with rotting flesh and ruddy skin. They were ordinary people who returned from the grave—sometimes family members, sometimes suspected sinners—accused of continuing their corruption beyond death.

And not all of them were called “vampires.” But if they fed on blood or life force, if they blurred the boundary between the living and the dead, they belong to the vampire family tree. It’s a diverse and grotesque lineage, one that existed long before fangs became fashionable.

Fear Made Flesh: How Stories of Vampires Take Root

One theme that appears consistently across vampire folklore is fear. Fear of death. Fear of disease. Fear of difference. Fear of the inexplicable.

In both my peer-reviewed article and my undergraduate capstone, I focused on the transformation of the vampire over time, particularly how changing social anxieties influenced their portrayal. While I didn’t extensively explore the Church’s role in early writings, I did examine how fear of outsiders, of rebellion, of moral decay shaped the way these creatures were imagined. The monstrous Other became a convenient scapegoat for everything society couldn’t explain or tolerate.

And that’s something I plan to explore in greater depth in future writings: how institutions, especially religious ones, fanned the flames of fear, creating monsters from the margins.

What we fear, we mythologize. And what we mythologize, we often try to destroy.

Unearthed and Understood: When My Work Was Cited Abroad

(Formerly: A Citation from the Shadows)

One of the most surreal moments in my journey occurred the day I discovered that my article had been cited in Russian. It was included in a scholarly paper and featured on a website dedicated to vampire folklore.

That validation was deeply meaningful. It reminded me that even niche research, fueled by curiosity and passion, can echo across borders. And yet, despite that, I still get asked one of the strangest questions of all: “So... do you believe in vampires?”

It makes me laugh every time.

Fact and Fiction: Separating Dracula from the Dead

One of the most persistent myths I come across is the claim that Dracula was based on Vlad the Impaler. The truth? Stoker borrowed the name and a few vague historical references, but there is no meaningful connection between Vlad III and the fictional Count Dracula. There is even less connection between Vlad and the ancient vampire myths that existed centuries earlier.

Stoker’s vampire was shaped more by Gothic literature, Victorian fears, and popular fascination with the exotic East than by any Romanian warlord. Still, popular culture clings to the Vlad legend because it’s dramatic, not because it’s accurate.

Likewise, Hollywood has warped our view of vampires into something almost unrecognizable. We’ve turned them into romantic antiheroes, tragic lovers, or glittering immortals. These stories have value too, but they often overshadow the darker, more culturally revealing versions that came before.

What survives in folklore isn’t just horror, it’s history, translated through myth.

Why Vampires Still Matter

We return to vampires again and again because they are more than monsters. They’re mirrors.

They reflect the fears that lurk just beneath the surface of a culture, whether that’s fear of disease, foreignness, sexuality, or death itself. They absorb our anxieties and give them shape. And in doing so, they teach us something essential about who we are and who we fear becoming.

Their stories remind us that the scariest monsters aren’t the ones that hide in shadows, but the ones we create when fear overpowers reason.

– Mary McFadden
Creator of Fanged Fables
and Vampire scholar (a.k.a. vampirologist)

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