While Gordon’s work in new religions is well known, readers may not be aware of his interest in vampire mythology and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Gordon has one of the largest private collections of Stoker’s book, and in multiple languages, he is frequently sought out by the media as an expert on this topic, and he is the author of The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead (3rd ed., Visible Ink Press, 2010).

Gordon has made some time in his very busy teaching and traveling schedule to answer a few questions on the vampire myth and its lasting appeal in popular culture.

TheoFantastique: Gordon, thank you for carving out some time for this interview. It is a pleasure to have someone with your background and expertise in the area answering a few questions on this topic. Let’s begin with some of your personal background as a foundation. How did a Methodist minister and a scholar of new religions develop an interest in vampires?

Gordon Melton: When I was a teenager, I discovered science fiction, which led me to horror (which I decided I liked more). From searching out horror novels, I found some vampires and they proved to be something I could really sink my teeth into. At about the same time (the 1960s), the Hammer movies were appearing in the theaters. By the 1970s, I had become a lifelong fan.

Along with the novels, I also picked up any nonfiction books I could find. These put before me a continuing question that has provided countless hours for speculation, usually at the end of the day when I am otherwise too tired to work—If vampires were real, what would they really look like? How would they survive, how would they deal with the problems of outliving everyone else? Is liking bad jokes a prerequisite to being a vampire?

TF: In what ways do you personally explore and enjoy vampires and Stoker’s classic book Dracula as a fan and as a scholar?

Melton: The push beyond my attention to vampires as a hobby to something more serious came in the early 1990s. A new wave of vampire literature (both fiction and non-fiction) began to appear after a low point in interest in vampires had occurred in the mid-1980s. As I was reading the many non-fiction books, I began to notice a large amount of baseless and plainly false statements being made about the whole field, much by popular writers and journalists, but some otherwise very good scholars seem to toss their academic skills out the window when they turned to Dracula or vampires.

By this time, I had established myself as an author of reference books, and in response to my publishers (Gale Research) about writing something outside the religion field, I suggested doing a reference book on vampires that would assemble all that we knew, and hopefully supersede all the shoddy material that was then appearing. To do that book, I had to take my hobby to a new level. I think I read the novel Dracula five or six times while writing what became The Vampire Book. In the middle of working on the book, I had a period of illness, and watched vampire movies to entertain myself while recovering. Over the previous two decades I had built a pretty good collection of vampire literature and still enjoy a good vampire novel in my rare bits of free time.

TF: I have to ask this for my critics who stumble across this blog: Do you see anything incompatible with being a Christian and enjoying the vampire myth as a hobby and object of academic study? Why is this not a problem for you?

Melton: I gave this question some thought some years ago, actually during my graduate school years, and came to the conclusion that there was no incompatibility. On one level, I see no difference in my own enjoyment of vampire novels, than that of my Christian friends who are into other forms of fiction (murder-crime, action-adventure, or science fiction-fantasy, realizing that any genre has its really good and really bad examples), or into coin, stamp, or gun collecting. Certainly, mine is like anyone’s hobby, if its effects you negatively–if it, for example, takes away from time for personal devotions or distorts your Christian walk–drop it, but otherwise it is just entertainment.

However, I think your are asking about the seemingly essential negative and even evil nature of the vampire. Some might suggest that being interested in the vampire is like being interested in Satan –just doesn’t seem to fit with Christian piety. Actually the vampire is not like that. Fascination with the vampire is much more analogous to our fascinations with violent weather, giant carnivors, or the extremes of human behavior. Each present something negative embodied in the midst of something powerful and beautiful. Scientists exploring tornados perform valuable service. But is equally intriguing as to why some of us watch every show the Discovery channel puts on about tornados.

At the same time, the vampire myth is one of the more important stories told by human societies over the last six millennia. Understanding its historical effect on the race and its contemporary popularity (there have been over 1,000 new vampire novels published in English since the beginning of the 21st century) is a significant intellectual endeavor that now entertains hundreds of scholars. Several years ago I attended a conference on Buffy the Vampire Slayer that attracted several hundred scholars from around the world to talk about the television series for three days. Buffy remains the single television show attracting scholarly comment (it having pushed aside Star Trek and The X Files).

Along the way, I have developed a lecture on “How Dracula made the Reformation possible.” When I first mention this lecture to colleagues, I usually get a smirk that provides an opening for me to explain the truth in the title. The real Dracula, a fourteenth-century Romanian ruler named Vlad Tepes, fought the invading Turks who, having taken Constantinople were pushing up the Danube into Europe. Dracula’s actions delayed that push for a generation. Thus it was that the Turks were threatening Vienna just as Luther was launching the Reformation. Had Vlad not been around, there is every reason to believe that the Turks would have been at Vienna decades before Luther thus taking away one of the distractions from the Holy Roman Emperor and the time Luther needed to consolidate his strength in Germany. So we Protestants owe Dracula—at least a small amoun
t.

TF: I know the history is large and varied, but can you briefly summarize some of the key highlights of the vampire myth in history, legend, and folklore that provides the foundation its contemporary Western expressions?

Melton: The vampire myth appears at the earliest level of our records of civilization, six-thousand years ago in North Africa. All the first vampires are women who became vampires after losing a child in childbirth. Among the varieties of this early vampire is the story of Lilith, Adam’s other wife in Jewish folklore. As vampires, they attack the healthy babies of other children. The second level, showing up soon afterwards, are the vampires with which we are most familiar—those who are revenants. They have died an unusual death and return from death as a vampire. That is, the origin of the vampire myth is to be found in peoples’ exploration of the problems that often accompany birth and death (from crib death to deaths out of season). In cultures where the average person never ventured more than seven miles from their birthplace, the vampire explained a lot about the irregularities of some villagers’ death. Still a third kind of vampire is the one who preys on young adults, often showing up in Eastern European folklore as a bogyman figure. There actually was a time when parents told their children, “Obey your elders or a vampire will take you away.”

The revenant vampire from Slavic society traveled to the West in the eighteenth century, occasioned by the pushing of the Ottomans back to present-day Turkey. The discovery of people acting upon their vampire beliefs startled the Austrians who occupied the lands the Turks abandoned. The accounts of Serbian vampires provided material for scholarly debates through the eighteenth century and then the Romantic writers discovered them early in the nineteenth century. Dumas, Byron, Shelly, and Keats were just a few of the popular poets/writers who seems to be drawn to the vampire figure. They remolded the vampire as one of those powerful figures that Westerners have come to love to hate.

The Romantic writers recreated the vampire into a character suitable for the stage, and since that time, it has proved an immensely malleable figure. A hundred years later, Dracula donned a tuxedo and moved with ease into the British drawing room. And as we have needed it, the vampire has continued to change.

TF: What types of mythic or archetypal images and symbols does the vampire touch on and appeal to in the human psyche?

Melton: The vampire represents one of the most interesting and fluctuating personifications of evil in human life. Of all of the classical monsters, the vampire is the only one that can live incognito among us. Once you see Frankenstein’s monster or Godzilla, there is not mistaking what you are seeing, but a vampire can get up close before revealing himself/herself. Thus, early on, the vampire became a symbol of evil that passes itself off as the good. Social commentators since Voltaire have used the vampire to talk about the evil establishment that we must rise up and fight.

For teenagers the vampire is a good symbol of the authority figures that make their life hell as they are trying to cope with simply growing up—authoritarian priest/ministers, teachers who no longer loves or cares about the students they instruct, pedophile fathers/uncles, bullies, etc. When times are good, we cheer the vampire hunter. When times are bad and we feel powerless, we like to see the vampire suck the blood out of some human who is worse than the vampire.

During the last generation, the vampire world has been dominated by what is termed the conflicted vampire—the vampire who retains enough humanity to understand that the blood thirst s/he experiences is wrong, but can do little to stop acting on it when it arises. The vampire thus becomes the perfect character to explore the dilemma of the addict, at a time addiction is as difficult problem that contemporary society faces. Theologically understood, this new vampire has become the symbol of the human dilemma, the person who knows to do good but whose will is bound by sin.

In my experience, some people are simply turned off by vampires. My daughter is a good example; she simply wants nothing to do with my interest in vampires. She does not like being scared. I can appreciate that. But many people do, especially in a safe situation like a movie theater. In ways I do not fully understand, dealing with the horror that is mere fantasy, assists people in not being so scared when facing off against the very real horrors that come at us growing up in the real world. I have also come to understand how the vampire is latched on to as a symbol of one’s alienation from society, or some aspect of it. I have come to believe that the initial appeal of the vampire to me had much to do with the fact that I grew up as a short nerdy kid with a somewhat negative self-image.

TF: What religious or spiritual elements are there?

Melton: There is endless material for theological reflection in vampire books and movies. If I could pull out one issue it would be the way that vampire literature over the years have reflected the on-going secularization of society. In Dracula (1893), Christianity forms an essential part of the backdrop. Vampires pull back from holy objects (the cross) and holy places (churches), yet no ministers or priests appear, even in the background. By the 1970s, vampires were challenging the continuing relevance of crosses, holy water, and church buildings. Increasingly, vampire characters find that sacred symbols or realities present no obstacle to their having their way in the world.

At his/her best, the contemporary vampire challenges us to recognize the secular nature of the world in which we live, we have created a world that is insensitive to spiritual realities. That world has its good aspects—it allows scientific endeavor, it provides a secular government that (at least in theory) mediates our religious differences, and it provides the greatest degree of human freedom. At the same time, in the secular world, we have perpetuated/allowed—the Holocaust, modern warfare, poverty, disease—which slip up on us as collateral damage to existence. Nineteenth century commentators looked on society and saw the good religious people who led it. They were vampires who could stand back, and while quietly sucking up society’s resources, assisted us in developing means to tolerate racism, torture (of others, of course), epidemics, children growing up without the basic necessities, pollution—the list seems endless.

TF: To what do you attribute the long-running popularity of vampires and Dracula?

Melton: The vampires have always had a symbolic function in society. In Eastern Europe, it explained unusual death and served to facilitate what today we know as the grief process. Over the centuries it has periodically mutated to serve a new generation’s needs. Today it has become a symbol of what the average person finds so elusive—fulfilling sexuality, social power, and any hope of personal immortality. That a heady trio of carrots to dangle in front of us.

TF: You touched on some of this earlier, but can you summarize some of the ways in which the vampire image has changed in the last fifty years in the West as depicted in film, television, and literature?

Melton: Prior to the 1960s, the vampire was universally a monstrous figure. In every novel, film or play in which it appeared, it was the bad guy. Then in the 1960s, the hero(ine) vampire was created. Vampirella was not a revenant, but an extraterrestrial who came from a planet where blood flowed like water. One trapped on earth, she developed a blood substitute (so she did not have to kill to eat), and set about assisting humanity like any good s
uper hero. Novelist Fred Saberhagen followed with a humorous treatment of Dracula in which the vampire explains how he was so misunderstood and should actually be thought of as the good guy in Bram Stoker’s novel. Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape remains one of the great reads in vampire literature. About the same time novelist Chelsea Quinn Yarbro introduced us to the vampire Saint Germain, the gentle scholar who had centuries to learn to appreciate the finer things of life.

Shortly after Vampirella appeared, television producer introduced us to the conflicted vampire (mentioned above). Barnabas Collins spent much of his career on the daytime soap Dark Shadows searching out ways to recover his humanity. The conflicted vampire would become the central focus of the Anne Rice novels, which dominated the field in the 1990s. The Rice novels set up the vampire theme that is so important a part of modern harlequin romances.

All of the modern trends found their place in the popular vampire television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The story centers on the superhero Buffy and her team of assistant slayer, but then introduces the range of vampires—the hero, the conflicted and the just plan evil. As the show explored the human dilemma, the evil vampires almost always had their human co-conspirators among the human elites.

TF: Can you briefly comment on vampire subcultures, particularly that which attaches a spiritual dimension to the figure of the vampire?

Melton: The largest element of the vampire subcultue is made up of people who simply like to read novels and watch movies. They are the ones who bought up the 8 million copies of Anne Rice’s books, and watch all of the vampire movies, even the bad ones. After all, the worse movie with a vampire is better than the best movie without one (he said with tongue in cheek). In the last few decades a much small groups have become so fascinated with the vampire (the vampire of western fiction, not the one of ancient folklore) and have adopted a lifestyle that tries to copy it. They dress in gothic wear, get a job on the night shift, and might even buy a coffin to sleep in. An even smaller number have claimed that they are real vampires and live as if.

The latest incarnation of these real vampires are called sanguinarians. A miniscule number of them actually drink blood. Their number is quite limited as most people (even those who like vampires) abhor the taste of blood and more importantly, cannot digest blood taken orally. If they drink any, they will simply regurgitate it. However, there are groups of people who consider themselves psychic vampires and believe that they live by taking the psychic energy of others. They have organized as a sanguinarian religion complete with a code of ethics. The sanguinarians are often sought out by the media and become the subject of the many shows on vampires that come out in October on cable television.

TF: One last question, Gordon. Some have said that the zombie is a more appropriate and popular monster for our times in the Western world. Of course the appeal of various monsters depends upon certain cultural and social circumstances, but would you agree with this assessment? If so, is it too soon to place a stake in the heart of the vampire as a symbol?

Melton: The zombie has certainly found an audience ever since Romero’s Dawn of the Dead—a really great movie. In the end, however, the zombie remains a one-dimensional monsters. The vampire has attained a set of human attributes and emotions that make it a far more interesting character capable of being introduced into a much broad range of human situations. Got zombie’s, got apocalypse—that is a good story, but is its pretty much the only story. The passing contemporary interest in the zombie is no threat to the vampire.

TF: Gordon, thank you once again for making some time and for sharing your passion and expertise in this fascinating area of popular culture and academic study.