'Unfortunately, a virus can’t account for the vampire’s fundamentally irrational qualities: the fear of sunlight, the missing reflection, that embarrassing garlic allergy.'

Given how difficult it is at dinner-parties to explain what science fiction (SF) actually means, I try not to create further confusion by writing in these columns about the fantasy or horror genres.

This week, however – for various reasons I won’t bore you with – I’ve been thinking about vampires.

Vampires are creatures of the irrational. This is part of what makes them frightening, but it also makes them a poor fit for SF.

Some stories force a marriage – Richard Matheson’s novel I Am Legend, recently filmed for the third time, makes vampirism merely a mutated virus.

Unfortunately, a virus can’t account for the vampire’s fundamentally irrational qualities: the fear of sunlight, the missing reflection, that embarrassing garlic allergy.

The best vampire stories take these bizarre quirks of folklore and think their implications through with fiendish thoroughness.

The vampires in the cult miniseries Ultraviolet don’t show up, not only in mirrors, but in any artificial detection medium, including CCTV, microphones and even weighing-scales.

Feeling Cross

As creatures of legend – in the form we know them best, the legends of European Christendom – vampires have been shaped by their Christian context.

The nosferatu themselves may terrify us, but their own fear of crosses, Bibles and holy water offers a paradoxical affirmation of God’s power. In this respect they’re little different from the demons of the mediaeval mystery plays.

This creates a constant tension in that seminal work of modern vampire lore, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

In Sunnydale vampires and demons abound and God is rarely mentioned, yet Christian paraphernalia form a primary defence for Buffy against her supernatural foes.

The film The Fearless Vampire Killers makes a joke of the issue, with Alfie Bass reacting to a crucifix by chuckling ‘Oy vey, have you got the wrong vampire.’

In works of SF vampirology, this is usually addressed – if at all – by invoking the subjective nature of religious faith. In the Doctor Who story The Curse of Fenric, set during World War II, a traumatised vicar finds his ailing faith and a Bible insufficient to ward off the leechlike Haemovores, yet a fervent Soviet revolutionary succeeds using his hammer-and-sickle badge.

(The Doctor’s own faith seems to be humanistic – he defends himself by muttering the names of his companions.)

Looking Grave

In late 20th- and early 21st-century culture, the vampire is a charismatic, seductive figure – a stereotype assisted by the compelling good looks of Christopher Lee and others.

Considered as a damned soul who has deliberately turned away from God, the vampire represents a fascinating, undreamed-of freedom.

This view of the vampire – milked for melodrama in the film Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and for androgynous, lace-frilled misery in Interview with the Vampire – dates back to the nineteenth-century Gothic novel, and is probably all Lord Byron’s fault. At its root, the vampire legend plays on a much more basic terror.

Originally a vampire was a corpse, returned to near-mindless life and preying desperately on the living. This visceral fear is summed up much more succinctly in modern film by the horrific yet pathetic image of the zombie.

These vampires live on after death, but not in the eternal life of the soul promised by Christianity. Instead, the body is all there is, and bodily death – grave-clothes, decomposition, inextricable mingling with the soil – is all the dead have to look forward to.

The vampire is an image of damnation, true, but in a world where there is no salvation to turn away from – a world of the purely material, without souls, salvation or Christ.

This is perhaps what makes the vampire such a compelling, and such a lasting, figure of terror.

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