Neon’s A Doll A Day… Again (2020)
Thank you very much, everyone!


Day 333

ADAW ketchup, number yet to be determined. #45

The last monster I want to talk about is vampire.

[Image: 6e0062ccef49dac2e1b1a6633aa00eab.jpg]
(no detail photo, as the doodle lacks any detail that could be shown)

'...What? Didn't she say they were all going to be Slavic or specifically Czech not-your-typical-Halloween monsters?' you probably didn't ask but I'm gonna go ahead and assume you did.

You see, there are vampires everybody knows and then there are the old, and I like to call them real, vampires.

This post is more of a teaser, because I don't know even a fraction of what I'd consider enough to write a proper vampire post. I always knew there was a big difference between what I know from books and TV, and what vampires used to be, but when I delved deeper into the topic, I found out that my knowledge is painfully shallow. It is, however, a topic I'd like to revisit and report about it in greater detail, so this isn't the last you hear about them - the old, weird and often unrecognizable ones.

Suave and seductive, aristocratic vampires that populate various niches of literature and movie genres (and Oddwickshire) were fashioned after none other than Count Dracula, who wasn't the first of his kind, but was the one who gained the most popularity and influence and fathered the genus of literary vampires. The folk vampires, however, originated from Slavic* and also Baltic tribes and evidence of their existence (OK, evidence of people's beliefs involving vampires) stretches back deep into the prehistory, mostly in form of bodies buried in very specific ways.

*There are several reasons I'm proud I'm a Slav. Being the first ones to be scared out of our wits by vampires is close to, if not on, the very top of the list.

Vampires of the old took their time before they started resembling vampires as we know them today. At first, they were more like revenants, or zombies, they were walking corpses. They didn't even suck blood, and I'd love to write more about the evolution of vampire, but boy, would that be biting off more than I can... gulp...

For a very long time, they weren't pretty at all (they were obviously dead, their clothes torn and dirty), they (un)lived in their graves instead of fabulous mansions and gothic castles and they tortured people in many different ways (e.g. spreading diseases, although I'm not sure how, probably by using magic). The oldest concepts of what they were and how they came to be are, naturally, lost; but the oldest ones we know of don't really involve spreading vampirism through infectious bites, the dead turned into vampires because a cat, a dog or a wolf jumped over the lazy... sorry. Jumped over the body, sometimes on it. It was the same for early werewolves here, so they and vampires were kinda blended together for a while. Later, witch's curse became a popular reason to become a vampire.

I call these vampires real because of their power to prompt real people to do real things to other real people, no matter how much these lusus naturae themselves do not, scientifically speaking, exist. People were killing other people, including children, and disturbing graves and mutilating bodies because they firmly believed in and greatly feared vampires, adding more than a touch of realness to their existence.

When you look at Count Orlok from Nosferatu, you see something of old vampires in him, eventhough he was based on Dracula. He's still aristocratic and has stylish clothes and a properly grim gothic castle, but there's no way you'd mistake him for a human person. It might be why he's my favorite movie vampire.

And that's it for today, I have more learning to do when it comes to vampires, and I'll be back to report about my discoveries whenever I get to make them. Probably not the next year though. Next year I'll be trying to cure my zombification, as it gets in the way of my vampirism.
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RE: Neon’s A Doll A Day… Again (2020) - by neon_jellyfish - 11-29-2020, 01:03 AM

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