The article “Archaeologists Suspect Vampire Burial; An Undead Primer”, written by Heather Pringle for National Geographic, describes and gives examples of several vampire burial sites both in the New World and the Old World. Gliwice, Poland is the first location the article describes; here archaeologists opened an ancient grave in a highway construction site that was suspected to belong to a vampire. The skeletal remains had been decapitated and the head rested upon their legs. This form of burial was an ancient Slavic burial practice for disposing of suspected vampires, believing that decapitated vampires would not be able to rise from their graves. In the 1990s, the University of British Columbia’s archeologist Hector Williams discovered an adult male whose …show more content…
His head and upper leg bones had been laid out in a skull and crossbones fashion. Physical anthropologists found that the man died of consumption, or modern day Tuberculosis. This would have caused those infected to grow pale, lose weight, and to waste away. These attributes are often linked to vampires and their victims. The researchers noted that “the vampire’s desire for food forces it to feed off living relatives, who suffer a similar ‘wasting away’” in an article in the American Journal of Physical Anthropology. The locals also seemed to have decapitated the suspect to avoid its vengeance from the grave. Many archaeologists who have studied these vampire burials believe that vampires arose from common misunderstandings about diseases (tuberculosis), and from a lack of knowledge about decomposition. The majority of 19th-century American and European people knew about the changes in the human body immediately following death, but they hardly saw what happened in the grave during the following weeks and months. For example, when the gastrointestinal tract begins to decay, it produces a dark fluid that could easily be mistaken for fresh blood during exhumation, creating the vision of
In a world with ghosts, monsters, demons, and ghouls, there is one being that resonates in everyone’s mind. The idea of these creatures can be found in almost every culture on the planet in one form or another. They prey on the weak and they feast on the blood of their victims. They are compared to a fox for being quick and cunning, but also rather seductive in their nature. With their unholy existence one can only describe them as almost demonic. So what is this horrid creature? Well it is none other than the vampire, a creature as old as time itself. Throughout history there have been many different variations of the vampire, each with their own unique abilities. But one cannot help but mention
Carmilla is an example of a woman who loves her food far too much. Carmilla is consumed entirely by her food, even sleeping in a coffin of blood: “The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed” (Le Fanu 102). There exists a unique relationship between the vampire and their victims. Food becomes defined in terms of victimhood, distinctly separated from humanity’s general consumption of meat. The need for human victims makes hunting synonymous with courtship, as intense emotional connections are established between the vampiress and her food. As seen in the intense relationship developed between Laura and Carmilla, the vampire is “prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons” (105). For Carmilla, cruelty and love are inseparable (33). The taking of the victims’ blood for sustenance is a highly sexualized exchange of fluids from one body to another. The act of consumption is transformed into an illicit carnal exchange between the hunter and the hunted.
1. Time: The role of time in Dracula is very important. Looking at life through each person’s eyes makes the whole ordeal seem more realistic. After Jonathan's last entry in Chapter 4, we are left wondering whether he made it out alive or not. The time suspense here draws us in wanting to know more and more. Time’s importance also has to do with occurrences of good versus evil. The evil things always happen at night in the dark, and night has always been represented as a dark, evil concept.
In both stories the vampires were searched for by the towns people who went to the cemetery looking for vampires by digging up graves. In The Peasant and the Corpse, the peasant told the towns people about the horrors of the vampire that almost killed two people which angered the towns people and began to search for the vampire in the cemetery. In Lastovo Testimonies, some people decided to take matters into their
The Romantic Era was a time when writers wrote with passion in relation to elements of writing such as the fantastic or supernatural, the improbable, the sentimental, and the horrifying. Edgar Allan Poe was one of the many writers who used elements such as these in his writings. Poe was famous for reflecting the dark aspects of his mind in a story, creating detailed imagery intriguing the reader. The fantastic and supernatural elements are expressed in The Premature Burial as impossible and in a sense, horrifying. The idea of people walking after their believed death is very extreme thinking in a world that seems normal.
His skin is pale, with slicked-back hair, lips blood red, and his pearly white teeth sharp; he’s Dracula, the original vampire. Bram Stoker’s famous novel Dracula, which was written in 1897, started the vampire craze that still lasts today. It has sparked numerous novels, movies, and songs across the world through the year, and its popularity is still growing. As times have changed, so have Dracula and his predecessors. Dracula is about Count Dracula meeting this human Jonathan Harker for business and Jonathan along with his friends learn that Count Dracula is a vampire. In the end Count Dracula is killed before he can reach the safety of Transylvania. Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula is the pinnacle of all modern concepts of vampires; however, the modern concepts of vampires are superior because of the traits of the vampire characters, the central idea of the storylines, and the historical context from which the vampires are based.
The concept of a dead person returning in his living physical form and feeding on the living is considered a vampire. The vampire is believed to also be capable of transmitting his vampirism to those he infect or bite. Kayton recognizes that though this belief has been found in early writings of the Babylonians, Semites, and Egyptians, the most famous vampire scare swept Europe in 1730. This vampire epidemic lasted approximately five years (305).
Night Of The Living Dead a film that was in my opinion the first of its kind. It didn’t have the biggest budget when they filmed it. Yet a film I would watch again and again. The 1968 original film is a classic I really enjoyed. It didn’t have the most famous actors and actresses or the greatest acting in that case. It didn’t even have great film quality, yet I was glued to the film from the first minute to the last. I saw it as a change of scenery from the films we see today, and if you’re someone who likes black and white films you’re going to love this one.
When the city of Los Angeles was a small city of a population of 28,285 the Angelus Rosedale Cemetery was founded as Rose Cemetery in 1884, making it 133 years old. In 1993, a funeral home called Angelus Funeral Home bought the cemetery and renamed it Angelus Rosedale Cemetery. The Rosedale was the first cemetery to service all races and religions. It was also the first to adopt the design scheme of lawn cemetery, along with trees this cemetery has many Mausoleums, and pyramid crypts. In 1887, the cemetery opened its first crematory making it the second crematory in the United States. The first cremation was on June 16, 1887 who was Mrs. Olive A. Bird the wife of an esteemed doctor. By 1913 the cemetery had performed over 2,000 cremations. In the beginning the cemetery was mostly used by LA mayors and other important or rich families but as time went by many different ethnicities and people of all social classes were buried here. Along with civilians this cemetery features a section dedicated to the fallen soldiers of the Civil War. The cemetery is 65 acres spreading through Washington to Venice and from Normandie to Walton Ave.
It has been found that the decomposition process is best divided into five stages: fresh stage, bloated stage, decay stage, post-decay stage, and remains. The fresh stage starts the moment the individual died and lasts until bloating can be observed. The bloated stage is usually within two to seven days after death. Putrefaction begins at this stage and the gases produced from bacteria cause...
Vampires have been a successful and popular form of superstition and entertainment for centuries. The vampire legend began in Eastern Europe, although many forms have existed in several cultures all over the world. Bram Stoker’s Dracula was the first
Hollywood in known for making literary adaptations, and such adaptations will exploit context. Movies bring literary properties to the public that otherwise would not bother to read them. However the "marriage" of literature and film holds their own separate qualities.
Throughout history, we have seen vampires come in every form and shape, which commonly comes through the medium of film or television. The traditional vampire is often ingrained into many Americans heads as a dark and bat-like figure with a lust for blood supplied through his innocent victims and large fangs, yet we constantly see movies that differ from this stereotype. The 1980 movie “The Shining” directed by Stanley Kubrick exemplifies a very modern and mutated image of the vampire in the form of psychosis while the 1931 movie “Dracula” displays the vampire in a more traditional sense, however, both films show the apparent influence of Slavic roots.
“The zombie frenzy is growing, and it has cast its shuffling shadow on nature, mathematics, biology, and survival. So what can these shambling monsters teach us?” (Seifert 62) Before one can talk about zombies, one must first understand what a zombie is. The Oxford English Dictionary is known to be the most comprehensive dictionary in existence, its definition for the word ‘zombie’ may not be up to date anymore. In the dictionary, it describes a zombie as one of the Vodou zombies from Africa and Haiti and not any of the un-dead creatures seen today. Informally, zombies nowadays are described as a very aggressive, reanimated human corpse that is driven by a biological sickness or infection (Mogk 5-6). The effects these informal zombies have on people are starting to show in recent generations from young children up to grown adults. Whether these changes are for the better or not remains to be unseen but to prevent these changes to worsen, the portrayal of zombies in media should be changed to positively affect current generations.
The descriptive word vampire came from the old tale name, Vlad Tempest, aka, Vlad the Impaler. He was known for impaling long wooden sticks in people through their abdomen. He was the 15th-century prince of Wallachia who lived during the time of the Ottoman. The logic with Vlad impaling people was that he would push the stick through the ground (with the bodies still on them) and put them up in front of his palace.