We’re all familiar with a wide array of mythical monsters from movies, books and other media, but how much do these have in common with the folklore and stories that inspired these tall tales? This article aims to find out and to trace the evolution of these stories into the movie monsters we know today, looking at three of the most common and familiar creatures: vampires, zombies and werewolves.

Vampires

Vampires are one of the most popular and enduring monsters of film-land (to coin a phrase) but the suave aristocrats and wanton seducers of fiction have very little in common with the creatures that plagued the imaginations of ordinary people in previous centuries (and in some cases, even today). The word “vampire” originally comes from German and was first recorded in English in 1734, but that doesn’t mean that England didn’t have vampiric traditions beforehand. In fact, almost all cultures have traditions of blood sucking demons and revenants: Chinese folklore has the Chiang Sitch, a murderous spirit which takes over unburied corpses; Britian had a number of stories about wicked people revived from the dead; Central European tales tell of the sinister strigoi; ancient Greek stories hold that those left on the banks of the Styx unable to cross into the Underworld became vampires; while some cultures even believed in blood-drinking deities, like the ancient Egyptian Sekhmet, the Indian Kali, or the Babylonian Lilitu (later incorporated into Hebrew traditions as the demonic children of Lilith, Adam’s first wife before Eve). Appearance depends on the legend: some stink of rotting flesh, others turn into mists or animals, some are covered in hair, others have bright red hair, stranger stories involve vampires with two hearts, vampires that appear as disembodied heads or ones with barbed, black or hollow tongues.

Aside from divine vampires, most traditions held that the vampire was undead; a walking corpse. How a corpse became a vampire depends on the story: some were created from the graves of suicides or particularly evil individuals, some might appear if someone walked over their grave or a grave was moved or abandoned. Others vulnerable to vampirism include black magicians, the seventh son of a seventh son, unmarried people, anyone born with a caul, an illegitimate person, anyone born on a holiday… in short anyone born, living or dying in unusual circumstances could be suspected.

Image via Wikipedia

So with all these potential vampires around, there were plenty of opportunities for vampire hunters, priests and others to earn a few pennies getting rid of them. One such figure which appears commonly in European vampire legends is the dhampir, a half-vampire, half-human creature who could supposedly see things other humans could not and were often employed to despatch monsters; it seems that there were a lot of bogus dhampirs around! As with the legends themselves, there was a whole range of different methods of execution. We’re all familiar with the stake-through-the-heart (designed to pin the corpse to its coffin), crucifix and garlic stories, but cremation, mutilation (often cutting off the head), and even throwing seeds and knots into the coffin were just as common (the belief was that vampires were rather obsessive compulsive and would spend all night counting seeds, untying knots of searching for a missing sock). The idea of sunlight being fatal to the vampire is a modern one, first appearing in the 1922 film “Nosferatu”, even in Bram Stoker’s novel “Dracula” the eponymous vampire wanders around in daylight completely unaffected.

The destruction of a vampire in a 19th century engraving. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Studies of decomposition have shown that some of the features that vampire hunters would look for in a corpse were actually the result of normal decay. The apparent growth of hair and nails is caused by shrinking of the skin, blood around the mouth and bloating around the belly was the result of gases let off by rotting flesh while dead skin can flake away giving the body a surprisingly healthy appearance. So that explains the appearance of “vampiric” corpses, but what about nightly visitations? Well here we have an even creepier explanation. Aside from nightmares and imagination, there’s a surprisingly common phenomenon known as the “night hag”. A sleeping person partially wakes up, awake enough to be conscious of their surroundings, but their body is still under sleep paralysis. The result is the sensation that something is sitting on top of them and restricting their sleep, and scientists believe that this unnerving experience could be the source of legends such as the vampire and other sinister creatures like incubi.

A Nosferatu inspired illustration of a vampire. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

But there’s still more to the vampire legend. Aside from well documented cases of blood-drinking murderers like Giles de Rais and John Haig (oddly enough the two most famous Dracula inspirations, Vlad Tepes and Erzsabet Bathory, although brutal were never recorded actually drinking blood), and cases of supposed revenants such as Peter Plogojowitz and Arnold Paole, there are plenty of people who, for whatever reason, really do drink blood. For some it’s a strange compulsion, for others it’s a sexual fetish. Many occultists also believe in “psychic vampires”, individuals who can either accidentally or purposefully drain other people of energy just by being in the same room as them. Even today many people believe in immortal vampires, in the 1970s a huge crowd of people gathered outside Highgate Cemetery expecting to see the famed Highgate vampire emerge from its tomb while the phenomenally eccentric “vampire hunter” Sean Manchester exhumed and staked a corpse he believed to be the creature. These stories, along with the ever flourishing vampire fiction genre, ensure that this is one legend that’s not going to fade away anytime soon.

An atmospheric view across Highgate. Image from Wikimedia Commons

Zombies

The zombi (Anglicised to “zombie”) is a relatively new addition to the Wester-world’s supernatural pantheon. Thanks to the movies they’re often confused with walking corpses or even corpse-eating ghouls but the zombie of folklore is a different creature altogether. The word comes from the voudun (or voodoo) traditions of Haiti, Africa and the American Deep South (apparently brought over to America with slaves). A zombie is a creature revived from the dead by a voudun priest (in Haitian voodoo known as a “Hougan” if male and a “Mambo” if female) by magic to be used as a slave for the priest, and thus the word can be more accurately attached to stories of necromancy than to the standard “living dead”. So next time you sit don to watch a “living dead” flick, you can irritate all of your friends by informing them that actually they’re ghouls not zombies!

A sensationalist view of voudun practitioners from 1889. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Scarily enough, zombies are one of the few folkloric creatures that have been proved to be real: researchers in Haiti have interviewed individual “zombies” working for voudun practitioners. Of course, they’re not really reanimated corpses, though the reality is just as creepy. The priest poisons the individual with a tetrodotoxin (often taken from pufferfish) which leaves the victim in a coma resembling death. Once they’re buried, the priest digs up the coffin, performs a “spell” and “revives” the victim. When the comatose person awakes, lying in a coffin in a graveyard with a witchdoctor looming over them, they assume that they really are a zombie and d

uly takes on duties as the priest’s undead servant. We don’t know for sure how often this takes place or how many victims are unearthed at the wrong time having died from being buried alive, just don’t get on the wrong side of a voodoo Hougan!

An illustration showing a zombi. Image via Wikimedia Commons

Werewolves and other were-creatures

The word “werewolf” comes from Olde English and literally means “man-wolf” as does the French term “loup garou”; the term “lycanthrope”, from Greek, means exactly the same thing but in a different order (“wolf-man”). Like the vampire legend, stories of werewolves come largely from Europe, though the very earliest mentions come from ancient Greece and Rome. Ovid tells the story of Lycaon, a king turned into a wolf by Zeus, while Petronius includes the terrifying tale of an encounter with such a creature in his “Satyricon”, and Herodotus talks about a whole tribe turned into wolves in his “Histories”. But other cultures had their own were-creatures: were-jaguars and were-coyotes are a common feature of central American folklore; were-tigers and were-bears were feared in central Asia; Japan has a tradition of were-foxes or kitsune; New Zealand was supposedly the home of were-lizards; there’s even an old German tale of a were-hedgehog. The motif of the shape-shifting human is a common one the world over but what for some is a spiritual blessing, for others was a terrible curse.

A famous 18th century woodcut showing a werewolf attaking. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

Like vampires werewolves were frequently hunted in medieval Europe, but sadly unlike vampires the accused lycanthrope was usually still a living person. Werewolf trials were rather similar to more famous witch-hunts; suspects were often tortured, dismembered and killed. Unlike movie werewolves, folkloric lycanthropes didn’t need a silver bullet to kill them and could be executed by far more mundane methods. Many were completely innocent, attacked simply because they had a birth mark, eyebrows that meet in the middle or some other peculiar trait. Some showing lupine traits may have been suffering from congenital porphyria, which makes them sensitive to light and unusually hairy (a disease often also mentioned in modern assessments of vampire lore and surprisingly widespread in mainland Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries). These hunts were particularly common in Estonia, but fear of werewolves was so widespread that no light-hearted werewolf tales are known between the publication of the Satyricon in the first century AD until the 18th century. Stories such as that of the “Beast of Gevaudan” a lone wolf which killed over 60 people in three years prove how feared natural wolves were, supernatural ones were considered far worse, and there are countless cases particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Mass murderers and serial killers, such as Peter Stubbe of Bedburg, were said to be werewolves due to the savagery of their attacks.

The torture and execution of Peter Stubbe. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

But mass hysteria and persecution is only part of the story. In 1541 in Padua, a farmer attacked and killed several people. When captured he told the crowd of onlookers that he was a wolf but that unlike most wolves he had hair on the inside of his skin, not the outside. Believing him, bystanders cut off his arms and legs to try to find this fur. By the time they discovered that the man was wrong, he had already bled to death. This man shows one of the first known cases of clinical lycanthropy, that is, the pathological belief that a n individual is turning into a wolf. A more famous case from 1573 is that of Gilles Garnier of Lyons, who was caught gnawing on the bodies of three children, though officials were more appalled by the fact he was trying to eat meat on a Friday; this was a truly religious age! Quite why someone might convince themselves they are turning into an animal is a yet unknown, but it seems to be a relatively common psychosis, occurring both naturally and as a result of hallucinogens, especially LSD and ergot poisoning.

A werewolf attacks a child. Image via Wikimedia Commons.

The possibility of chemically induced lycanthropy is interesting as it could explain the belief that a person could turn themselves into a wolf by means of a sort of magic salve. Although modern movies would have us believe that lycanthropy is contagious, caught through a bite, folklore has no such tradition and most werewolves were believed to either have developed the condition naturally or induced it by means of black magic, linking it to witchcraft and Satanic worship. One thing that movies like “the Wolf Man” and “An American Werewolf in London” did get right however was the connection between lycanthropy and paganism; we’ve already seen how Gilles was condemned for eating (human) meat on a Friday and how magic was considered the origin of the curse, but equally conversion to Christianity was considered a cure and exorcisms were frequent occurrences at werewolf trials. So, although today we think of werewolves as similar to vampires, that is to say shape-shifting supernatural monsters, they were more connected to witches and demons in previous centuries.

A brief conclusion

So why do these monstrous creatures, originally so caught up in Christian mythology and very real fears of death, witchcraft and wild animals, still captivate us today? Of course we still fear death and the unknown, and the combination of a fear of pain and a desire for immortality makes them alluring. But to me, part of the appeal is that there really is an element of truth in these macabre legends: an element of truth that not only explains the origins of such legends but actually makes them all the more immediate and frightening. We may not be able at risk from immortal monsters, but real-life vampires, zombies and lycanthropes pose far more of a threat.

Further Reading

Want to find out more about these legends and the truth behind them? For paranormal legends, ghost-stories and grim tales of walking corpses, why not try the Encyclopedia of Ghosts by Daniel Cohen. For a look at the science behind such supernatural stories, Jane Goldman’s X-Files Book of the Unexplained volumes are a great light-hearted and readable foray into a range of such tales, from vampires to UFOs, from serial killers to possession. For more on vampires, my own favourite supernatural subject, Vampires: the Occult Truth by Konstantios is a fascinating combination of ancient legends, modern occultism and vampyr culture as the author discusses not only the folklore and his own occult experiences but also interviews a  number of real blood-drinkers. Or for a more tongue in cheek discourse, try The Vampire Watcher’s Handbook by “Constantine Gregory” which is not ony very fun but beautifully illustrated.