Abstract
Since its beginnings in folklore the vampire has been connected to ideas around infection, pollution, and disease. Be it unexplained deaths, plague, or tuberculosis the body of the vampire has been represented as both the source of contagion and its patient zero, and potential cure. Further expressing the horrific results of unseen and unstoppable disease and the foreboding and anxiety that accompany viral outbreaks and wider epidemics. This timely study then looks at how and why the vampire continues to fulfill this function and posits that the true patient zero in the twenty-first century is no longer the dangerous, ancient, outsider from the East but is the undying monster that has made its home within Western culture itself.
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Notes
- 1.
For example, in the New England Vampire Panic of the nineteenth century, parts of the body of the suspected vampire were burnt and ashes consumed as a cure for the disease spread by vampire (it was in fact tuberculosis). See Bell (2011).
- 2.
The vrykolakas entered Greek folklore after the sixth century when many Slavic peoples migrated into Greece bringing their own vampire lore with them. See Lawson (1964).
- 3.
The case of the “Vampire in Venice,” as chronicled in Mark Collins Jenkins’ Vampire Forensics, tells of a sixteenth-century plague victim buried with a brick thrust between its jaws to, possibly, prevent it rising from the dead and infecting new victims (2011, 143).
- 4.
At least Stoker’s novel never details any attempts by those in the vicinity of Dracula’s castle doing anything other than trying to ward off the vampire seeing their actions as learning to live with a disease rather than trying to cure it.
- 5.
This is made apparent in the “Book of the Vampires” that appears throughout the film. It becomes even more apparent in the later remake by Werner Herzog from 1979 where the spirit of the Nosferatu infects Jonathan Harker who at films end we see on a horse riding off into the distance wearing the vampire’s cape.
- 6.
Count Dracula shows how easy it is to evade such precautions by causing the Demeter to run aground on Whitby beach to elide customs or landing officials when he arrives in England.
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Bacon, S. (2023). Introduction. In: Contagion and the Vampire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39202-3_1
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