#christopher frayling

“Painters can’t make a likeness of him - however hard the artist tries, the subject always ends up looking like someone else; equally it is impossible to photograph (or ‘Codak’) him - the resulting print always makes him appear ‘black or like a skeleton corpse’; and there are no looking glasses in the Count’s house - because he has no reflection and casts no shadow; the lights in his house must therefore be specially arranged to ‘give no shadow.’”

“Somehow the inarticulate peasant vampires […] who attacked sheep and cows as often as their relatives, became the aristocratic hero-villains of the Romantics. In the eye-witness accounts, the chubby vampires tended to have florid complexions - as if they had been drinking too much- swollen bodies, skin slippage, wide-open mouths full of blood and a halitotic stench. In Romantic fiction, they tended to be fashionably pallid and clean shaven, with seductive voices and pouting lips, and they were always sexually attractive. In folklore, the vampire was likely to hurl himself or herself at the victim’s chest or arm - to smother, as well as to suck. In fiction, the preferred erogenous zone was invariably the neck. It was quite a transformation: a special effect that lasted for the best of a century.”

“The fascination of beautiful women already dead, especially if they had been great courtesans, wanton queens or famous sinners, suggested to the Romantics, probably under the influence of the vampire legend, the figure of the Fatal Woman who was successively incarnate in all ages and all lands, an archetype which united in itself all forms of seduction, all vices and all delights.”