Vampire Fandom: From Travel to Murder

Vampire Fandom: From Travel to Murder

Tourism

Dracula by Bram Stoker is a novel that has influenced many. From movie adaptations to spin offs to remakes, Stoker's novel has created a flurry of vampire-related content. Inevitably, this has created a vampire fanbase. There is a large spectrum of vampire fans. On one side there are casual fans, and on the other there are people who take their connection to vampires to an extreme level. Somewhere in the middle of this spectrum is the tourist population in Romania stemming from peoples' love of Dracula. In an article titled "STALKING THE COUNT: Dracula, Fandom & Tourism," these tourists are discussed. "Bran Castle" in Romania was fixed up to look like what the Count's home in the novel would look like, and is now a popularly visited sight. There are of course some people who just visit because it is something to see while in Romania, but there are also people who are drawn to it because of their love of Dracula. In the article, fans of the novel who visited the castle were interviewed. The similar nature of their answers can be summed up by a line in the article saying, "By drinking in Dracula country, by smelling it, feeling it, seeing it and tasting it, the fans get a livelier and more complete picture; the respondents talk about getting the sense that they have come 'closer to the story.'" (2) It's clear that Bram Stoker's novel has had a pretty big impact on a lot of people if they are willing to travel to Romania for a chance to get a visual from the story. For a chance to understand this feeling without traveling to Romania, below is a video tour of Bran Castle from the tourist attraction's official website.

Real Vampires

The tourist fans of vampires are more common and understandable, making the more mysterious and interesting part of vampire fandom at the other side of the spectrum. On this side, we see a group of people who have brought the creatures to life in a whole new way. These are the real life vampires. Rather I should say people who refer to themselves as vampires. These aren't actual vampires who run around and turn into bats, but a community of people who drink blood, human or animal. Discover Magazine released two articles by John Edgar Browning, a researcher from Georgia Institute of Technology, about his study of some of these so called vampires. Interestingly enough, these vampires have strayed from the classic tale of Dracula and depictions of vampires in popular culture all together. Through his research, Browning got a close look at vampires in different locations, specifically focusing on New Orleans and Buffalo. What he found were human beings who you could see and not even know that they were vampires. He found a group of vampires who don't harm people and sometimes even help them like the New Orleans vampires' work with feeding the homeless. On top of blood, these people sometimes feed on "energies" of people, a less painful way of getting what they feel they need to survive. These vampires have strayed beyond fandom and turned it into a lifestyle. They seem to have very little connection to vampire stories such as Dracula. They are not monsters, but people. (3) (4) However, other accounts find that there are people who do follow Dracula and its monsters more accurately by taking vampirism to a violent place. These people commit acts much closer to Count Dracula's horrific acts of feeding on helpless victims. One story told in a national geographic video below tells of a man who kidnaps and feeds on a woman who managed to escape and tell the tale.

Why We Love Vampires

So what exactly is it that drives this love of vampires? Marry Williamson talks about this in her book "The Lure of The Vampire: Gender, Fiction, and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy." Williamson dedicates her first chapter to Dracula. Bram Stoker's story is one of the most influential vampire stories. Everyone, vampire fan or not, knows the name. That being said, Williamson believes that Dracula has not created the true vampire craze. Though Bela Lugosi's portrayal of Dracula did result in a whole lot of fan mail, particularly from women, Williamson suggests that "sympathetic vampires" have created the real vampire fans. While Williamson is correct about this, we also really do have Dracula to thank for these fans. Even Williamson's choice to dedicate her first chapter to Dracula shows that the novel really is what paved the way for later portrayals. Without Bram Stoker, the sympathetic vampire may have never had such a high place among popular culture. Even though Dracula was released over 100 years ago, the impact its made on culture has still lasted. (1)




Works Cited:

1 O'Connor-Salomon, Kelly A. "Williamson, Milly. The Lure of The Vampire: Gender, Fiction, and Fandom from Bram Stoker to Buffy." Journal of Fantastic in the Arts, no. 2, 2008, p. 265

2 "STALKING THE COUNT: Dracula, Fandom & Tourism."  Conference Papers -- International Communication Association, 2011 Annual Meeting 2011, pp. 1-16.

3 John Edgar Browning. "Real-Life Vampires Exist, and Researches are Studying Them." Discover Magazine, Mar. 2015.

4 John Edgar Browning. "What I Learned Studying Real Vampires." Discover Magazine, May 2018.