Phantoms form out of aerial dust and celluloid grain, but are their grisly shapes real or imaginary? Are they possible to identify with certainty, or are we left to grasp at the gossamer, to remember what never really was? In Stoker's Dracula, Jonathan Harker's journal explains, “Let me begin with facts – bare, meagre facts, verified by books and figures, and of which there can be no doubt. I must not confuse them with experiences which will have to rest on my own observation, or my memory of them.” In the awful den of hellish infamy, such is not an easy task.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cinema and vampirism underwent various evolutions that impacted heavily on the ability of audiences to comprehend them, to make sense of them. The two invariably pose questions, but those questions are particularly pronounced when considering the first two decades of film exhibition. To explore this issue, the United States serves as an important case study, as it represents a geographical location in which these issues converge, collide, and even collapse. The protean vampire was never more unstable than in America during the early cinema period.

Consider the following account from Rhode Island, published in March 1896, only days before Edison's Vitascope premiered at Koster and Bial's in New York City:

In this case, the understanding of and belief in supernatural vampires was so strong that a suspected corpse was exhumed. The incident stems from longstanding folkloric superstitions.

But only one year later, Philip Burne-Jones's painting The Vampire (1897), and Rudyard Kipling's companion poem of the same name, depicted the creature as a mortal woman who metaphorically bleeds men of their lives.

Tod Browning's London after Midnight, released by MGM in 1927, represents America's first supernatural vampire feature film. Except that it isn’t. It does not depict a supernatural vampire, not really. Its story features Lon Chaney as a detective, Inspector Burke, who costumes as a supernatural vampire (“The Man in the Beaver Hat”) as part of an elaborate ruse to catch a murderer. The detective also enlists an actress (Edna Tichenor) to costume as a vampire known as the “Bat Girl.” Here is thus a supernatural vampire film without a supernatural vampire, a paradox, one perhaps well suited to the subject matter.

During its running time, London after Midnight included an insert shot of a “vignetted passage of the printed page of an old book, the paper of a parchment-like quality, aged, the print in an Old English type.” According to the script, the page read as follows: “– the undead, the vampyrs [sic]: dead bodies which leave their graves at night to suck the blood of the living.” Here was a definition, one that made vampires synonymous with the “undead,” a term that Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) rendered with uppercase letters and hyphenated as “Un-Dead.” In the novel, Dr. Van Helsing explains that the Un-Dead are “desperate,” “strong,” and are distinctly different than the “common dead.” In response, Arthur Holmwood exclaims, “Un-Dead! Not alive! What do you mean? Is this all a nightmare, or what is it?”

The questions are hardly unexpected. The term undead was little-known in English prior to Stoker, not appearing in such nineteenth-century literature as John Polidori's The Vampyre (1819), James Malcolm Rymer's Varney the Vampire (1845–7), and J. Sheridan Le Fanu's Carmilla (1872). True, the concept was present in those tales, as well as those published after Stoker's Dracula. F. Marion Crawford's short story For the Blood Is the Life (1911) describes “a woman's shriek, the unearthly scream of a woman neither dead nor alive, but buried deep for many days.” Nevertheless, the concept remained difficult to fathom, to understand, and the term was rarely used during the silent film era.

Vampire hunters are necessarily brave. Their prey is powerful. Their prey is supernatural. And their prey sees them as prey, hence the need to be well prepared, mentally, spiritually, and practically. In 2022, a vampireslayer kit from the nineteenth century auctioned for over $15,000, its contents including holy water and brass crucifixes.

In the eighteenth century, Dom Antoine Augustin Calmet recorded the use of decapitation, impaling, burning, and staking to make dead the undead. Nearly two centuries later, Montague Summers explained, “The only way to obtain deliverance from their molestations is by disinterring the dead body, by cutting off the head, by driving a stake through the breast, by transfixing the heart, or by burning the corpse to ashes.” In Stoker's Dracula, Van Helsing also keeps garlic close at hand.

The means of destroying a vampire are many, of course. In F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (Prana-Film, 1922), Ellen Hutter (Greta Schröder) keeps Graf Orlok (Max Schreck) in her bed all night until the cock crows at dawn. She captures a dark entity long enough to expose him to the light, thus creating an unforgettable image, his disintegration. The process is not unlike the image capture intrinsic to filmmaking. In 1928, the book Amateur Movie Making instructed readers that the filmmaker “must capture spirit and emotion and imprison them upon his celluloid ribbon, and for this purpose, nothing is more efficient than the lamp.” Artificial light or real, supernatural vampire or reel, professional vampire hunter or hobbyist, fiat lux are words to the wise. Light dispels the dark, even as it produces new images, new shades, new shadows.

Amateur filmmaking, the production of “home movies,” became a somewhat popular pursuit in the mid- to late twenties, particularly for the wealthy, being spurred by cameras and projectors that used smaller gauges than 35mm.

In Bram Stoker's Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992), the vampire count (Gary Oldman) strolls through London, depicted in grainy footage that appears to have been shot at 16 or 18 frames per second. The sound of a projector clicks in the background while a street barker invites everyone to experience the “Amazing Cinématographe.” Dracula and Mina (Winona Ryder) attend the exhibition, the images quickly arousing the vampire's passions. On two occasions, a phantom-like train appears on the screen.

Coppola created these images for his film, inspired by such early moving pictures as L’Arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat/The Arrival of a Train (Lumière Brothers, 1895) and The Ghost Train (American Mutoscope and Biograph, 1901). Bram Stoker's Dracula thus links vampirism and the cinema. Indeed, Stoker's novel first appeared in print in 1897, at approximately the same time that public film screenings became commonplace. As he wrote, “It is nineteenth century up-to-date with a vengeance.”

Connections between vampirism and silent cinema resonate loudly. E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire (2000) stars Willem Dafoe as actor Max Schreck. In this fantastical alternate history about the production of Nosferatu (1922), Schreck is an authentic vampire, hired by director F. W. Murnau (John Malkovich) to add realism to his film. Murnau confidently declares, “If it's not in frame, it doesn't exist.” In one scene, Schreck becomes fascinated by a film projector, peering into its lens without speaking, the light flickering on his face. The project has become the projected.

We need only consider the question of where cinema resides to understand the potency of these metaphors. Film is archived on a film reel or on a DVD or in hard drives, but that is not where the audience sees it. Rather, light pulses temporally and temporarily on a screen.

Life involves change, from youth to old age. Death, too, is a transformative state, the cadaver decomposing into dust. But to be undead is to never grow old. It is to be static and unchanging. A supernatural vampire does not evolve. A “vamp,” on the other hand, can change, and did, frequently, during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

In 1920, as the “vamp” film craze was on the wane, a newspaper reporter observed, “So many misleading things have been written about these often gentle and inoffensive creatures, and there is so much popular ignorance on the subject, it would seem high time that they be given a hearing.” That comment had great merit. Only one year earlier another journalist asked readers, “Do you really know what a vamp is?” To help readers, he clarified, “we are not talking about honest-to-goodness vampires, but rather of the vamp, who is shown in a variety of ways to be different. Just what the difference – and how much the difference – is hard to figure out.”

Such questions were easier to ask than to answer, in part because the vamp was arguably as chimerical as she was vampirical. She developed, and she transformed, so much so that even her origins are difficult to pinpoint. In the early twentieth century, some writers cited Salome and Cleopatra as early examples of vamps, and yet they were much further from folkloric vampires than some of their early twentieth-century counterparts. A definition published in 1920 explained, “Vamp is an abbreviation of the word ‘vampire,’ which means a person who preys on others … The term has been popularized by Kipling's famous poem, The Vampire.”

Along with Rudyard Kipling, it is crucial to mention Philip Burne-Jones and his painting The Vampire (1897). The resulting vamp became the most notable of the metaphorical vampires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, due not only to its popularity but also its ability to invoke the uncanny, even the supernatural, through visual and thematic means.

Dracula was not Hungarian. Bela Lugosi, who famously portrayed the title role in Tod Browning's Dracula (Universal, 1931), was born in Hungary, but Dracula was not.

Vlad III, also known as Vlad Drăculea (Vlad Dracula) and Vlad Ţepeş (Vlad the Impaler), remains a hero in Romania. As Voivode of Wallachia for three separate reigns during the fifteenth century, he was at times at war with Hungarians, at times allied with them. But no one mistook Vlad III's heritage, not even the Germans, his greatest detractors in the years after his death.

Bram Stoker's Dracula recounts his own complicated history with Hungarians in the 1897 novel:

Histories fiction and histories nonfiction reside in a similarly complex place: Dracula was not Magyar; he was not Hungarian. And yet he was never far from the country and its people, including in the cinema.

In the late twentieth century, a few historians discovered that F. W. Murnau's Nosferatu (Prana-Film, 1922) was not, as long believed, the first time that a filmmaker adapted Stoker's Dracula for the screen.

Are vampires good at mathematics? Perhaps those who were once accountants and bankers. Perhaps those who failed algebra courses not so much. In fairness, even for vampires who own calculators, it might be hard to keep track of how many victims they have bled over the decades, over the centuries.

In some folkloric traditions, vampires who encounter spilled grain or seeds must count them, apparently due to a type of supernatural arithmomania. Woe to the less-educated vampire who could not count as high as the number of seeds on the ground. Or to the vampire who kept losing count and had to start anew repeatedly until it dawned on him or her that it was dawn. Perhaps there are times when it's preferable to be the Count von Count of Sesame Street.

Such mathematics may or may not be important, but to the vampire hunter, the vampire enthusiast, and the vampire scholar, one number is as dramatic as it is baffling: the global vampire population. According to much folklore and literature, vampires give rise to more vampires. Biting one creates another, the process repeats, and then repeats, and so it goes. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Van Helsing refers to the title character as the “King Vampire.” At the end of the nineteenth century, there were fewer than two billion people in the world. But how many supernatural vampires were there, if not in the real world, then in the world of fiction? Over how many undead did Dracula reign?

Put another way, the problem is that, by a given point in time, every person would either die or transform into a vampire. As more vampires are spawned, more blood is necessary, and so the scarcer it gets. Eventually there would probably be, as the title of Ubaldo Ragona and Sidney Salkow's 1964 film warned us, The Last Man on Earth. Then he too would become either dead or undead. Thus, earth could accurately be called, to borrow the title of Mario Bava's 1965 film, Planet of the Vampires.

Supernatural vampires are criminals. Their dark deeds range from sexual harassment to rape and murder. And they are imposters, not just of other people, as when Dracula pretends to be Count de Ville in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel, but they also imposters of people, impersonating the living as they wine and dine with and on victims, whether in Transylvania or London or anywhere the undead might journey, which they also do illegally, travelling in crates of dirt without passport or stamped visa. Though they may not feel guilt, vampires are guilty, and guilty of so very many sins. Here are crimes against the law, as well as crimes against humanity.

Robbing, looting, purloining: how very often vampires participate in those felonies, their misconduct transgressing social norms and expectations. As Charles A. Kinkaid's The Vampire's Treasure (1922) explains, “Even a vampire would give up its riches, if it were given human blood to drink.” But as the title character in Stoker's Dracula proves, a vampire need not deplete its wealth to obtain blood. Stealing blood is a relatively easy task, even if it unlawful and immoral. Horrid abomination or minor infraction, the vampire is nothing if not a scofflaw.

Staged in London in 1823, The Three Vampires; or, Maids Beware of Moonshine depicted a trio of shady humans thought to be vampires. One is a “Practitioner of Medicine,” the second a “Pork Butcher,” and the third an “Undertaker,” their combined professions potentially helpful to so many malefactions. The maids guzzling their illicit homebrew are members of the same family, aptly named “Swallow-all.” A playbill described the play as a “New Operatic, Melo-Dramatic, Terrific Vampiric, Monstrous, Frankensteinish, Horrific Romantic Burletta, comprising much Moonshine, and more Mirth, written under the Lunar influence, but not by a lunatic… .” One did not necessarily need to be crazy to perceive the value of vampirism as a dynamic and compelling metaphor for criminality.

Given the many fascinating qualities that Dracula possesses, we may well forget his memory, meaning his ability to remember, and he does have such a very long history, he and his forebears, as he explains to Harker in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel:

Dracula has other memories as well, including memories of love, as he reminds his trio of brides after interrupting their lustful attack on Harker: “[Y]ou yourselves can tell it from the past. Is it not so?”

By contrast, in E. Elias Merhige's Shadow of the Vampire (Lions Gate, 2000), Max Schreck (Willem Dafoe), who plays Graf Orlok, has an extremely poor memory. He cannot recall when he became a vampire or where he was born. One character chides him, complaining, “Count Dracula wouldn't say he couldn't remember.” But Schreck/Orlok must say it. He is ancient, so very ancient, that his memory has faded. Is it possible to conceive of a time before he existed? Such is difficult for him as well as for us. Might we recall the date of his birth, even if he is unable? Let us reconstruct that night, for it was indeed at night, when Orlok's symphony of horror was first heard in Germany, when he first cast his shadow on a Berlin theater screen, when not a single scratch appeared on a pristine print that advanced through a film projector, its teeth sinking into Nosferatu's sprocket holes with each turn of the take-up reel.

Victims of vampires do not immediately become vampires. A period of transition occurs, whether it unfolds over minutes, days, or weeks. In Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), the Count not only drinks Mina's blood, but also shares his own, making her sup from an open wound on his chest. During a slow transformation, Mina can feel what Dracula feels, see what Dracula sees, and hear what Dracula hears, even though vast geography separates them. She is a “poor soul in worse than mortal peril.” The process of becoming is underway, for her character in the fin de siècle, just as it would be for the screen vampire during the Roaring Twenties.

In 1921, The Nation pointedly asked readers, “What shall be done with the vampires?”:

Here the question had to do with the negative effect that screen vamps could have on American youth. As Reverend William F. Crafts preached that same year, “I would rather have my son stand at a bar and drink two glasses of beer that have him see that [movie] vampire woman … he could not forget that vampire woman until he was 80 years old.”

These sentiments were not new. In 1916, a newspaper editorial declared that it was “time for movies to move” beyond the vamp era. The following year, Motion Picture News published the following “sage” advice from the public to the producers: “we don't approve of vampire women nor of vampire men either.” Then, in 1918, another writer demanded that Hollywood “bury in oblivion the superfluous screen ‘he vampire.’” Women's organizations condemned vamps during the late teens, even as one company manufactured vampire dolls with “roguish eyes.”