Vampires in popular culture
Vampires are frequently represented in popular culture across various forms of media, including appearances in ballet, films, literature, music, opera, theatre, paintings, and video games.
These were derived from the writer Rudyard Kipling who was inspired by a vampiress painted by Philip Burne-Jones, an image typical of the era in 1897, to write his poem 'The Vampire'.
, describing a seduced man, became the title of the popular film A Fool There Was that made Theda Bara a star, the poem being used in its publicity.
[1] A vampire features in the landmark Nosferatu (1922 Germany, directed by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau), an unlicensed version of Bram Stoker's Dracula.
The first of these, The Vampire Lovers, (1970), starring Ingrid Pitt and Madeleine Smith, was a relatively straightforward re-telling of LeFanu's novella, but with more overt violence and sexuality.
There is, however, a very small subgenre, pioneered in Murnau's seminal Nosferatu (1922) in which the vampire is depicted in the hideous lineaments of the creature of European folklore.
Max Schrek's disturbing portrayal of this role in Murnau's film was copied by Klaus Kinski in Werner Herzog's remake Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht (1979).
Christopher Lee, Delphine Seyrig, Frank Langella, and Lauren Hutton are just a few examples of actors who brought great sex-appeal into their portrayal of the vampire.
It has been noted that vampires are "supernatural beings with a laundry list of fantastic abilities and a need for feeding on the living, which would presumably give numerous options for a plot".
[9] In 1995 the game was renamed from Jyhad to Vampire: The Eternal Struggle to increase its appeal and distance itself from the Islamic term jihad.
[12] The vampire was one of the first monsters introduced in the earliest edition of the game, in the Dungeons & Dragons "white box" set (1974),[13] where they were described simply as powerful undead.
[14] The vampire later appeared in the first edition Monster Manual (1977),[15] where its description was changed somewhat to a chaotic evil, night-prowling creature whose powerful negative force drains life energy from victims.
One popular Dungeons & Dragons campaign setting, Ravenloft, has as a central character a vampire named Strahd Von Zarovich, who is both ruler and prisoner of his own personal domain of Barovia.
[20] Popular video games about vampires include Castlevania, which is an extension of the original Bram Stoker novel Dracula, and Legacy of Kain.
Like much of Kipling's verse it was incredibly popular, and its inspired many early silent films whose "vampires" were actually "vamps" rather than being supernatural undead blood-suckers.
, describing a seduced man, became the title of the popular film A Fool There Was (1915) which made Theda Bara a star, and the archetypal cinematic "vamp".
A version of the striga makes an appearance in The Witcher video game based on the works of Polish writer Andrzej Sapkowski.
As a demonic undead creature, which transforms from the corpse of a dead child conceived via incest, striga in the Witcher's universe does not look like insects or vampires but looks similar to a ghoul with a muscular quadrupedal body, big claws, and a fang-filled mouth.
It is rumored that the strix restored Remus to undeath, and corrupted a sixth clan of vampires who were destroyed en masse.
They reappear in Night Horrors: Wicked Dead as heralds of disaster, mainly unbound by their former oath (although they still occasionally pursue such activities for personal reasons).
Immensely amoral libertines, they view vampires clinging to humanity as weak, and as such will often serve as tempters in order to make them lose themselves to the Beast.
