Vampires. Origin and Resurrection. From Folklore to Count Dracula

The history of vampires goes back to the Eastern European villages of the 18th century, when rumors of bodies rising from the dead rolled across Europe and caused mass hysteria. From the first stories of vampirism, Christopher Frayling explores how... and why vampires became one of the most enduring figures in the history of mass culture. How peasant vampires, described by Joseph Pitton de Tournefort and the House of Augustin Calmet, that is, folkloric vampires attacking sheep and cows, became aristocratic anti-heroes of the romantics. He traces the lineage of the literary vampire starting from 1816: the story of modern vampires was born - in proper oral form - in a rented holiday villa overlooking Lake Geneva on the night of June 17, 1816, when the weather was unusually damp and the atmosphere unusually charged. That day at Villa Diodati gathered Lord Byron, John Polidori, Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley to tell invented ghost stories, but as a result, that evening saw the birth of the literary vampire and Frankenstein. The author further discusses the artistic works that were written between 'The Vampire' by J. Polidori (1819) and perhaps the most famous vampire of all time, 'Dracula' by B. Stoker (1897). The author of the book, Sir Christopher Frayling, is a cultural historian and has published numerous works on various topics, from xenophobia to westerns. He was also the rector of the Royal College of Art in London from 1996 to 2009, where he remains an honorary professor of cultural history to this day.