Then, in the 1890s Irish author and theatrical agent Bram Stoker got interested in vampires, perhaps as the result of a meeting with a Hungarian author. All of this had the effect of establishing an image in the western mind of Hungarians and other Balkan-region peoples as being ignorant, backward, superstitious, and terrified of vampires. By the 1750s, as the Enlightenment became established in Western culture, the Austrian Empress Maria Theresa was embarrassed about the association between the Austro-Hungarian Empire and superstition, so she forbid taking actions against supposed vampire corpses. Starting in the early 18 th centuries, stories about Hungarian vampires began to circulate, most famously tales about Arnold Paole and Peter Blagojevich, one a bandit, the other a peasant, both posthumously suspected of vampirism, both of whose cases eventually reached the attention of Austrian officials. Various Slavic languages term these revenants vampir or variations on that the etymology of the term is unclear, but it came into English through German as vampire. The exact mechanism by which revenants killed their victims varied some drank blood, some caused sickness, and one is reported to have strangled his victims. If a corpse was suspected of being a revenant, it was ‘killed’ by having a stake driven through its heart. The graves of those suspected of being revenants were sometimes dug up to look for signs of revenantism, such as a lack of decay, blood on the lips, or perceived growth of hair or fingernails. A revenant is a person who has died, been buried, and has then supposedly come back from the grave to kill or sicken the living. In Eastern Europe in the 16 th and 17 th century, a belief in revenants emerged, mostly as an explanation for outbreaks of disease. Indeed, some Romanians actually consider the ‘vampirization’ of Dracula as a Hungarian conspiracy to blacken his name (after all, Bela Lugosi was Hungarian…) Romanians have generally remembered Vlad Dracula in a positive light, as a national hero, and many of them consider the modern linkage between him and vampirism as something of an insult to their heritage, sort of like if the great American president Abraham Lincoln were called a vampire hunter. Nobody at the time thought he was a vampire, and there isn’t any evidence that folk lore connected either man with vampirism even long after their deaths. The basic reason that Dracula wasn’t a vampire is the same reason that Grover Cleveland wasn’t a vampire. Gary Shore), I got to thinking about the historical linkage between Dracula and vampires, and thought it was worth a post. But as I was doing some reading for my review about Dracula Untold (2014, dir. Ok, obviously Dracula wasn’t a vampire because vampires aren’t actually real.
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