Death and The Undead Vampire

Death and the undead vampire is an odd juxtaposition, yet it is an oxymoronic characteristic of literary vampires – and one would assume real vampires if there are such – that they fear being slain, and dying. Thus we read about their fear of stakes and crossbows in traditional literature, and ultra-violet light and sunlight and bullets in the brain in contemporary literature/movies and we relate. It makes the un-human undead vampire appear a bit more human. Most of our modern writers allow the undead vampire a total dissolution into a puff of dust, a puff of ash, a stain of residual oils, and then the undead vampire is totally dead – gone as we expect to be. The Victorian’s weren’t so kind and gentle. Or perhaps you consider starvation while stapled to the ground by a stake through the chest kind?

“I have heard and read,” Charles Holland [states in Risen From The Grave: Varney the Vampyre and the Feast of Blood] “of how these dreadful beings are to be kept in their graves. I have heard of stakes driven through the body so as to pin it to the earth until the gradual process of decay has rendered a revivification a thing of utter impossibility”(196). The Victorians thus rendered the vampire neutral – unless someone came along and removed the stake, or the ground shifted. Visualize as I do, the large warning sign in the field, “Vampire here, Please do not Remove the Stake.” Note that in the television series Dark Shadows it is exactly this occurrence that brings the vampire, Barnabas Collins, back to life (and yes, Barnabas was trapped in his coffin with silver chains and a silver cross – so it isn’t an apple to apple comparison). But isn’t there a Willie Lowman in every village, willing to open the casket or pull the stake from the vampire just to see what will happen?

For the pre-Dracula Victorian, vampires had to be “burned and the ashes gathered to the winds of Heaven to prevent them from ever again uniting or assuming human form”(196). The process designed to prevent the wounded vampire finding a bit of moonlight to lie in, for in folklore, the wounded vampire simply had to lie out in a puddle of moonlight, and he/she/it would heal. Given the superior strength of the vampire, it would take quite a struggle to get a vampire to stand still for the funeral pyre.

Most modern authors/film makers are kind enough to have the expired vampire puff into smoke, thus preventing the slayer the hassle of dealing with, and potentially needing to explain to authorities, a corpse. This very practical vampire disposal also prevents modern slayers from feeling cruel as they walk away from an undead vampire who will suffer eternal thirst without the ability to die of it, while also neatly freeing the vampire soul and allowing it to go to where-ever it would have gone if it hadn’t been trapped by the undead vampire body.