It was the vampire we were one with, the vampire we wanted to be, the vampire at the center of the story - not its boring, puny human protagonists. Still, vampires were the bad guys, and we had to hide our fondness for (our desire to be like) them. It was one of those shameful vices, like self-gratification, we felt we must conceal from the disapproving scrutiny of the world-at-large. To admit we identified with a blood-sucking demon who rose from her (or his) grave every night, would have marked us indelibly as "seriously weird" in the eyes of others.

~Jean Stine &
Forrest J. Ackerman, ed.
"I, Vampire"

The vampire has facinated us more than any other monster or supernatural creature since the beginning of myth and storytelling. In mythologies around the world, demons and half-humans who suck off the vital force of the living, robbing them of health, and life itself, have been held in fear and dread.

This terror holds elements of bth repulsion and attraction. Since the Eastern vampire cult entered Western arts as a literary device in the eighteenth century, we have become less repulsed and more attracted to the vampire. The vampire of the arts is so much more human-like than his folklore counterpart, and has been endowed with numerous attractive characteristics. This vampire is the modern Devil, who uses our fatal attraction to seduce and trick us out of our souls.

He woke a living corpse from some superstitious tale in Irv's transcripts: skin colorless and shrunken over bone, mind like a cavern with consciousness rattling about in it looking for direction. He was a ghost, a phantom, without hunger but knowing that he must feed soon or die; knowing that he had lived before though not just when or how, and that the knowledge of previous lives would be availiable at need - but not specific events, not discreet memories; knowing that he must not seek to stir up those memories. Nothing must distract him from the immense task of learning his way about the new world facing him.