How Monsters Went from Menacing to Misunderstood
With the Enlightenment, monsters were brought under the lamp of reason. The Hydra, the unicorn, mermaids—careful observers exposed them as hoaxes or misidentified species. The French anatomist Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire analyzed certain apparent monstrosities, such as cyclopic and acephalic fetuses, not as moral warnings but as developmental mishaps.
Yet, as Goya warned in 1799, “the sleep of reason produces monsters,” and Enlightenment vigilance regularly lapsed. In the stories we told then, the beasts still attacked, infected, and rampaged until they were vanquished by heroes. The current sympathetic turn unsettles that archetypal pattern. The talons and fangs have been filed down, the hunger for flesh recast as a troublesome compulsion to be managed through self-control. Audiences love these rehabilitations. But can we really do without the monstrous—or are we merely relocating it to places, and people, closer to home?
Even in an age of microscopes and anatomical theatres, horrors seeped in from the edges of empire, where the dead were said to rise and feed. Around 1726, in the Serbian village of Medveđa, a man named Arnaut Pavle fell from a hay wagon and broke his neck. Soon after his burial, the village was gripped by fear. Four people died; others swore that Pavle harassed them in the night. Forty days later, the villagers exhumed his body. Their observations, recorded by the Austrian surgeon Johann Flückinger, helped give rise to one of modern culture’s most enduring monsters.
“They found that he was quite complete and undecayed, and that fresh blood had flowed from his eyes, nose, mouth, and ears,” Flückinger wrote. Blood covered Pavle’s shirt; his nails had peeled off, and new ones had grown in their place. Everything suggested that he was a vampir—the local word for such demons. People recalled that Pavle had once complained of being tormented by a vampir, and, to protect himself, had smeared his body with its blood and eaten earth from its grave—foolproof ways to become bloodthirsty himself.
The villagers drove a stake through Pavle’s heart. The corpse groaned and bled. They burned his body and threw the ashes back into the grave, then disinterred his supposed victims, who, by lore, must have become vampiri themselves. Flückinger, a regimental surgeon in the Habsburg army, led the inquiry. His report, dated January 7, 1732, marked the vampire’s first major appearance in Enlightenment Europe. Soon after, a letter from another physician, Johann Friedrich Glaser, appeared in a Nuremberg journal, recounting the outbreak in greater detail. Translations and commentaries spread across northern and western Europe, provoking both panic and debate. In March, the London Journal published an account of “dead Bodies sucking, as it were, the Blood of the Living; for the latter visibly dry up, while the former are fill’d with Blood.” By the end of 1733, at least a dozen books and several dissertations had been published on vampires.
The vampire evolved quickly once it entered the bloodstream of European culture. Voltaire made it a metaphor for greed and parasitism, the perfect emblem of hypocritical excess. John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819) gave the creature aristocratic poise and predatory charm. Bram Stoker’s “Dracula” (1897) completed the metamorphosis, fusing the Serbian corpse-demon with gothic eroticism (fangs, neck-biting), Romanian superstition (garlic), and late-Victorian dread—of contagion, of female sexuality, of imperial contamination.
Stoker’s count was as courtly as he was corrupt. He fed on the living, defiled women, spread disease, and inverted sacred symbols. He offered no tragic backstory, no flicker of remorse, nothing to complicate his evil. He was, in Professor Van Helsing’s words, “devil in callous, and the heart of him is not.”
For decades, his screen descendants stayed true to type. The title characters of F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” (1922) and Tod Browning’s “Dracula” (1931), the villains of “The Return of the Vampire” (1943) and “Horror of Dracula” (1958): all were creatures of pure appetite, pure evil. But by the nineteen-seventies the infection had mutated. A more introspective breed of bloodsucker appeared: the world-weary sensualist of Anne Rice’s novel “Interview with the Vampire” (1976), the mournful aristocrat of Werner Herzog’s film “Nosferatu the Vampyre” (1979). Today, the rehabilitation is complete. The undead are brooding and sensual, the perfect boyfriend material of “Twilight,” “True Blood,” and new-wave romantasy—creatures that would be unrecognizable to the Balkan villagers who first staked Arnaut Pavle in terror.
