Vampires have usually provoked a good deal more argument than dread. For starters, what are they? Are they snarling, restless corpses— and what on earth is a restless corpse?— gobbling up the blood of the living to sustain a postmortem hallucination of immortality? Are they best dispatched with a stake to the heart, a contemptuous guffaw, some rapid- fire tee- heeing, a silver bullet or a professorial snort of incredulity? Often they seem to be several dusty centuries old, and able to alternate cleverly between appearing as the type of skeletal horror that would have caused a scandal in Edgar Allan Poe's “Masque of the Red Death” (1842) or a reincarnation of a seductive Don Juan or Jezebel. But what about that hair in the middle of their palms? Or their howling in crazed harmony with wolves? Or those toxic problems with stream- crossing, daylight (often lethal, though there seem to be exceptions) and crucifixes? Along the line of crucifixes, is every vampire just a Christian in sinful trouble? If not, why all that fuss over the most important Christian symbol?

Why not simply convert to some other religion and let the crucifix, so to speak, be damned?

As may seem clear, paradox if not contradiction mixes into virtually any discussion of what comes in modern times to be called vampirism, with much of the academic debate swiftly descending into a tussle between the sensible and the morbidly sensational, or, often, between sanity and trendy irrationality. Hefty scoops of superstition seem tossed into the conversational pot only to spice the sauce.

Even more peculiar than the paradoxes are the storms of denial. With hundreds of millions of copies in print ever since its appearance in 1897, and eventually in over 50 languages, Bram Stoker's Dracula ranks among the most popular books ever written. Complementing the literary phenomenon is the fact that more full- length commercial films have centered on Dracula and Company— well over a hundred— than those devoted to any other major or minor figure, including Christ, God, Hamlet, Hitler, Stalin and the excitable giants of monster films. Respectable anthropologists have argued that vampirism, on its folkloric levels, must be not only worldwide but ancient, or at least a match for religion in its antiquity.