On the Page, Stage and Screen

A comparison of various popular sources for vampire lore against the myths of history. Do all vampire have fangs? Can all vampires reproduce? How do the popular vampires of the 20th century live and die and hunt and feed? S. A. Rudy takes a look at five modern vampire themes.

I am Legend. Duel. The Twilight Zone. Star Trek. Dracula. X-Files. One genius helped create or inspire all of them. Do you know his name?

More than 80 years after its completion, FW Murnau's Nosferatu remains among the most potent and unsettling horror films ever made. Now released again in a fully restored version, with its original score available for the first time since 1922, it has lost none of its impact, unlike many of its imitators.

From its centuries-old genesis in European folk tales, the lore of the vampire has always been in flux. Much like the creatures that morph from wolf to bat to human form, vampire mythology continually reinvents itself -- a process amplified for modernity with the publication of Bram Stoker's hugely influential 1897 novel, "Dracula."

No one ever would have guessed when Buffy Summers first stabbed her way into American pop culture with the film version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer that the young, blonde "Valley girl" cheerleader-cum-assassin of the undead would still be saving the world today--15 years after "dusting" her first demon.

In the process of writing his latest book, "The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Dracula From Nosferatu to Count Chocula," Eric Nuzum needed to do some research. So he ... well, let's let him tell it:

You're cover-shopping at the bookstore. If you're lucky there's a horror section: otherwise, you may be in sci-fi, fantasy, romance, or that wondrous catchall, "novels." You want to find vampire books, of course. Other than the word "vampire" in the title, what will tip you off? You look at the cover paintings.

Many have probably heard about the book called Twilight by Stephenie Meyer, which was released in October 2005. It's the story of an average teenage girl who moves to the cloudiest peninsula in the United States -- the Olympic Peninsula. Isabella Swan, aka Bella, moves to the small town of Forks, Wash., to live with her father after her mother gets married to an amateur baseball player. She hates living in Forks, until she meets a strikingly gorgeous teenager in her biology class.

Hammer brought screen chills to cinema audiences from the 1950s, and many films were made at various studios in Borehamwood. They made stars of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing.

"Budapest seems a wonderful place... The impression I had was that we were leaving the West and entering the East." So begins Bram Stoker's Dracula, written in a time when the city was seen as Europe's final frontier. Today, Budapest is rather more familiar (it joined the EU in 2004) - although it has lost none of its original appeal.