The Age of VAMPIRES

Source: The Age of VAMPIRES, Horses, 53:24, uploaded 2025-01-30, Watch Later position 597.

Horses opens with a distinction that modern vampire stories tend to hide. The vampire belongs to fiction now, whilst earlier Europeans treated it as a fact of life. Villages blamed revenants for disease, famine, dead livestock, and deaths that arrived in clusters. Government officials travelled long distances to investigate outbreaks, and European rulers were accused of vampirism. These vampires had no fangs, no bat form, and no need to sleep in a coffin lined with native soil. The familiar creature grew out of a much older set of beliefs.

The video concentrates on the European vampire because that tradition has shaped the modern one most directly. Vampiric legends also appear in Chinese, Indian, Native American, and South American cultures, although a serious account of all of them would fill days. Horses treats the choice as a limit of scope and as a matter of personal interest. It begins with the European revenant, asks what people thought it looked like and did, then follows the creature into the literature and cinema that gave it its present form.

A word without a single origin

The word vampire has no settled etymology. Horses discusses a theory that connects the old Russian upir with the Serbo-Croatian vampir, then considers a chain of associations involving an old Iranian religion, a Slavonic word for a drinking bout, and an imagined “tomb of darkness”. The video gives more weight to an alternative account that links upir to the Latin impurus, meaning unclean in reference to a corpse. It presents this as the most plausible origin whilst keeping the larger point in view: the word formed through several Slavonic terms whose relations remain hard to recover.

The neighbouring folklore supports that uncertainty. Bulgarian vapir, a Romanian form rendered uncertainly in the captions, Russian upir, and Polish upor all sit near the same family of ideas. Werewolves belong to this same network. Serbian vampires and werewolves could both be called vukodlak, a thirteenth-century term that refers to a wolf-pelt wearer, whilst the Greek vrykolakas appears to have entered Greek from Serbian. The English word first appears in the 1730s, long after the beliefs that it came to name.

Blood-drinking dead people also predate the vampire. Horses mentions Lilith, rumours about the Germanic Goths, Grendel in Beowulf, and fifteenth-century witches who were said to consume human blood. None of these supplies a single point of origin. In the early fourteenth century, Serbian law already addressed people who removed suspected vampires from their graves and cremated them. Emperor Stefan Dušan’s legislation fined the village and punished the priest involved. The story has no founding monster. It grows from attempts to explain death and disaster with the concepts available at the time.

Horses resists treating those beliefs as failed versions of modern science. Medieval villagers had no account of decomposition, contagion, or the causes of famine that resembled current knowledge. When an epidemic swept through a village, a revenant offered an explanation that joined the deaths into one event and supplied an action that might stop it. Exhuming and burning the suspected corpse gave the living something to do. The absence of contrary evidence could sustain the belief for as long as the crisis lasted.

From village revenant to European panic

The account of Arnold Paole gives the video its first extended case. Paole was a Serbian soldier, probably from a village near modern Kosovo, who said that a vampire had harassed him during military service in Turkish Serbia. He tried to protect himself by eating earth from the vampire’s grave and rubbing the vampire’s blood onto his body. He repeated the story often. In 1726 he fell from a wagon, broke his neck, and died. Afterward, villagers said that he returned at night, killed four people within thirty days, and attacked cattle. Seventeen people died within three days after eating meat from those animals.

The villagers exhumed Paole and found what they understood as proof. The body had not decayed. Fresh blood appeared at the eyes, nose, mouth, and ears, the fingernails seemed to have grown, and the skin looked intact. They drove a stake into his heart, reported that the corpse groaned and bled heavily, burned the body, and scattered its ashes over the grave. They then exhumed the other dead and found fourteen bodies of different ages and genders that seemed to show the same signs. Horses presents the report as a case that moved the vampire from a local fear into European public culture.

A second report, dated in the narration to 1725 and attributed in the captions to a medical officer whose name is difficult to hear, described a Serbian corpse that rose to strangle victims and infect them with a condition that killed them quickly. The report used an early form of vampire for the corpse and its victims. Horses treats the Paole and second report as the pair that helped create Europe’s vampire frenzy. In 1732, according to the video, twelve books and four dissertations appeared on vampires, with another twenty-two papers circulating through Amsterdam, Leipzig, and Vienna.

The panic found a receptive Europe. Medicine and science were making claims to solve the world’s puzzles, and the vampire presented a problem that crossed the boundary between life and death. Rumours said that a princess in Vienna had risen as a vampire. In Paris, a story that Louis XV had kidnapped children to drink their blood led to riots in which twenty people died. Theories about the outbreaks included opium and datura, poisonous plants, tainted meat, an unhealthy diet, and the action of body fluids mixing with nitrogen in the soil. A Lutheran pastor blamed rats and vermin that entered coffins. People who rejected supernatural vampires still accepted that outbreaks were real, then explained them through mass hysteria or psychological disturbance.

Maria Theresa’s adviser Gerard van Swieten wrote a treatise on vampirism and concluded that Slavic people were primitive and unusually susceptible to mass hysteria. The Empress eventually declared vampires imaginary. That response kept the hierarchy of the period intact. Western Europe could call itself rational whilst describing the people who lived with the reports as barbaric. The vampire had become a test of science, empire, and the right to define another population’s beliefs.

The corpse as evidence

In the folklore Horses reconstructs, people usually met a vampire after death. A village suspected a dead person, opened the grave, and examined the body. The result looked very different from Dracula or Nosferatu. The corpse could appear healthy, darker than the living, or dark blue. Blood remained at the mouth, and the body might release liquid blood when stabbed. A swollen body with taut skin counted as a sign of vampirism. Accounts also mention fresh-looking nails, new skin, a white liver, and open eyes or mouth. Sharp teeth scarcely appear. The long canine belongs to later fiction, whilst some Russian vampires supposedly used a pointed tongue and other revenants strangled or cut their victims.

Horses accepts that the reports describe what people saw whilst rejecting their diagnosis. Blood loses oxygen after death and darkens. If a body lies on its back, blood can settle in the lower parts of the body and leave the face lighter. Saponification can remove the outer skin and produce a darker layer beneath it. Bacterial action can change blood after it has coagulated, and sudden death through concussion, suffocation, or violence can leave blood liquid. Disease can force blood and other fluids from the mouth, which turns an act of regurgitation into evidence that the corpse has been drinking.

Decomposition also produces gas in the tissues. When the gas cannot escape, the body swells and the skin becomes tight. Skin slippage can expose raw skin beneath the epidermis, whilst the same process can make the nails appear to have grown. The white liver has a further possible explanation. Cirrhosis, which Horses connects to heavy drinking, can block the liver’s veins, change its colour, and make the organ swell. The video admits that cirrhosis tends to make a liver yellow, so the white colour may have entered the accounts through language, translation, or repeated retelling.

The exhumers also found what they expected to find. Reports could call a body fresh whilst describing bloating, new skin, or other ordinary signs of decomposition. The observers did not possess the medical knowledge that would separate the two descriptions. Horses treats this as a psychological part of the diagnosis and leaves mockery aside. They saw strange things happen to bodies in the earth and used the vampire to make those things intelligible.

A mindless creature for an unmanageable world

The folkloric vampire has little of the agency given to its modern descendants. It spends most of its time in the grave, behaves like a nearly catatonic body, rarely speaks beyond a groan, and does not defend itself when people exhume it. Some traditions allow it to feed only on Saturdays. Daylight has no general place in the older accounts. The victim’s wounds appear on the chest, close to the heart, whilst two neat punctures in the neck belong to later fiction.

The video rejects porphyria as an explanation for European vampirism. The disease can damage the skin and gums, and some forms create a sensitivity to sunlight. Medieval physicians might have treated it with blood or haem, which encouraged a later story that sufferers needed to drink blood. Horses points out that the symptoms fit the modern fictional vampire more closely than the folkloric corpse. It also warns that the theory turns a medical condition into a supernatural stigma.

Blood was only one part of the vampire’s diet. Revenants supposedly tore apart livestock and sometimes ate people. Wild animals already attacked domestic animals and corpses, especially when war, famine, disease, or crime produced hurried burials. Shallow graves gave scavengers access to the dead. People who never saw a corpse walk could still explain a mauled body by giving it the power to change into a wolf or dog. Bats have no place in this early folklore. The vampire bat, Desmodus rotundus, lives in Central and South America, whilst Romania and Transylvania have no native vampire bats.

One Galician account gives the vampire almost every power at once. It can kill, eat people alive, cause illness and epidemics, control storms, spoil crops and milk, know secrets and the future, become invisible, and take the shape of animals. The open-ended list reveals the function Horses sees beneath the details. Famine, disease, weather, and ruined livestock were unpredictable events without a shared physical cause. The vampire could absorb them all. Its powers changed with the place that needed an explanation: Serbian vampires overturned carriages, whilst Icelandic vampires stamped across frozen roofs.

The same flexibility appears in the conditions that created a vampire. A person could become one after being bitten, although folklore also blamed bad behaviour, robbery, arson, alcoholism, suicide, sorcery, and witchcraft. Children born with teeth, a split lip, an extra nipple, or a vestigial tail could be marked for an undead future. In Romania, a black hen crossing the corpse could have the same effect. People who died alone, unwitnessed, without a priest, or without anyone to care for them were especially vulnerable in these stories. Soldiers killed in war and mothers whose children had not been adopted could also return.

These circumstances overlap with the physical explanation. War, disease, and crime forced people to bury the dead quickly and without care. An unattended corpse could decompose strangely or become accessible to animals. The belief in an unfulfilled life supplied the moral and social meaning, whilst the rushed burial supplied many of the signs found later.

Burial, detection, and killing

Prevention began at the grave. If chewing compelled a corpse to rise, people could fill its mouth with broken pottery, dirt, or an old book. A brick under the chin could shatter the teeth. Other communities buried the dead with food so the corpse would have no reason to seek human or animal flesh. A candle could guide the dead towards heaven. Poppy seeds might sedate the body, whilst nets and ropes tied into complex knots could keep a vampire occupied for years. A Polish account describes a priest placing a named slip of paper under a revenant’s tongue, laying the body face down, and striking its backside with a shovel before reburying it.

Sharp objects served as a second line of defence. Slavic communities placed a sickle over the stomach to prevent the swelling associated with a vampire. Romanian accounts describe sickles in the heart, sharpened sticks above a grave, and knives, pins, or stakes beside the corpse. Living people protected themselves with garlic, mustard, cow dung, and human faeces, all of which could be smeared on a person or a house. In Pomerania, people mixed the alleged vampire’s blood with brandy and drank it. Paul Barber, whose book appears in the video’s description, gives Horses the grim joke that the vampire probably never drank human blood whilst humans drank the vampire’s.

The cross also survives from this older material. A wooden cross or tar in the shape of a cross could guard a Serbian door, and making the sign of the cross near a graveyard could keep away a revenant. One Serbian custom solved the problem with a strange generosity: direct the vampire into a forest, where it could feed on animals and remain there. If prevention failed, the village had to find the corpse. The first person to die in an outbreak made an obvious suspect. If several bodies were opened, the least decomposed could be named as the vampire.

Horses gives the horse test as another example. In several Eastern European traditions, a horse refused to cross the grave of a vampire. Albanian accounts preferred a black horse, whilst other traditions used a blond or white one. A sunken grave or a crooked cross suggested that the dead person had been climbing out. The disturbed earth also had an ordinary explanation, since quick burial in shallow soil made movement and scavenging more visible. Blue light around a grave could come from gases, bacteria, or moonlight. Invisible vampires created different tests in different places: Saturday-born twins wearing their clothes inside out could see them in Yugoslavia, and dogs might bark at them in Russia. A Yugoslavian saying reverses the sign. Barking dogs meant there was no vampire, whilst quiet dogs meant that one had arrived.

Killing the creature was described as putting it at peace. Staking remained common, although the wood varied: ash around the Baltic, oak in Poland, and hawthorn in Serbia. A knife, sword, nail, shovel, fire, or decapitation could work as well because the force that killed a human also killed the alleged vampire. Russians threw suspected vampires into water, perhaps to counter the droughts blamed on them. Water also held danger for the dead in Albanian and Bulgarian customs. Native soil, which now seems inseparable from the vampire, belongs to the modern tradition that began with Bram Stoker’s Dracula.

Cremation offered certainty in Greece and appeared elsewhere as a last resort. It demanded time, fuel, and an accelerant. An adult body could take one to three hours to burn, an oil furnace could require up to twenty-four gallons, and an open fire might consume a large supply of wood without destroying the corpse. One account describes an executioner cutting a body into pieces after an enormous fire failed to burn it. Outbreaks came during crises when those resources were scarce, so staking and decapitation were usually more practical.

Dracula and the modern vampire

Bram Stoker’s Dracula gives the old material its most influential literary form. The novel follows Jonathan Harker to Transylvania, where he meets Count Dracula, then sends the Count to England to spread pestilence before a group led by the vampire hunter Van Helsing destroys him. Its scrapbook structure, made from letters, diaries, and newspaper reports, gives the supernatural story the surface of an investigation. Horses describes the novel as a culmination of centuries of vampire folklore and authorship.

Stoker researched geography, political history, folklore, natural history, medicine, language, and psychology. The video says that a Hungarian book about the principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia supplied large sections of the novel, along with the names Nosferatu and Dracula. “Dracul” meant dragon in Stoker’s period and later came to mean devil in Romanian. Vlad III, known as Vlad Dracula, may have supplied the name, although Horses finds no strong evidence that he drank human blood or otherwise served as the model for the Count.

The source also notes that Stoker’s research relied heavily on Western European writers. He never travelled to Romania, Greece, Turkey, or Transylvania, and his references contain little Romanian or Eastern European authorship. Horses offers one possible political reading: a foreign monster enters Britain from the East, spreads disease, and falls to English or English-adjacent men with experience of colonial work. It presents this as one interpretation among many and leaves Stoker’s intention unproven.

The novel became a success during Europe’s vampire obsession and quickly produced stage adaptations. Film supplied the next transformation. F. W. Murnau’s 1922 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror borrowed from Stoker and made the vampire a visual presence, even though the film did not succeed commercially. Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula then cast the Hungarian actor Bela Lugosi in the role. Black-and-white film made the blood at the mouth difficult to read, whilst the medium’s interest in glamour and sexual danger encouraged a new vampire. Theda Bara, one of America’s first film sex symbols, even carried the nickname “the vamp”.

The modern creature kept changing. T. S. Eliot placed vampires in The Waste Land in 1922. Vampirella appeared in 1969, and Marvel published The Tomb of Dracula in 1972. Each version altered the vampire’s shape, powers, and origin until the new creature stood far from the swollen revenant found in Slavic graves.

The vampire as a cultural form

Horses declines the familiar account that makes the vampire a symbol of humanity’s fear of death. That reading can apply to some versions, yet it leaves out the creature’s greater flexibility. The vampire changes whenever a culture needs a new answer. European villages gave it the power to explain catastrophe. Enlightenment Europe turned it into a problem for medicine and science. Stoker placed it inside Western Europe’s unease about Eastern Europe. Hollywood made it alluring at a moment when film needed danger with a sexual charge.

Future vampires will grow from later needs. They will inherit the old form and rebuild it for a different social or spiritual setting. The vampire is physically unreal, although the stories built around it carry more than fiction alone. Its history records what people fear, what they cannot explain, and what they want to keep outside the boundaries of ordinary life.

Limits

This note reconstructs Horses’ argument from the complete English caption track, the video’s metadata and description, and its absence of chapter markers. The description lists Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality (Yale University Press, 2008), Elizabeth Miller’s Dracula (2001), Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu’s In Search of Dracula, and Nick Groom’s The Vampire: A New History (Yale University Press, 2018). The video provides no page numbers, bibliography links, or chapter breakdown.

The historical dates, outbreak counts, medical explanations, folklore quotations, and accounts of Stoker’s research remain claims made or presented by the video here. Several proper names are difficult to recover from the captions, including the second medical officer in the early outbreak section and some names in the Serbian reports. I have kept those details cautious where the source itself does not make them clear. The sponsor segments at the beginning and end are omitted because they do not carry the video’s argument.

Further reading / references

• Paul Barber, Vampires, Burial, and Death: Folklore and Reality, Yale University Press, 2008.
• Elizabeth Miller, Dracula, 2001.
• Raymond T. McNally and Radu Florescu, In Search of Dracula.
• Nick Groom, The Vampire: A New History, Yale University Press, 2018.
• Bram Stoker, Dracula.