Weekend Argus (Saturday Edition)
He’s just mad about vampires
Jbjsaturday
BLOATED and rosy-cheeked, sallow with long fingernails, fangs and foul breath, young and good looking, cuddly and goofy – vampires have been all of this and more since they emerged on the ghoulish scene centuries ago.
As a teen, J Gordon Melton, who is a professor of American religious history at Baylor University, was transfixed by science fiction – until he discovered vampires.
He has written a book called the The Vampire Book: Encyclopedia of the Undead. He has a collection of thousands of vampire books, vampire comic books, vampire DVDs, vampire playscripts and poetry, and other vampire-abilia, much of it locked away in a bank vault with security to rival that of Dracula’s crypt.
Melton recently published The Vampire in Folklore, History, Literature, Film and Television: A Comprehensive Bibliography.
As we celebrate Halloween the writer shares his vast knowledge of the garlic-hating, sunlight despisers. Melton is a vampirologist, someone who studies vampires. His interest and vampire collection started when he was a youngster.
He started buying vampire books, and never threw them away. “I became even more interested when Hammer Horror Films, decided to do a Dracula film in colour instead of black and white. Christopher Lee was turned into a superstar with The Horror of Dracula in 1958,” he said. “They made six sequels. In the last one, Christopher Lee had almost no lines because he was paid by the line and was so expensive. They couldn’t afford him anymore.”
In the 1990s, Melton was working with educational publishing company Gale Research, and they asked if there was anything he would like to do. “This was about the time when Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula with Gary Oldman came out, and studies of vampires were heating up. I gave them my list, and the last item was a vampire encyclopedia. They pounced on it,” he said.
The history and folklore behind vampires goes back centuries like the stories of witches.
He said in Eastern Europe sto- ries were linked to unusual births and deaths – something like a caul over a baby’s face or a strange birthmark.
More recently vampires have become popular because of movies like the animation Hotel Transylvania 2, and handsome Hollywood stars like Twilight’s Robert Pattinson or Buffy’s James Marsters.
He is very proud of his vampire collection. “I began collecting for the fun of it. Now I have more than 800 copies of (Bram) Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula. An interesting thing about it is that the original version was sent back to Stoker to be edited and cut down. The original title was The Undead, but at the last moment, he changed the name. And in the original ending in the manuscript, Dracula’s castle gets blown up. I have some 6 000 or 7 000 other books, around 9 000 comic books, about 800 movie versions.”
He said the myths about vampires have changed. “Up until the 1970s, they’re all evil, and the only ending is to kill them. But now we have ‘good-guy’ vampires who likes the status, the long life, and have found a way to not kill. The first good-girl vampire was Vampirella introduced in a 1969 comic book.
He said in the 1970s, vampires stories for kids were introduced, like the character in Sesame Street.
When the Twilight Saga came along, you had a vampire book on The New York Times bestseller list for the first time. Vampires even took a humorous twist, like in Dracula: Dead and Loving It and Love at First Bite.
One of the things that is intriguing and confusing is the various “surefire” ways to kill a vampire: beheading, stake through the heart, put them in the sun .
Melton said in early European folklore, one way was to cut off the head. “A long time ago, some people believed that vampires should be buried upside down. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the vampire dissolves into dust. There are other rules about vampires that keep changing on TV and in movies.
“Some vampires are allowed to walk in the sun or have a reflection in the mirror. Before, you couldn’t take a photo of a vampire because it didn’t have a soul. In the Twilight films, vampires can go out in the sun, but they sparkle. And Buffy had lots of changes.”
He said in the last 25 years, there was a community of vampire wannabes who started adopting a vampire lifestyle. “They sleep during the day and work at night, buy a hearse and make it the family car, buy coffins and sleep in them, wear powder to turn their faces white. In the 1990s, there were some people who tried drinking blood, but the body doesn’t accept that as food and you throw up.”
When people learn that Melton researches vampires , he said, they make a lot of puns. But he just laughs it off. – newswise