Famous vampires of literature: the origins of horror

They reside in ancient and gloomy castles or in luxurious and richly decorated apartments. They seduce their victims with their charm and their hidden powers or that they attack them with ferocity. They shun garlic and crucifixes or, on the contrary, are indifferent to them. In vampire horror literature there are plenty of them and with peculiar characteristics that provide a variety of characters, however there is no doubt that some of them represent the "founders", the archetypes that have given way to other famous vampires to exist in our imagination.

The vampire is generally an immortal being who feeds on blood, which spends its existence surrounded by the darkness of the night: thus favored by the darkness in killing its prey, it nevertheless shuns the light of day because it is lethal to him and would turn him into a heap of ashes. These are almost the canonical traits of every vampire present in literature, as well as in cinema or comics, for example. However, alongside the distinctive elements that make these characters into "vampires", various authors over time have applied intrinsic peculiarities to their protagonists that have made them unique, unmistakable and have given life to new vampire ideas: they have thus paved the way to the following works, which thus drew on and were inspired by these new archetypes.

Among these exemplary models we have selected three types of famous vampires in particular, which have established themselves in the collective imagination and served as example and inspiration for their successors: the charming but evil aristocrat, Bram Stoker's Dracula; the esthete and tormented hedonist protagonist of Interview with the Vampire, by Anne Rice; and the vampire "invader" who creates a host of his own kind, sowing death and horror in the province, in Stephen King's Salem Nights.