The origins of the word “vampire” are shrouded in a Carpathian fog. There are arguments for Turkish, Serbo-Croatian, and Lithuanian roots, among others, suggestive of the linguistic cross-fertilizations of central and southeastern Europe. We know the word made its way into English via French and German at, as scholar Andrew Hock Soon Ng signposts it, “the crossroad where Enlightenment science and rationality converged with folklore and the Judeo-Christian faith in the eighteenth century.” The vampire is a very European “hybrid produced by the marriage between folklore and modern science.”

John Polidori’s 1819 “The Vampyr” may be the first published vampire story, but the most famous vampire is of course the iconic Dracula. This undead, blood-sucking Transylvanian nobleman was the creation of the Anglo-Irish author Bram Stoker. Dracula made his first appearance in the eponymous novel of 1897. He may have been inspired by the fifteenth-century Vlad III of Wallachia—a.k.a. Vlad Dracula (Dragon) or Vlad the Impaler—but he was very much a creature of Victorian Britain.

There have been hundreds of stage, print, and big/little/digital screen versions of Dracula and his undead kin since Stoker’s book. The vampire idea, and the label, have spread around the world. The vampirization of the world, if you will, has been so pervasive the term is now applied to other figures of mythology, even when the cloak doesn’t fit at all.

For not all of the world’s legions of undead are nocturnal blood-predators with fangs. Andrew Hock Soon Ng argues that vampire-universalism, particularly prevalent now on the internet, is very much misplaced. “Non-Western undead embodiments, particularly from Asia, cannot be classified as vampires,” he writes. In fact, “subsuming non-Western undead creatures under the vampire as a category expresses more than just an Orientalist assertion; it is also a denial of the vampire’s singularity and the unique circumstances determining it.”

The vampire is specifically European, but Europe also had other mythological undead figures. There were many names for these creatures, and the vampirization of them was a precursor to the vampire’s global conquest.

Ng wants us to appreciate both the vampire and the many types of non-European undead for “their entrenched singularity as creatures.” In a topology of such supernatural figures, the Euro-vampire should be put into a “comparative cross-cultural analysis between undead entities from different parts of the world.” From Asia, other such beings include the Indian baital, the Chines jiangshi, the Japanese bakeneko, the Indonesian pontianak, and the Philippine aswang.

More to Explore

Do Vampires Really Exist?

Matthew Wills

October 18, 2021

And how would we know? Let's ask the Enlightenment.

“European renditions of classic Asian monster tales […] demonstrate the translational violence to which an apparent Asian undead being is subject when its story is adopted for a Western readership,” Ng writes. His examples include Richard Burton’s 1817 translation of the Sanskrit Baital Pachisi, A. B. Miftord’s 1871 translation of a shape-shifting Japanese bakeneko story, and Soulie de Morant’s 1913 translation of the seventeenth-century Chinese jiangshi tale. These take extraordinary liberties with the source texts to make the stories fit the vampire model. For instance, about Mitford’s “vampire cat,” Ng writes that there are actually no “noticeable points of confluence between vampires and the Japanese monster.”

But it hasn’t just been Western translations. Ng gives examples of local “recasting” of culturally specific undead figures as vampires, including a five–film franchise out of Hong Kong released between 1985 and 1992. About a Chinese jiangshi (which literally means “jumping corpse”), these were marketed as the Mr. Vampire saga.

Simply put, writes Ng, “we cannot separate an indigenous creature from its native cultural-historical and cosmogonic basis if we wish to comprehend the peculiarity and significance of its status as undead.” So, to “persistently label one example with the referent of another” is a “disservice to both.”

In short, let all the undead rise…and be themselves.

Support JSTOR Daily! Join our membership program on Patreon today.