h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Bram Stoker's Dracula revealed another aspect to the vampire legend.

The vampire is, perhaps, everything we secretly desire to be - erotic, predatory, amoral. He moves about at night, with free rein to practice his perversions. In short, the vampire is a representation of the id gone wild, with nothing to check it - utter amorality.

Coincidentally, Dracula was written during the Victorian era wasn't it? A time when the qualities you mentioned were actively repressed. Perhaps vampire stories offered the people of the time an outlet for such desires...

Exactly the point. Dracula offered a kind of vicarious experience of the experiences that were so repressed back then.

Do you think there is a modern-day equivalent? Should we bring back vampire stories so that people can vent their tensions?

Well, look at the popularity of Anne Rice's novels. The pendulum is swinging back to straitlaced morality and I don't know how people vent their tensions. Myself, I have little problem with repression, and was raised in a fairly open household. So I'm not sure. . .perhaps as repression increases people find new ways of releasing tension and repressed feelings.

I suppose. I notice that recent vampire films and suchlike such as 'Blade' also portray vampires as sexy. I think it's something that has been embedded in our collective consciousness over the last hundred years or so. It's amazing how their image has altered since medieval times...

Fascinating subject, but disturbing really. What does a vampire do? He overpowers the innocent, spills blood and ruins them; it seems to me that there are some deeply unpleasant rape-fantasy connotations involved in the myth.
The traditional method of dispatching the vampire is also relevent here; by using a stake (a classic phallic object) the hero (usually a younger male) destroys the rampaging (older male)bast and rescues the victim (usually innocent female). In short we have a sort of Oedipal thing going on with the young man figthing the older one for possesion of the female.
On the matter of the vampire-as-id idea, let's look at the fact that vampires have no reflection; vampires have no surface to reflect (no superego) only the underneath (id).
O.k. so vampires are poweful and, in there total disregard for the rules are rebellious and sexy; but I think they might also reflect a degree of male aggression.

Definitely male aggression, so why are they so popular with females as well? I think - as a female - they appeal to the animus, the raw, male side of our psyche.

Tricky one isn't it ... the very thing we find attractive is the very thing which, if it were reality, we would wish to avoid. So maybe it comes down to the fact that it isn't reality and simply provides a buffer zone to deal with these fears/desires. The id needs airing and the animus needs taking for a walk now and again and this is a safe way to do it.
When it comes to female fascination with the subject, I suppose it depends on the woman. If you take Anne Rice then much of her work seems to be dealing with the trauma of childbirth/death, but for a teen fan of Buffy, then someone like Angel could represent the fear/attraction of sex ... you don't have to dig too deeply to see the fact that Angel turns evil when he has slept with Buffy as a metaphor for sex=corruption.
Casts no reflection so you can see what ever you want to see in that dark mirror? Maybe.

Vampires also represent power, freedom etc.
They are immortal yet not truely alive, free to due as they please throughout eternity. They can kill, rape, destroy all without fear of punishment. They are fundenmentally evil with little need of self control or civil behavior. They have no real need of money or companionship only blood and shelter from the sun.

Hey I would love to be a superhuman rotting corpse for even a couple of decades. Oh and why do you have to be so freudian about it, Mead's I and the Me [Desire vs. Control] works much better. I imagine the idea of no real responsibity combined with overwhelming supernatural power is appealing to both sexes. The Vampires of Buffy are souless beings without the limitations of a consience to govern themselves [kinda like malicious children]

The vampire legend was originally the product of superstition combined with the contemporary bloodthirsty antics of such worthies as Elisabeth Bathory and Vlad Tepes. In short, and yes I am going Freudian, it is the projection of our deepest fears about our own capability for violence.

Maybe not just violence on a personal level, but a much larger social level. Race memories run deep and the great plague taking nearly a quarter of Europe with it must have seemed like some supernatural curse ... when you consider the blood connection through rat fleas you have to wonder. You could also see the whole thing as a reflection of revolutionary zeal ..if you take Stoker's Dracula, he is an aristocrat who literally feeds of the lifeblood of the peasents and his end comes at the hands of the representatives of the aspirant middle classes (Harker is a lawyer, Quincey Lewis a businessman and Van Helsing an academic)...kill the old order, so the new can live free.

One expert explained it to me this way: tuberculosis was the disease that fed the legend, due to its symptoms (pallor, weight loss) and the fact that the dead could transmit the disease. Even today, in the hills of the Carpathians, memories run deep of supernatural creatures and peasants still fear to walk abroad at night. . . .though now most predators still wear human form.

Sorry I've not replied for a while, but something struck me the other day when I was walking home ..it might sound simple, but I think we fear nothing ..literally. Think about it; it isn't what we can see about the vampire that we fear, but the very abscence they represent. A thing with no image and no soul, a thing of mist, an abomination that shows us no peace after death. What do you fear most? The open door or the locked one? The later, I suspect, because we can fill that vast, blank room behind it with whatever flavour of terror chills us most. Maybe instead of looking for the psychological or historical 'truth' behind the myth, we should look to something far simpler ... we fear the dark, vast blank of night and the vampire is that nothingness incarnate.

True. The human race has often personified that which it fears. Look at Death for example. The guy with the scythe. Human consciousness created Death during the days of the plague. But why? That's the big question. Why does humanity feel the need to create physical representations of the things they fear?

I'm sure I can't answer that one...

Because we have eyes - and if we can see it, it isn't so bad.

As I type, I can see mothes trying to get in to feed off the light ..it strikes me that this is an apt image for the vampire. Because the vampire has no light or life, it seeks to possess a little warmth form us. I suspect that this is another aspect of the psychological fear, the idea of fearing the invader. This old racist idea that 'they', the foreigner (which Drac - unless you're Transylvanian - is) will 'take our women' and corrupt us with their heathen ways is, I'm afraid, as old as time. I'd like to say that this wasn't with us now, but even in Buffy we still get the outsider represented as evil. Take a look at the collection of Buffy villains - Spike (A punk and, for a time, disabled), The Master (Eastern European), The Principal (Jewish), Mr. Trick (Black). Now look at the heroes ..Buffy (Miss cheesecake America, Xander (the ordinary guy) etc. Even today we're being told that the outsider is bad and the 'ordinary' is good.

Vampires are very erotic

Yes, very. Right up to the point where they sap all of your life spirit and turn you into their mindless croney.

No mention of the psychological reasons for the stories of Lilith?