Up to Our Necks : A Slew of Movies, Books and Ad Campaigns Is Giving Vampires--Real and Imagined--Their Long-Overdue Shot at Exposure

Vampires--both real and imagined--have surfaced everywhere lately: on stilts in Saudi Arabia, in divorce court in California, maybe even running for President.

And with a slew of Dracula books and movies due out, vampires have also been recruited as pitchmen for Tabasco Bloody Mary Mix and Virgin Atlantic Airways.

After centuries of lurking in the shadows, vampires have finally found their place in the sun.

Government officials, of course, are too busy figuring out how to correctly pronounce Bosnia-Herzegovina to deal with this menace. But others have picked up the slack.

One is Stephen Kaplan of the Elmhurst, N.Y.-based Vampire Research Center. Kaplan, 65, the self-described “father of vampirology,” claims to possess dossiers on 850 living blood guzzlers. His confidential vampire census poses such questions as: Do you have retractable fangs? How much blood do you consume in a day?

And, perhaps more salient: Have you ever been institutionalized?

From the survey, he has tabulated some startling statistics.

Percentage of vampires with graduate degrees: 35.

Ratio of vampires who prefer drinking blood from thighs instead of necks: 1 in 16.

Los Angeles, with 25 known blood imbibers, ranks as the vampire capital of the world, Kaplan says. Former vamp champ San Francisco now trails with 17, and San Diego’s rip-roaring night life has drawn a mere two. Among the locals are several movie producers, a politician or two and an exotic dancer who trades sexual favors for blood. “They’re not crazy, they’re not evil,” Kaplan says. “They simply have a physical need to drink human blood.”

Some hypnotize their victims into submission, others quench their thirst through violence.

In Australia last year, according to news accounts, a woman was sentenced to life in prison for stabbing a man and drinking his blood while he lay dying. She also used to slurp from cuts she made in her lesbian lover’s wrists.

Jurors in a recent Santa Cruz trial, however, scoffed at a prosecutor’s arguments that an accused killer who reportedly sipped her victim’s blood fancied herself a vampire. They convicted her only of assault with a deadly weapon. The prosecutor offered no apologies for the unorthodox strategy: “I thought, hey, if it was going to fly anywhere, it would fly in Santa Cruz.”

In yet another Bay Area case, says Kaplan, a judge dismissed a man’s claim that his ex-wife’s habit of drinking blood in front of the children was good reason to deny her custody. The judge’s ruling: Being a vampire doesn’t necessarily make you a bad parent.

“Musicians, actors . . . and late-night talk-show hosts should all be assumed to be vampires unless proven otherwise.”

--Kiki Olson in “How to Get a Date with a Vampire”

People have been fascinated with detecting vampires for centuries. In the early 1700s, European villagers commonly dug up the corpses of suspected Draculas and “rekilled” them if signs of vampirism were found.

In a case recounted in Natural History magazine, Austrian medical officers investigated reports of a mysteriously undecayed body discovered with fresh blood spilling from its mouth and eyes. When villagers subsequently pounded a stake into the heart, the corpse groaned.

The explanation: As bodies decompose, gases build up inside and push blood from the lungs into the mouth. The groan was caused by the stake forcing air from the chest cavity up through the vocal cords, the magazine said.

Several factors could account for the body’s well-preserved appearance, according to a news service interview with Rob Brautigam, who publishes International Vampire magazine and directs a vampire research center in Holland: Certain diseases and poisons, and cold or very dry ground sometimes act as preservatives.

In the 1700s, however, people believed such corpses weren’t really dead, but instead ventured forth at night through tiny holes in their graves and sucked blood from victims’ necks or thoraxes.

Percentage of vampires who are women: 80.

Most common vampire professions: real estate, medicine, entertainment, politics.

Today, the hunt for vampires continues in locales ranging from Saudi Arabia to the Democratic National Convention.

In July, humor columnist Dave Barry courageously investigated the possibility that vampires were seeking the White House. What about Jerry Brown? he wondered: “Most of the time, his own delegates don’t know where he is. He’ll suddenly show up somewhere, and then, whoosh, he’s gone. He doesn’t have a hotel, so nobody even knows where he sleeps .”

Barry’s theory: Don’t believe press reports that California’s former governor often sleeps on the floor. That’s just a cover-up “so people won’t consider the possibility that he sleeps hanging from the ceiling .”

Alleged Draculas also prowl the Middle East. Kaplan once fielded a call from a Saudi Arabian man who claimed his brother-in-law had been attacked by a caped vampire on stilts. When Kaplan suggested that such attire might prove cumbersome, the caller replied: “My brother-in-law said the vampire was the best stilt-walker he has ever seen.”

Kaplan rejects all but a handful of such reports. His three-page vampire questionnaire is designed to weed out “the kooks and crazies,” he says. Sample questions:

1. After you have taken blood, your victims are left:

a. unconscious

b. not seriously harmed

c. satisfied

d. dead

2. Can you see yourself in a mirror? If not, how do you check your appearance?

Kaplan says modern-day vampires differ markedly from their folkloric and fictional counterparts. Dracula and his ilk drank blood by the quart, cringed in the presence of holy water or crosses, and slumbered in coffins.

Real-life vampires, on the other hand, sip only a few ounces a week, often attend church or synagogue, and usually catch their shut-eye in beds. They’re also more likely to live in California or Florida than Romania. (Attempts to interview them, however, were unsuccessful.)

Yet there are similarities, Kaplan says. Fictional vampires possessed jumbo incisors and an inordinate fear of garlic. Modern vampires sometimes file or artificially lengthen their teeth. And they dislike victims who eat garlic, which supposedly alters blood chemistry in a manner displeasing to the discriminating palate.

Youngest known vampire: 13.

Oldest: 85.

Experts disagree over the causes of vampirism. Kaplan claims that compulsive blood drinkers have a condition he calls “reverse progeria,” which causes them to age very slowly and appears to create a physical need to quaff corpuscles. The thirst typically begins during puberty, he says, when red blood cell counts plummet.

A recent medical journal report, however, concludes that “there is no evidence that vampirism is a true medical phenomenon linked to an organic disease.” Dracula-esque behavior is instead attributed to psychological disorders, often with sexual overtones.

Celebrity whom vampires would most like to bite: Cindy Crawford.

City where vampires are most likely to quarrel with each other over a victim: San Francisco.

Real or not, vampire stories intrigue the public. Dracula scholar Leonard Wolf counts at least 200 films and scores of books on the subject, ranging from the serious (“Nosferatu”) to the spurious (“Billy the Kid Versus Dracula”).

The prototypal vampire, created in 1897 by Dublin-born author Bram Stoker, was modeled after a 15th-Century Romanian prince, Vlad Tepes--a.k.a. Vlad the Impaler.

Vlad apparently didn’t drink blood, but he certainly spilled it. When a visiting monk forgot to remove his cap in the prince’s presence, Vlad had it nailed to the cleric’s head, Wolf says. Other visitors fared worse: Vlad impaled an estimated 40,000 to 100,000 people during his reign.

One story had an invading Turkish army retreating in horror at the sight of a forest of impaled bodies outside the prince’s castle. But that incident helped make Vlad a folk hero. A few years ago, the Romanian government even honored him with a stamp, Wolf says.

Author Stoker’s Dracula continued his reign of terror after death, as a vampire. Wolf says Stoker also introduced bats to the vampire legend, based on the blood-drinking proclivity of tropical bats discovered in the Americas.

Now Madison Avenue is handling the vampire myth. The Columbia Pictures release of “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” in November will be accompanied by no fewer than eight books, as well as related ad campaigns for Tabasco Bloody Mary Mix (“Give your drink a bite”) and Virgin Atlantic Airways (free trips to Transylvania, including lodging at Dracula’s castle).

Columbia unsuccessfully tried to hook up with blood banks via “I Gave Blood for Dracula” T-shirts. The publicity campaign will, however, include an expensive line of Dracula-inspired fashions (sorry, no capes) and a Dracula soundtrack (sorry, no “You’re So Vein “).

Other vampire products hitting the market--but not connected to the movie--include author Anne Rice’s latest saga, “The Tale of the Body Thief,” and Olson’s dating guide. Among the topics in the latter: “Why going steady may not be such a good idea.”