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“To Prevent So Spreading an Evil”: Stakes and Vampires

February 15, 2025 Christopher Davis

Scholars pretty much agree that the practice of driving a wooden stake through a suspected vampire’s heart finds its origins in Eastern Europe many hundreds of years ago. But nailing down a date when this belief first emerged is difficult. For millennia, people worldwide have believed in the power of wood to rid themselves of evil. The Chinese have tao, or peach wood, to ward off evil spirits. Native Americans used cedar wood to thwart theirs. And in many parts of Europe, it was believed that white thorn or ash was the best wood to combat evil. But the act of taking a piece of wood, sharpening it to a point, and driving it through (un)dead bodies? To the English-speaking world, word of such horrors came to Britain’s shores by way of a travel log: “The Travels of Three English Gentlemen, from Venice to Hamburgh, being the grand Tour of Germany, in the Year 1734” — published in 1745 in The Harleain Miscellany.*

Having heard tales of vampires from the men’s German landlord — who in turn was paraphrasing Baron Valvasor (the first to perhaps ever document a case of a vampirism (one Jure Grando from Istria) in 1689 — the author of the travel log writes of bodies being exhumed from their graves:

A Vampire Impaled — Illustration by Albert Decaris from Le Vampire. Extrait des mémoires du chevalier de Villevert, illustré de burins originaux par Albert Decaris. 1944.

Their Countenances are fresh and ruddy; and their Nails, as well as Hair, very much grown. And, though they have been much longer dead than many other Bodies, which are perfectly putrified, not the least Mark of Corruption is visible upon them. Those who are destroyed by them, after their Death, become Vampyres, so that, to prevent so spreading an Evil, it is found requisite to drive a Stake through the dead Body, from whence, on this Occasion, the Blood flows as if the Person was alive.

There were several reason why staking was effective. It pinned the vampire to the earth so that it could not rise. It released the excess of blood from the bloated creature, and, if made of wood (sometimes the stake was made of iron), the organic material carries the aforementioned protections against evil.**

THE CASE OF ARNOLD PAOLE

The next significant and detailed account of a real person accused of vampirism was the case of Arnold Paole, a Serbian solider who died in 1725 (some sources say 1726) and soon was suspected of four attacks on villagers in the town of Meduegna in which he was buried. Upon their deaths, bodies were exhumed and found to be vampires. Villagers recalled Paole saying he had been plagued by a vampire in Gossowa (possibly modern-day Kosovo), and that he had killed the creature. But apparently not before being cursed by the vampire himself.

calmet-dissertaion-apparitions — A 1749 copy of Calmet’s influential Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits (photo credit: abebooks.co.uk)

While not mentioned directly in 1728’s De masticatione mortuorum in tumulis by Michael Ranft about vampires in Germany, the Paole story is traceable to the 1732’s Dissertationem De Hominibus Post Mortem Sanguisugis, Vulgo Sic Dictis Vampyren. It is pretty much certain, however, that it’s popularity in spreading across Western Europe is attributable to Dom Augustin Calmet, a Benedictine monk who recounted the tale in his influential Dissertations sur les apparitions des anges, des démons et des esprits, first published in 1746. There, Arnold Paole is Arnold Paul, but the story is pretty much the same. And it ends with Paole being staked.

The book went through multiple editions, and was readily available (in French) in England soon after The Harleain Miscellany travel log was published. All different publications. But all pretty much conclude that the vampire of Eastern Europe migrated to Austria and Germany in the mid eighteenth century and became a big hit among a public fascinated with the tales. No wonder then that in 1748, a German by the name of Heinrich Ossenfelder gave Western civilization its first poem to mention a vampire, the appropriately titled “Der Vampir.” Seems the vampire had crossed over from Eastern Europe, not only to Austria, but also Western literature.

THE VOURDALAK, VARNEY, AND CARMILLA

The intersection of history and literature is where discussions of vampires seemed to dwell for the next twenty to thirty years. Notable thinkers like Rousseau, in a letter to Christophe de Beaumont in 1762, asserted that he wholeheartedly believed in vampires. Others, like Voltaire, did not — even mocking such belief. But any scientific discussion that would quell superstitions from the continent was no match for the writers of the Romantic period who gave new life to the vampire.

Coleridge’s Bride of Corinth. Polidori’s Ruthven. Neither of these early English Romantic vampires are staked. But in 1839, Russian writer Leo Tolstoy, in the Gothic novella Family of the Vourdalak, is among the first (if not THE first) to work the folklore directly into a literary work.

Family of the Vourdalak introduces old man Gorcha, and his warning to his family that if he does not come back from fighting the Turks after ten days, he is dead. If he comes after that ten days, he’s one of the undead, and they must destroy him. He tells his family “if this happens, I command you to forget that I was your father, no matter what I say or do, and to impale my heart with an aspen stake, because I will be a cursed Vourdalak returning to suck your blood.”

And what are these creatures? Gorcha explains:

“… vourdalaks, as the Slavic peoples call vampires, are believed in those countries to be dead bodies that come out of their graves to suck the blood of the living… Father Augustin Calmet, in his curious book on ghosts and apparitions, cites many frightening examples. Several times, the Emperors of Germany have appointed commissions to investigate outbreaks of vampirism. The commissioners tell of exhuming bodies engorged with blood, which they stake in the heart and then burn in the village squares. The magistrates who were present at these executions attest — with oaths and signed statements — that they heard the dead howl at the moment that the stake was plunged into their hearts.” (translated from the original French)

While Tolstoy’s vampire may be the first in western literature to be said to die by impaling it, English writers would soon take up the stake a few years after in James Malcolm Rhymer’s and Thomas Peckett Prest’s penny dreadful, Varney The Vampire.

Varney: The Desecrated Corpse — Vampires can definitely be destroyed by stakes in the penny dreadful that is VARNEY THE VAMPIRE (1845-47)

Published in serialized format from 1845 to 1847, Varney The Vampire is the first vampire tale in English literature to makes clear that stakes kill the undead (see especially the 48th chapter). It is also the first work to introduce the trope of a vampire having fangs. And it was all but forgotten as an essential piece of the puzzle that is vampires in literature. Looked down upon as it was the people’s fiction of the penny dreadfuls. Not artful like the vampire to come thirty years later from the penn of a talented Irish writer.

Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, first widely made available in 1872 (included in the author’s In a Glass Darkly) is considered among the first truly great vampire stories in English literature. Predating Bram Stoker’s Dracula by 25 years, Carmilla is not only a cornerstone of vampire literature, but also an early example of lesbianism in the genre.

It is a tale of the close relationship between Laura, the female protagonist, and Carmilla, a mysterious girl invited to live under the same roof with Laura, prone to mood swings and melancholy. When it is revealed that Carmilla is, in fact, a 17th century Countess named Mircalla Karnstein — and a vampire — it is only a matter of time before the men in Laura’s life track down the vampire, stake it, cut off its head, burn the body, and scatter the ashes in a river.

STAKES AND STOKER

Stoker would pick up the practice in Dracula (1897) when Lucy Westenra is staked by her fiancé, Arthur Holmwood. As for Dracula himself? Dispatched with a kukri knife to the throat and a Bowie knife to the chest. Arguably, the more horrendous and gory a death is Lucy’s, and not the vampire who made her.

From Dr. Seward’s Diary (Chapter XVI) comes the account of Lucy’s end:

“The Thing in the coffin writhed; and a hideous, blood-curdling screech came from the opened red lips. The body shook and quivered and twisted in wild contortions; the sharp white teeth champed together till the lips were cut, and the mouth was smeared with a crimson foam. But Arthur never faltered. He looked like a figure of Thor as his untrembling arm rose and fell, driving deeper and deeper the mercy-bearing stake, whilst the blood from the pierced heart welled and spurted up around it.”

By the dawn of the twentieth century, the public at large was becoming well aware of this pointy wooden means of destroying the undead. Though Stoker’s novel sold only moderately well upon release, sales of it skyrocketed when Dracula was adapted for Broadway in the 1920s. From there, it is only a short jump to 1931’s DRACULA, Universal studios’ adaptation. There, the Count is staked off-screen with an unceremonious whack of a hammer and moan from Lugosi.

MAKE NO MISTAKE

Actor Michael Gough stakes vampire woman Valerie Gaunt in Hammer’s DRACULA (a.k.a. HORROR OF DRACULA) from 1958.

In the late 1950s, Hammer Studios would not only bring out the stake to destroy the “vampire woman” in HORROR OF DRACULA (1958), but also, in the process, introduce a gush of bright red blood that other filmmakers would go on to repeat again and again. The rise of the hammer. The thrust of the stake. It was all very sexual. Penetration. Release, But let’s leave that for the literary scholars and psychoanalysts to discuss.

Suffice to say that by the 1960s, stakes and vampires went together like flyswatters and flies. It’s the first thing vampire hunters reach for — next to, maybe, the holy water or crucifix. No wonder it ended up in many a vampire hunting kit (which started “turning up” (read as: were made)) in the twentieth century. But the authenticity of these kits is always questioned. Still cool as hell.

montague-summers-kit-at-vampa-2400px — A 20th century vampire hunting kit that belonged to Montague Summers, author of The Vampire: His Kith and Kin. From the Vampa Museum collection.

Make no mistake, however: people like the influential and eccentric Montague Summers (1880-1948) — whose own vampire hunting kit is pictured here in this post — truly believed in vampires. And as much as enlightened twentieth and twenty-first century men and women relegate vampires solely to the world of fiction, there are still those who turn to the stake to destroy suspected vampires. As recently as March of 2024, an Oregon man staked his mother, believing her to be a bloodsucker.

It’s bloody business to impale a person. Just ask Mel Brooks. A brilliant parody of Francis Ford Coppolla’s DRACULA (1992), Mel Brooks’ DRACULA: DEAD AND LOVING IT (1995) has perhaps the bloodiest — and definitely the funniest — destruction of a vampire ever seen on screen. Brooks, along with writers Rudy De Luca and Steve Haberman,*** take staking to a whole new level when Jonathan Harker takes a literal bloodbath dispatching the undead Lucy. It’s a scene embedded below.

Once you watch it — and now, perhaps, having read this blog post — you will never think of staking a vampire in quite the same way again.

*Click here to read a more detailed excerpt from The Travels of Three English Gentlemen.

**Paul Barber’s Vampires, Burial and Death is an excellent resource for those who wish to dig further into the nature of corpses and why many who were disinterred were thought to be vampires.

***In addition screenwriting, Steve Haberman is a film historian. Check out his many great Blu-ray and DVD feature commentaries on many horror films, including 1931’s DRACULA and its recent 4K re-release.

Finally, the photo that server as header for this post is from 1968’s DRACULA HAS RISEN FROM THE GRAVE. Not one of best of Hammer’s Dracula films, but still a solid enough entry (with interesting color filters) — except for the silly part where Dracula actually removes a stake from his heart. Because the right prayer wasn’t said. Yeesh, so many rules. Give me a good beheading any day.

books, culture, film, history

Vamping It Up: Rudyard Kipling, Theda Bara & the 20th Century Femme Fatale

May 31, 2014 Christopher Davis

"The Vampire" by Philip Burne-Jones (1897) is an early femme fatale — “The Vampire” by Philip Burne-Jones 1897

Upon seeing the painting by artist Philip Burne Jones entitled “The Vampire” — first exhibited at the New Gallery in London in 1897 — poet Rudyard Kipling was inspired to write his poem of the same name. A rumination on the vampiric nature of the femme fatale (a term later in vogue in the mid twentieth century), the painting and the poem both depict an unnamed woman who seems to drain all strength and life from an unnamed man.

Fuseli's "Nightmare" (1781) — Henri Fuseli’s “The Nightmare” (1781)

Much like the female figure’s position of succubus in Burne-Jones’ work, Henri Fuseli’s painting from 1781, “The Nightmare” is an obvious inspiration — one known well to Victorian artists for its otherworldly incubus (or male demon) ravaging a sleeping female victim. But in Burne-Jones work, as in Kipling’s poem, the vampire is female, inverting the standard of predator and prey in a way that had really only been previously done (outside of poetry, perhaps) by Sheridan Le Fanu and his groundbreaking novella “Carmilla” (1871) [a known influence on Bram Stoker’s DRACULA and particularly the excised first chapter, “Dracula’s Guest” which was later published as a short story].

“A fool there was,” begins Kipling, and like lovers in poems before him, the unnamed man falls for “his lady fair.” The narrative voice, however, calls her by another name: “the woman who did not care.” In the end, Kipling writes

The fool was stripped to his foolish hide
(Even as you and I!)
Which she might have seen when she threw him aside —
(But it isn’t on record the lady tried)
So some of him lived but the most of him died —
(Even as you and I!)

Note that Kipling’s vampire never explicitly bares it all — not her nature, her fangs nor, to those later raised on Hammer Horror, her breasts. Kipling’s lyrical tones, almost musical and lighthearted in their cadence, impart the tale of a man drained (“mostly dead”) by a woman who “stripped his.. hide… and threw him aside.” Left to the reader is interpretation: is this a traditional vampire sucking blood? weakening the man sexually? playing on his pride and taking everything he has? (Read the full poem and decide for yourself.)

Fin de siècle art is charged with female empowerment — though it is often limited (because of the societal constructs of the day) to a woman’s ability to leverage sex to great advantage and (perhaps more shocking for the times) establish a persona of strength through sexuality. It is a persona donned with the intention — conscious or not — to simultaneously attract men while repulsing, even threatening them.

Enter the vamp.

The use of the word “vamp” as separate and distinct from “vampire” is American slang and loosely dates to 1909 after Porter Emerson Browne took the Kipling poem and turned it into a stage play entitled “A Fool There Was” (its title taken from the first line oft repeated in Kipling’s poem). Instead of bloodletting, the vampire of the film uses sex, drink and drugs in order to drain her victim.

Later made into a film in 1915, “A Fool There Was” is the story of a woman “of the vampire species” (as an intertitle card reads) who uses her charms to seduce and corrupt a moral Wall Street lawyer. “Kiss me, my fool” she commands at one point, as if hypnotizing her victim. “You have ruined me, you devil, and now you discard me!” he later laments.

The exchange is bloodless, but nonetheless draining.

A Fool There Was, first a stageplay, featured an early femme fatale — A Fool There Was 1915

As a promotional poster for the film from the period shows, here again we have the woman in a dominant sexual position above the man. Consciously or not, the filmmakers repeat the archetypal image of the inverted sleeping beauty. The promise here is death, not awakening. It is to be a kiss from the blood red mouth of a vampire that the victim receives and not the sweet peck from the non-threatening lips of Prince Charming.

Theda Bara was the film’s star. Billed as equal parts exotic and erotic, the studio (Fox) kept her origins a mystery, but it is no secret that she began life as Theodosia Burr Goodman. “Theda Bara” — an anagram for Arab death — was her stage name. Some consider her to not only be the first Hollywood vamp, but also its first true sex symbol. Mary Pickford was everything good, innocent and wholesome (plus, as she herself insisted, a natural blonde); Theda, on the other hand, was the mysterious temptress. She was a bad girl. Wanton. Sinful. Raven-haired with dark eyes.

Early on, film producers knew that tapping into established symbols of good and evil paid dividends at the box office, so the Hollywood system responded for decades with starlets that best represented this visual, and visceral, dichotomy that was vamp vs. virgin. For Theda Bara, however, it meant typecasting. Two years later she would play Cleopatra, but for the most part, her career was short-lived.

The vamp, however, survived. Lya de Putti gained notoriety as “The Hungarian Vamp” (appearing in films like D.W. Griffth’s SORROWS OF SATAN (1926). The Vamp character (or caricature) even graced the cover of a 1925 LIFE magazine in highly stylized, art deco elegance. It was during the nineteen twenties that the word became synonymous with sexually aggressive women about whom mothers would warn their boys.

Don’t believe that the vamp was taken seriously in the 1920s? Read “Mothers Complain that Modern Girls ‘Vamp’ Their Sons at Petting Parties” from The New York Times, February 17, 1922.

Sound changed film forever. And so too was the vamp transformed. Marlene Dietrich would bring a different, more androgynous and smoldering sexuality to the screen. Other actresses, like Jean Harlow, would infuse the character with comedy — earning her the nickname “the laughing vamp.”

The second world war saw the rise of film noir, and with it, the stock character of the femme fatale in her more recognizable, modern form. A more complex character than her vampish predecessors — the femme fatale of the forties (and into the fifties) evolved. She became more human, more vulnerable, yet was still a threat to fools unlucky enough to fall victim to her charms. Best embodied by actresses like Ava Gardner in “The Killers” (1946), this femme fatale was far from her vampiric roots, but remained nonetheless dangerous as ever.

A seductress from the moment she is introduced on the screen, Ava Gardner plays Kitty Collins, a moll that draws the male lead (“Swede” played by Burt Lancaster) like a moth to a flame.

Ava Gardner in THE KILLERS (1946) — Ava Gardner as the femme fatale Kitty Collins in THE KILLERS (1946)

Adapted from a story by Ernest Hemingway, “The Killers” eventually (spoiler) finds Kitty at the center of theft, deception and murder. Ultimately penitent, Gardner’s femme fatale of film noir is no heartless vamp, but what she shares with her forebears is a feminine allure that is irresistible to men. And the root cause of their downfall.

By the nineteen sixties and seventies — even well into the eighties — femme fatales were still a fixture of film, but they found expression is a multitude of many and varied characters; from dual-agent (Honor Blackman’s Pussy Galore in “Goldfinger”) to masochist (Isabella Rossellini in “Blue Velvet”) to outright psychotic (Glenn Close in “Fatal Attraction”) and even sympathetic victim (Kim Bassinger in “L.A. Confidential”), the femme fatale of the latter half of the 20th century matured and, with each iteration, seemed to become exceedingly more complex.

And the vamp? A lost caricature of sorts. A leftover whose heavy eyeliner and dark lips are seen more often in Goth subculture than in the movies. No surprise that the progenitors of Goth Rock (including bands like Bauhaus and Siouxsie and the Banshees) were heavily influenced by silent film — particularly German Expressionism. Siousxie Sioux herself often wore makeup reminiscent of the vamp.

While the role of the temptress is as old as the Bible, the part as played by actresses in Hollywood is only a century old. Is the femme fatale a necessary archetype in western culture? Or is the character outmoded?

Tapping into something quite visceral in human sexuality, the femme fatale will always have a place in popular culture. Just a different face. And one can only hope that the next century finds film fans still in love with the woman who is mysterious, exotic, erotic, dark and even potentially deadly.

VAULT OF THOUGHTS