what is the philosophy behind "vampires"?who do you think dracula is,with regard to our real life?

Answer 1

There was a real historical figure called Vlad Tepec, also known as Dracul (meaning Dragon in Romanian). He was the son of a Wallachian nobleman sent as a hostage to the Turkish sultan -- at this time Romania was part of the Ottoman Empire. Tepec (also sometimes known as Draculea, although that means Son of the Dragon) returned to his father's lands, and began a campaign against the Turks -- this is alluded to at the beginning of Francis Ford Coppola's film adaptation of Dracula. He drove them from his lands, and used some particularly bloodthirsty methods to do so. He was also a pretty bad landlord to the surrounding peasant farmers.

Christopher Frayling's book charts the history of Dracula as it develops from this figure, but also of pre-existing bloodsucker mythologies that were grafted onto the historical man by Bram Stoker and others. Vrykolakos (bloodsuckers) are an enduring feature of village lore in Greece and Turkey, and there are many other examples of blood-sucking spirits who return from the dead or stay young by drinking blood (another historical figure of importance for this is Elisabeth Bathory, a Hungarian countess who apparently drank the blood of virgins).

There are several scientific "explanations" for vampires and their hold on the popular imagination, including a rare disease called porphyria (a condition where your skin burns in sunlight because you lack the chemical needed to bind iron and produce haeomoglobin, thus making you crave iron-rich foods). There are also deep-seated concerns about ritual burial procedures that arise as cultures change or encounter other cultures.

The military encounters between the Muslim Ottoman Empire and the Christian (although with strong pagan traces) world of the medieval Balkans may well have brought fears of pollution, unsettled spirits, and unburied corpses - or bodies buried before they were dead, a grim fact of battlefield life. Nineteenth century vampires such as Dracula, and the vampyr in John Polidori's short story come from "the East," and can be seen as a political allegory about immigration fears.

Small wonder that the vampire mythology is still so resonant today, as rightwing media encourages hysteria about immigration. AA Carr's very frightening The Eye Killers plays with this by having a battle between a vicious white settler vampire and older, more ambiguous Native American undead spirits. Nina Auerbach, in her wonderful book Our Vampires, Ourselves, considers how the undead are a changing metaphor, who have been used in recent films and books to allegorise bloodborne diseases such as AIDS/HIV. Vampires have had a strong relation to anxieties about sexuality at least since Polidori & Stoker, and Frayling explores the similarities between Dracula's MO and that of the Highgate Stalker, a serial rapist who was attacking women in Stoker's area of London while he was writing the novel. Vampires often have a mesmeric sexual attraction, one that is often hyperbolic or androgynous (think about Gary Oldman's lavish locks and hairless chest in Coppola's movie, or David Bowie in The Hunger) - this is partially an Orientalist hangover, and partially a 20th century development reflecting anxieties about desire and the vampire as an eternal figure of youthful perfection.

Frayling's book offers another potent metaphor: Karl Marx referred to the aristocracy as "vampires" who were draining the blood of the poor and the peasantry. Perhaps vampires continue to be popular because they offer a metaphor for thinking about capitalism and the way in which it sucks the workers' souls. However, as Buffy demonstrates, vampires have stopped living in castles and started living in sewers/motels (apart from Angel, who is of an older order of vamp). Vampires can be said to have become the mindless consumerist masses, like football hooligans with fangs.

These are just some examples of the ways in which vampires have taken on meaning. Because they hover at the boundary of life and death - like robots, automata, zombies, ghosts etc - they are "test cases" for what makes a human, and what defines life. In an era where the President of the US personally intervenes to stop stem cell research, thus placing a higher value on the life of a foetus than a living human being, vampires have a great deal to offer as metaphorical figures.

Answer 2

vampires were created as a vehicle to titillate, intrigue, and fascinate first readers, then movie patrons. Dracula was not the first vampire in fiction, but one of the most famous. He was a sexual character, attracting female patrons to the movies in the very early 30's, and curling their toes in the novel itself. The character has been elaberated on, humorized, and extended throughout the years, turning him into a comic character, a disco king, and a horror figure. The idea of imortality is always interesting to both men and women. And both sexes desire the secrets of imortality as they get lost in the movies.
there have been many people wishing to get lost in the fiction of the story of Dracula and vampires in general.
Who is Dracula? He is the stuff that dreams are made of.
and so different from the realities of life.

Answer 3

the legend of Dracula stemmed from the old story of a lord in another country (possibly from Transilvania) who ate raw meat, which needless to say involved blood as well. That's one of the stories that could have spawned Dracula, or Nosferatu (the version before Dracula).

Answer 4

Dracula is a metaphor for what is really wrong with people.

We are takes and until we drain the life force out of whatever it is that we want we are not happy.

Dracula has powers and who has not wished that they had powers over others like the thrall to make people do what we wish.

Answer 5

There was an actual count who was very violent. He would behead his enemies and stick their heads on spears around his castle in Transylvania.

He became a legend and imaginations ran wild.

Blood being what gives us life and also in the past was spilled as sacrfices to atone the God or Gods. Therefore a person who drank blood would be the ultimite evil that had to hide in the dark from the God who shone like goodness in the sunlight.

Answer 6

i think the real dracula is among us and his name is alucard.

Answer 7

I am dracula and you are my prey.
(lol !!!!)

Don't you know this is a humbug ?