This book is a colourful and thorough overview of vampires and ideas about vampires over the ages. The reader is taken on a journey from the blood-thirsty demons of Mesopotamia to the vampires in the TV series True Blood, as dangerous as they are sen ...
This book is a colourful and thorough overview of vampires and ideas about vampires over the ages. The reader is taken on a journey from the blood-thirsty demons of Mesopotamia to the vampires in the TV series True Blood, as dangerous as they are sensual.
For the first time ever, Scandinavian vampire traditions are treated in a book of popular science. The Bocksten man – the Swedish bog man – in Varberg, and the Takstain man on the island of Gotland keep company with the Danish film director Carl Theodor Dreyer’s vampire film from 1931 and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s child vampire in Let the right one in (also filmed as Let me in). Here we are told about real people, those who have afterwards been called vampires and those who considered themselves to be vampires. Here we meet contemporary vampire sects with blood drinkers and their donors.
The history of vampires is aimed at all those who want to know what a vampire really is, or has been, from a historic as well as a cultural perspective. Can you see a vampire in a mirror? How do they react to garlic? Is it true that they hate werewolves? Who was Dracula? And do vampires really exist?