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Prior to the Romantic movement (say before the 1780's), the vampire had been either a subject of ecclesiastical study or a minor concern in folklore—it had no artistic currency.1 Then quite suddenly in Germany (Ossenfelder, Bürger, Goethe, F. W. A. Hoffman), in France (Nodier, Merimée, Gautier, Baudelaire), and especially in England (Southey, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats) the vampire had become an eidolon of Romantic consciousness, an apt mythologem for a new view of human interactions.2 My particular concern has been with adaptations of the vampire used not to shock, but rather to explain how the artist viewed his transactions with others: with his audience, with his friends, and especially with his art. For the Romantic artist, acutely self-conscious, found in this myth an analogy to explain how energy (life, imagination, creativity) was exchanged between the various characters and activities he encountered. Without the vocabulary of transactional analysis, this myth provided a working text, so to speak, to describe human exchanges.
What bothered me in my studies was that I was totally unable to explain the vampire's current popularity. It is one thing to explain why even “modern” writers, such as Henry James, Oscar Wilde or D. H. Lawrence used the analogy of the vampire to describe the inner and outer lives of their characters; it is quite another to explain why there is a vampire puppet on Sesame Street, “Count Count,” who teaches numbers to our children, or why vampire comics are one of the most popular genres in that febrile medium, or even why any child would want to eat a “vitamin enriched” breakfast cereal