SOURCE:An introduction to The Vampyre: Lord Ruthven to Count Dracula, edited by Christopher Frayling, Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1978, pp. 9-82.

Frayling is an English educator and critic who has written extensively on modern popular culture. In the following excerpt, he discusses Polidori's Vampyre in relation to several types of literary vampire in modern European fiction.

A Red Sea

The vampire is as old as the world. Blood tastes of the sea—where we all come from. Although we normally associate the myth with Eastern Europe or Greece, probably because of epidemics which emanated from those regions in the eighteenth century, traces of vampirism are to be found in most cultures. Blood drained by the Lamiae, emissaries of the Triple-Goddess Hecate: blood sucked by Lilith, the other woman in Adam's life; blood shed for dead Attis and mourning Cybele, the Great Mother; blood as taboo (the book of Genesis...