Dracula's Wedding:How Vampires Stopped Being Evil Monsters And Became Boyfriend Material.

It's all Lord Byron's fault. That's the long and short of it. Once, vampires were horrific folkloric beasts with terrible hygiene and some seriously unfortunate behaviours. These days they're matinee idols with good (though very sharp teeth), natty threads, and the incredible sexual stamina of a brown antechinus that's swallowed a job lot of Viagra.

I was at The Bell in Whitechapel for the London Fortean's Society's Vampires:from Monster to Mister with Dr Tina Rath who styles herself as a 'vampire specialist' (nice work if you can get it) and even has a PhD on 'the Vampire in Popular Fiction' (god help us if there's a war) talking about how vampires took this journey from being the ultimate outcasts to being the sort of guys (and gals) you'd happily settle down with.

Dr Rath got off to a slow start (and at one point she messed her words up so much I wondered - and I wasn't the only one - if she was having a stroke) but when she got into her stride she gave an interesting - if a little overlong, we don't all live as long as vampires, doc - account of what she has studied and what she thinks about the subject. Just don't ask her if there are any gay vampires (because there's loads of 'em, they're pretty much all gay according to Dr Tina Rath).

It's hardly common but there are several noted cases of young females being drawn to, and claiming they're in love with, cannibalistic sex killers. Usually ones that are always in prison which means they are both very very dangerous as well as, at the same time, completely safe and unable to harm their admirer. Unless, of course, some lunatic like Donald Trump starts letting them out of prison.

This, too, has become true of vampires. An 18c Benedictine monk, Antoine Augustin Calmet, seemed to devote a lot of his time to thinking about, and studying, vampires (including one that wouldn't even die after multiple stakings) but the vampires he studied were vampires of folklore rather than vampires of popular fiction and, for some reason, only seemed to reveal themselves to people in manual work and trades rather than philosophers and doctors.

The most famous of all vampires, Vlad Dracula, lived in the 15th century but was only identified as a vampire four hundred years after his death. He's a vampire who became known for his love of the women though 'the wives of Dracula', rather creepily, refers to his daughters and not his lovers. Hopefully, they weren't the same thing. That's some impaling that's surely beyond the pale even for Dracula.

According to modern experts, however, Vlad did have two wives (the first unnamed, the second Justina Szilagyi who married three other times) and these do not appear in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel but do appear in Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film. Vlad was buried in modern day Romania, in the ground of the Snagov Monastery with an unmarked tombstone. When excavations were carried out in 1933, no human remains were found in the grave whatsoever. Instead, they found the bones and jaws of several horses. Had dead Dracula got a bit peckish over those hundreds of nights?

Ealier, in the 18th century, there had been a thirty year vampire epidemic in central Europe which was believed to have been caused by Austria's annexation of Serbia and Bosnia-Herzegovina with the central figure being one Arnold Paole. Paola was a Serbian hajduk who, following on from the work of his compatriot Peter Blagojevic, was believed to have become a vampire following his death and this initiated a believed epidemic of vampirism in the region which left sixteen people dead. An Austrian confirmation that vampires were real led many to take the law into their own hands.

But Vlad was an outrider at a time before vampires were seen as sexy and romantic. Although female vampires of the time were believed to steal the beauty of other women and that took us on to an amusing digression on how one may become a vampire. Traditionally, to become a vampire you must be bitten by a vampire but other reasons have also been put forward.

A bad career choice (becoming a barmaid, for instance) could result in a woman becoming a vampire. Or taking up smoking. Or having a cat jump over your grave. Or, indeed, having a bat fly over your grave. Although as there are bats in pretty much every country in the world (though not Greenland, perhaps that's why Trump's trying to 'buy' it) almost every grave would have had a bat fly over it at some point.

If you are the illegitimate offspring of two illegitimate offspring (very much a bastard's bastard) you'll probably end up becoming a vampire and be careful eating the meat of an animal killed by a wolf if you don't want to develop a thirst for human blood.

The most likely way you end up as a vampire though is if you're a fictional character and somebody writes a book about you and makes you one. That's what happened back in 1815. It was the heart of the Romantic era but the eruption of Mount Tambora on the island of Sumbawa in Indonesia that year caused over ten thousand deaths, created a typhus epidemic that spread all the way to Europe, and plunged much of the world into a year of bad weather. 

1816 was known as the year without summer so, if anything, it was a dark romantic era and with this in mind Byron, the Shelleys (Percy and Mary), Mary's stepsister Claire Clairmont, and the physician John William Polidori all travelled to Switzerland and, to keep them amused during the long dark nights, they had a little competition to see who could come up with the scariest story.

We've all been there - though rarely with such long lasting results. Byron himself never really came up with much (he was more into gambling, trying to fight duels, and swimming the Hellespont) but Mary Shelley, famously, came up with Frankenstein (which you can read more about here) and Polidori turned in The Vampyre, soon to become the first ever published account of vampirism.

Not that Polidori knew anything about vampires. He modelled his vampire on Byron because Bryon was really into both sex and death/ Polidori's work went on to become so popular it spurned an opera and as Byron was a good looking chap (though maybe not as handsome as Polidori himself), the vampire was seen as a good looking chap too. But what must surely have really hurt Polidori was that, on publication, the book was attributed to Byron.

Polidori died young (25) as did Byron (36) and Percy Shelley (29) which some have put down to the curse of either the vampire or Dr Frankenstein but is ruined by the fact that Mary Shelley lived to 53 (not that old, really, I'm older than that) and Claire Clairmont, who went on to become a governess in Russia, to 80.

All short lives compared to your average vampire. A tradition began where it was said that vampires had to marry their victims before they were able to drink their blood which of course meant that vampires had to make a bit of an effort with their appearance and manners. Although the marriages, for obvious reasons, didn't tend to last very long.

For me, that would have been a good place to wrap up the talk - maybe chuck a few references to modern day vampires in - but Dr Rath continued on. She spoke about how Alexandre Dumas pere (The Count of Monte Cristo chap) wrote about vampires, how there was a time all vampires were dismissed as 'German bloodsuckers', A.K. Tolstoy's The Family of the Vourdalak, James Malcolm Rymer and Thomas Peckett Prest's Varney the Vampire, and James Robinson Planche's Bride of the Isles.

She mentioned how in Bram Stoker's novel, Dracula uses Croydon Airport to fly into Britain and then there's a run down of other big vampire events in the last century or so. 1922 saw F.W.Murna's Nosferatu put vampires on the silver screen for the first time and 1987 saw Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark and Joel Schumacher's The Lost Boys (which was inspired by Peter Pan's lost boys and had some wondering if Peter Pan himself is not a vampire) before we got to the modern television vampires like those in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Twilight, and What We Do In The Shadows - including energy vampire Colin Robinson (not Robertson).

Sadly there was no mention of Carry On Screaming, Blacula, Count Duckula, or the snooker player Ray Reardon though there was a little coda about modern romantic vampire books like My Vampire Plus One and Filthy Rich Vampire in which the vampires featured are good looking, excellent sexual performers, and always - and this seems most important of all - considerably richer than you.

These new vampires, Dr Rath, hardly seem like vampires at all - they eat food and drink red wine for a start - and, in fact, seem like people just made them up. Which, you would think (and I would too - but we're not vampire experts) would make them just like the earlier, also made up, vampires. 

To he credit, Dr Rath was self-aware enough to understand how silly saying you just can't invent your own vampires was but she did it with a straight enough face to have us all wondering. It'd been an interesting journey into the world of vampires and it's always nice to spend an evening with the Fortean gang. Thanks to David for hosting, thanks to Pizza Union on City Road for food beforehand, and thanks to Jade, Paula, Michael, Jackie, and Tim for joining me. I wandered off down Middlesex Street looking for a neck to bite.