vampire

In Hungarian and Slavonic folklore, an ‘undead’ corpse that sleeps in its coffin by day and sucks the blood of the living by night, often in the form of a bat. Dracula is a vampire in popular fiction, based on the creation of Bram Stoker.

The victims are generally said to become vampires themselves over time.

The popularity of vampires in the horror genre was greatly boosted by a series of best-selling novels by the US writer Anne Rice, beginning with Interview with the Vampire 1976. In films, the German director F W Murnau's Nosferatu 1922 was groundbreaking.