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. |
