Tuesday, July 15, 2014

On Vampires

Hello Liam B Hershtale here again to shoot you some knowledge. Today I’m going to talk about vampires. Now before you cry about Twilight and try to burn me at the stake you should know two things. One is that the entire embodiment of what we know today about vampires is made up of ideas from people who added to the myths themselves in order to make their literary or cinematic works not only more dramatic but also to make more sense. Yes this includes even Stoker the author of Count Dracula written in 1897. In this novel Stoker put curtain limitations on Count Dracula including the whole vampire coffin myth that is of course not originally apart of the vampire myth.  Stoker’s inaccuracies can be attributed to the oldest human condition death. That is so deeply ingrained in our reality that even when something is brought back from the dead there must be a way to kill it. You might ask yourself. “Isn’t Stoker the father of the modern vampire?” Well the answer is yes and no where he might have a direct connection to the way we may view vampires today he wasn’t the only one make changes to the way people thought about vampires. F.W. Murnau the director of 1922 Nosferatu is widely believed to be responsible for at least one of the daylight myths. You know the one without all the glitter. The second thing you should know is that the culmination of multiple myths across the entire planet can be seen as the sole reason for our total understanding of vampires. I’m serious every major civilization dating back to the first records of human history has a vampire myth in some shape and form. Now why is this? Well as humans we are prone to systematic fits of hysteria throughout history which are typically caused by two things lack of knowledge and fear of death. It’s not our fault we only try to make sense of the world around us so when we are confronted with what we personally can’t explain we reach out for explanations. Usually when this happens someone comes up with a theory that then drives others to attempt such theories until a favorable outcome is achieved. This is why we see weird and strange rituals like staking the bodies of loved ones into the ground and placing large rocks in the mouths of suspected vampires in order to stop them from feeding.  I guess the main reason for me writing this is to explain that people from our past used these myths to give us certainty in uncertain times and we today use them for entertainment. So if there is something you don’t view as correct to these myths or just that you don’t even like a particular take on these myths just remember that any of the stories surrounding vampires are the random interpretations that our human brains have formed to assist us in understanding. This means even you can come up with your own horrifying or beautiful spin on possibly the oldest monster myth of all time. Do you agree? If so leave a comment below and as always give us something to talk about so send us a topic. Thanks and have fun

-Liam B. Hershtale

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