the 2020s

the 2020s are significant in the book as a moment when vampire stories become especially self-conscious about their own history. Older beliefs, literary inventions, films, and television conventions are placed beside one another, so that the vampire appears not as a stable creature with a single origin but as a changing cultural form shaped by fear, desire, medicine, religion, censorship, and adaptation.

Historical Atmosphere

the 2020s are set against the nineteenth-century world that helped make vampires culturally persuasive. The 1800s combined rapid technological change brought by the second Industrial Revolution with continued confidence in spiritualism, séances, witchcraft reports, and other supernatural explanations. Gill Hoffs describes Victorian Britain as a mixture of industrial development and discovery, “glory and guilt,” primacy and delight in the macabre, in which newspapers could still report witchcraft as fact. This tension matters to the later vampire tradition: modern audiences inherit both the scientific confidence of industrial society and the older imaginative structures that made invisible forces credible.

That inheritance is visible in the nineteenth-century New England vampire panic. Tuberculosis spread through households as “consumption,” apparently consuming the health of its victims, while limited medical knowledge encouraged families to interpret successive deaths as the work of dead relatives returning to drain the life force of the living. The case of Mercy Brown in Exeter, Rhode Island, shows how a medical crisis could become a supernatural investigation. After Mary Brown died of tuberculosis in 1883, Mary Olive died in 1886, and Mercy died in January 1892 after she and her brother Edwin had contracted the disease, neighbours persuaded George Brown to disinter the family bodies. Mercy’s body appeared comparatively fresh because it had been buried for less than two months during a cold winter and had spent time in a crypt, yet decomposition was treated as evidence of vampirism. Her heart and lungs were removed and burned, and the ashes were mixed with water for Edwin to drink; he nevertheless died on 2 May 1892. In this pattern of fear, the 2020s inherit a recurring question: when disaster exceeds understanding, does explanation follow evidence, or does it follow the story that best gives fear a target?

Older Myths Reconsidered

the 2020s also look backward to earlier moments when local deaths became public vampire narratives. During the eighteenth-century vampire craze, villages in eastern Europe dug up suspected corpses and staked them. In 1731, thirteen people died in rapid succession in one Serbian village. A doctor attributed the deaths to malnutrition, but residents insisted that vampires were responsible and persuaded him to exhume the bodies. He found little decomposition, apparent blood in some mouths, and bodies that seemed unusually plump. Johann Flückinger and other medical and military witnesses were then sent from Vienna, and their observations helped turn local belief into a documented case. The episode demonstrates how “evidence” could be produced inside a framework already organized by superstition: the bodies were examined, but the examination did not necessarily displace the vampire explanation.

Antoine Augustin Calmet’s work shows another stage in that transformation. The Benedictine monk, born in 1672 in Lorraine and admired as an academic, published and expanded a study of angels, demons, spirits, revenants, and vampires in 1746 and 1751. His The Phantom World drew on accounts such as those printed in Lettres Juives, including a report from Hungary attested by officials connected with Belgrade and by an imperial officer who claimed to have witnessed the proceedings. Calmet’s scholarship did not simply separate folklore from fact; it preserved supernatural reports within an academic and religious investigation. The 2020s therefore inherit a tradition in which vampires have repeatedly crossed the boundaries between village testimony, medical report, clerical inquiry, and literary history.

Adaptation and Cultural Memory

The 2020s are represented most directly by the BBC television adaptation of Dracula written by Mark Gatiss and Steven Moffat. This version initially presents Count Dracula as an unmistakably evil immortal, but gradually reveals a figure troubled by the myths that define him. He fetishizes the sun and demands that Jonathan Harker describe it, later watching a sunrise on television in another victim’s house. He recoils from the cross and appears unable to cross a threshold without an invitation. In the final scenes, however, most of these barriers are shown to exist because Dracula has believed the stories about vampires for centuries. His fear of the cross remains real, but the adaptation makes belief itself part of the monster’s weakness.

The series gives that weakness a historical and psychological explanation. Dracula had fed on poorly educated peasants who were deeply committed to religious teaching, and he absorbed the fears and convictions of those he killed. When he encounters Zoe Van Helsing in the present day, he jokes that he cannot wait to eat atheists, while Zoe interprets his vulnerability differently: she suggests that his condition is not merely infection by other people’s beliefs but shame, particularly shame at being unable to face mortality and die a true death. The adaptation consequently turns familiar vampire rules into a record of cultural transmission. A myth can control its supposed embodiment even when its literal claims are false, because centuries of belief have made the fiction psychologically effective.

This self-consciousness extends to the wider history of vampire representation. The Vampyre, published in 1819, transformed Byron’s unfinished fragment into John William Polidori’s story of Lord Ruthven, who befriends Aubrey and attacks the people closest to him. The magazine falsely attributed the tale to Lord Byron, using the name Ruthven in a way that reinforced the association with Byron’s public image. Polidori disputed the attribution, while the mistaken authorship also promised stronger sales. The episode shows that vampire culture has long been mediated by reputational borrowing and commercial mythmaking. In the 2020s, such history makes adaptation appear less like a departure from an original than another turn in a chain of misattribution, revision, and cultural recycling.

Media, Technology, and the Vampire Image

The period also gains meaning from comparison with cinema. F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, released in 1922, disguised Dracula as a different property after Florence Balcombe refused permission to adapt Bram Stoker’s novel. The film changed names and details but retained enough of the plot to make its source unmistakable. Prana-Film faced a copyright lawsuit and was ordered to destroy all copies, yet one print had already escaped and circulated internationally. Every surviving copy therefore descends from that single survivor. The story gives technological reproduction an almost vampiric logic: the threatened image survives by escaping the institution that sought to eliminate it.

Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula established a more enduring public image, with Bela Lugosi’s performance as the murderous and doomed Count becoming a model for the classic vampire. Later censorship altered even the sound version. When Dracula was reissued in 1936, the Hays Code required cuts, including the Count’s death groans and an epilogue that reassured audiences that vampires existed. The contrast with the 2020s is revealing. Contemporary adaptations can openly examine sexual desire, religious trauma, psychological shame, and the constructed nature of vampire rules, while earlier films were required to contain both erotic implication and supernatural suggestion within moral limits.

The relationship between media and fear is not confined to film. In 1954, the Daily Mirror promoted the idea that horror comics were responsible for the Gorbals Vampire hysteria and suggested that Glasgow might seek a complete ban. A secret government memo later acknowledged that such comics were not “obscene” under the Obscene Publications Act 1857 but argued that they were harmful to children and should be subject to comparable restrictions. By the 2020s, the vampire has moved through newspapers, comics, film, television, novels, and popular music, but the underlying mechanism remains recognizable: a medium is blamed for turning representation into behaviour, while public anxiety converts a story into a social threat.

Meaning in the 2020s

the 2020s do not resolve whether vampires should be understood as monsters, metaphors, or products of storytelling. The book instead places the BBC’s troubled Dracula beside the moral ambiguity of other modern vampires. Count Dracula can be presented as entirely murderous and yet given a tragic history of love and loss; contemporary vampires may avoid human blood and still violate moral boundaries; their attraction may arise precisely from their refusal to obey ordinary social rules. Vampire narratives thus make moral judgment unstable by forcing audiences to compare supernatural predation with human violence and appetite.

The decade’s most important contribution is therefore interpretive rather than chronological. It treats vampire history as a layered accumulation in which medical misunderstanding becomes folklore, folklore becomes literature, literature becomes film, film becomes a censored public image, and television returns to expose the machinery beneath the image. The 2020s present the vampire as a creature haunted not only by death but by accumulated stories: a figure whose supposed rules, identities, desires, and weaknesses are continually made and remade by the cultures that believe, fear, criticize, and enjoy them.