"An Escape Through the Blood"
    Is there a difference between those who identify with the vampire myth and those who don't?

    This Research Project was conducted by Jennifer Marcum for the purposes of a Psychology class and is not to be copied in any way unless otherwise specified by her.

    You may however link this page. Thank You.

    Abstract

    Surveys were passed out on the internet to individuals who do and do not identify with the vampire myth in order to see if there was a difference between their personalities and they way view the world. 100 surveys were returned and calculated using a Pearson Product Moment Correlation. It was found that indeed individuals who identify with vampires are more apt to defy social rules and do things that make them feel happy (provided it is legal) regardless of what they have been told. They are also happy with their lives. These results can be interpreted to mean that if you are happy with who you are and do not need society to tell you how to act, then you are more likely to identify with a myth or ideal that is outside of societal rules. Vampires are portrayed as outsiders, and they seem to be who today’s outsiders are looking to for guidance.

    Introduction


    Since the beginning of time people have been enchanted by the very things that scare them. We all remember being tucked in at night with stories of ghosts, goblins, witches and vampires lurking in the shadows waiting to pick off some unsuspecting child who was not safely asleep in bed. Times have changed though; the world is becoming a big place filled with sterile buildings and black suits. Many of us are more afraid of joining the inevitable rat race than of Dracula jumping out of a dark alley and making us dinner. That is the reason for this research project. It seems that a great many of us in the world have turned to the things that we once feared, for comfort. Instead of checking the locks and hiding under the covers at night, one now sleeps by open windows in low cut shirts inviting the dark stranger to enter our homes.

    The occult has always been something that has haunted our society in the background. Witches were once burned at the stake and vampire-killing kits were once sold to wary travelers in Eastern Europe. Thankfully this no longer happens. Within the last decade there has been a growing resurgence of interest in the occult, and vampires in particular. According to the Philosopher/Psychologist Katherine Ramsland, this could be a result of a deep disenchantment or boredom with science and rationalism (1989). In a survey done at the end of the 1980’s by The California State University they showed that 27% of 574 high school and college students thought that vampires might actually exist (Ramsland 1989). This was ten years ago. A survey taken at around the same time by Andrew Greeley at the University of Chicago showed that more than 40% of American adults believed that they had had contact with the dead, nearly twice as many as 20 years ago. While two out of three Americans experienced having ESP and three out of four believe in life after death (Ramsland, 1989).

    Vampires are everywhere, in movies, books, candy, and greeting cards. There is a growing group of individuals that take comfort in the lore of the vampire. Many live the vampire lifestyle, while others feel a great bond with these creatures and surround themselves with vampire paraphernalia in the hopes of becoming something of what the vampire is. But what are vampires exactly? What is it that draws so many of us to the vampire, while so many others find solace in them selves or other paths? The purpose of this study is to find out, perhaps, once and for all what exactly draws individuals to the vampire while it leaves others behind. The vampire symbolizes a number of things, and had never been put as eloquently as Katherine Ramsland in her recent book Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampire in American;

      With the emergence of Lestat as a new type of hero who embraces his vampirism, how we understood the vampire changed. We learn that vampires defy the limitations imposed by social expectations and can therefore realize their utmost potential. They possess heightened perception and strength. They can cultivate great focus, passion, and awareness of life. They form mental bonds that allow them to read minds; fly, project astral bodies, move fast, and jump great heights; transcend gender categories; heal themselves; fully surrender to the flow of life; and defy death. Often they are young, beautiful, and vitally seductive, like gods of ancient times; yet even when ugly, they possess wisdom and power. Vampires feel everything with the amplitude of the Romantic poets. They know isolation, need, and the craving for meaning, but also the bond of unity with other minds. They seize the intensity of experience that many of us covet, and challenge us, if we dare, to take it for ourselves. In short, the vampire shows us what it means to live the extraordinary life. Now readers want to be vampires, not kill them. (1999)
    To be a vampire is to be an outsider. Many individuals in today’s society feel like outsiders. They do not agree with society, and the constraints imposed by it. They want to be free from the norms of dress and manner; they want a chance to be themselves. Norine Dresser wrote the book American Vampires: Fans, Fictions & Practitioners, in it she states “I believe my interest in the vampire has partly to do with the fact that within those unearthly realms I feel more comfortable than I do in the real world…Perhaps part of the appeal of the vampire is it gives us the believe that there are beings who can live outside the problems of society that we, as mortals, must face everyday.” (1989) If the myth of the vampire provides such a release, why then are there so many people that still cling to society? They willfully join the rat race, and follow without question, the footsteps of those that have gone before them. This is the difference that will be identified by this project. It is the belief of the researcher that the people who indulge in the vampire life are, for lack of a better word, bored. They feel trapped in the mundane workings of everyday life and they run to the vampire because not only is it sexy but it is dangerous and it allows them, if only for a little while, to damn the world and be who they want to be. As the author Anne Rice once stated, “If I were a vampire I would like to be Lestat. What fascinates me is that he knows right from wrong and he still does what he has to do. He’s determined to be good at being bad.” (Ramsland, 1989) This very thing fascinated many individuals as well. They know right from wrong but just once they want to do things that please us. They want to be hedonists and take what is rightfully theirs, damn the consequences. Society might say this is wrong, but the vampire facilitates this.

    For the purpose of this report a few terms should be defined. The word vampire has many meanings, and for the purposes of this research most of them will be included. A vampire is one who drinks blood because of a physiological need, also one who drinks blood because of a fetish. A vampire many also be one who ‘feeds’ on the life energy of another. Finally a vampire can be a person who dresses in period clothing, sleeps in a coffin and avoids the sunlight; a person who while they have no taste for blood still live the life of a Count.

    While at first such an experiment might seem frivolous, and needless it is clear that one can learn a lot about those individuals that live in our society, yet feel the need to live apart from it. The vampire is a passionate and alluring creature that has drawn many in. They draw individuals in with a promise of passion and beauty. The world has become a giant hospital and the vampire is the savage garden that lives outside of it. Many feel that if they can just escape from the sterility of the world perhaps they can finally live. Louis in the book Interview with the Vampire told his story to the boy reporter Daniel, who at once wanted to be like him. The story of the vampire’s life, his passion, his travels drove Daniel to hunt down these creatures till they would give him the gift he so longed for (Melton, 1998). He felt what so many of feel, and what so many of long for a release from. An escape from the pain of living is waiting in the shadows if only one are willing to walk with it. As Lestat said to Louis in Interview with the Vampire, “The wine has no taste. The food sickens you. There seems no reason for any of it, does there? But what if I could give it back to you? Pluck out the pain and give you another life, one that you could never imagine. And it would be for all time. And sickness and death could never touch you again. Come, I’m going to give you the choice I never had.” (Jordan, 1994) Who could turn down such an offer? A promise of total release?

    It is important to point out here that in a recent study on the antisocial behavior of individuals who play the game Vampire: The Masquerade, while nothing significant was found (they don’t differ form the standard average), some tendencies were found. These individuals seem to be More careless of social rules, they were resourceful, forthright, imaginative, easy to get along with, sensitive, expedient and apt to disregard rules and be self indulgent and they were also affected by strong feelings and possessed more abstract thought. A relatively small sample size was used which could account for the lack of any statistical significance in the findings (Simon, 1998).

    The question at hand inevitably is why should this be studied? Perhaps there is no good answer, but the researcher believes that there is. An integral part of psychology is understanding the workings of the human mind, and the behaviors one indulges in. Stephen Kaplan has been the director of the Vampire Research Center since 1972. He began doing a census in 1981 to count the vampires in the world. At that time he counted about 50 real vampires but now estimates that there could be as many as 300 in the US and 500 worldwide. These are only the findings of one study (Ramsland, 1989). Many others believe that there could be thousands of individuals in the world who are vampires or live the vampire’s lifestyle. There is a site on the Internet, The Vampire Research Institute (VRI), which has a survey geared toward vampires. They started this in 1993 and have since been compiling data. They have not released anything conclusive, but have found that individuals who are vampires or are intrigued with the vampire lifestyle are creative, they had close relationships with their mothers, they have few regrets and are comfortable with their sexuality (Ramsland, 1999).

    All the fictional literature says the same thing. Vampires are a mirror of ourselves (Schopp, 1997). One looks to the vampires in novels to see what is missing in their own lives. This is so because the authors of vampire literature facilitate this. Anne Rice’s vampires are all too human, but they live on the outskirts of our world. They have their own problems, and their own lives, yet they mirror ours. ‘For the vampire fan, the text provides a doubling of fantasy space-i.e., the text itself is another world for the reader, but within that text two worlds exist: one world like our own, and the paraxic vampire world, which provides alternatives to our world and, through such provisions, comments upon and even contests the paradigms that structure that world.’ (Schopp, 1997) The world of the vampire is a place to act out fantasies, things that the mundane culture one lives in might not agree too. The illegal is not being refered to here, however; we live in an age in America where sex and everything that goes along with is considered taboo. The generations before were very repressed and now that they are older they use their power to try and hid the world from many. ‘The vampire represents an unknown that may be threatening, but that also exposes the culturally repressed. The contemporary vampire’s otherness configures its world as a place to act out fantasies and desires without the constraint of human socio-cultural, sexual or even physical mandates.’ (Schopp, 1997)

    Methods

    For the purposes of this research a sample of 100 individuals was gathered using the internet. Surveys were presented to individuals at a small woman’s college in the south via email, and to several vampire related e-mail lists. The survey consisted of 36 questions to be answered on a Lykert scale of 1-5. Individuals who indicated that they identify with vampires were to complete another series of questions to ascertain how they came to identify with vampires, if they have access to vampire related paraphernalia, and vampire activities. They were also asked if they were happy with their lives and if they agreed with the quote from Poppy Z. Brites novel Lost Souls “He believed in them because they had to be there; otherwise there was no hope for him, because he had always known he could not live his whole life in the real world. He had faith that someday he would find them…or they would find him” (1993). All subjects filled out the questionnaire and e-mailed it back to the researcher.

    Results

    The subjects consisted of 80 females and 20 males, 77 of them were Caucasian, 11 were Asian, 6 were Hispanic, 3 were African American, and 3 were of another decent. The average age of the individuals in the study was 23 with a range of 41 years. 41 of the individuals who answered the survey were from the Southern US, 47 were from the rest of the US and Canada, 12 of the participants came from Europe, Austria and South America. 24 of the participants had no religious affiliation, 12 were Pagan, 13 were Christian, 12 were Catholic, 15 were agnostic or Atheist, 18 of the participants were a form of Christianity, 1 was Muslim, 1 was Taoist, and 1 was Hindu.

    It was found that a significant amount of the participants who identified with vampires lived in the south, r(98) = .308, p<.01. Several of the questions turned out to be significant for individuals who identified with vampires. They feel that people do not understand them, r(98) = .350, p<.01. They feel like they were born in the wrong century, r(98) = .433, p<.01. These individuals dislike conformity, r(98) = .233, p<.05, and they do what makes them happy regardless of what society dictates, r(98) = .301, p<.01. Their favorite colors are black, r(98) = .437, p<.01, and red r(98) = .350, p<.01. They dislike large crowds, r(98) = .205, p<.05, and they are more apt to defy social limitations r(98) = .309, p<.01.

    When analyzing the questions that the individuals answered when they indicated that they identified with vampires it was found that the average number of years that they have been vampire fans is 10.63. There were 6 people who claimed to be vampires in the study. According to the means the majority of the participants had access to paraphernalia, and vampire aficionados, but not hangouts or other vampires. The majority of them preferred Anne Rice’s vampires to Abraham Stokers Dracula. Most of them first came into vampires by reading books and not by watching movies, having a near death experience, a friend, or have always been a vampire fan. The majority of them do not agree with the quote from Poppy Z. Brite’s novel and the majority of them are happy with their life.

    Discussion

    The results of the study were exactly what the researcher expected to find. Individuals who identify with vampires seem to be loners, who don’t feel like they fit in with society. Vampires also do not fit in with society. Perhaps these individuals choose to identify with the vampire myth in order to have something in their lives that they could connect with. The individuals in the study who did not identify with vampires found things within society to identify with. Many listed that their religion was their driving force, while others identified with individuals in a craft such as dancing or art. Individuals who identified with vampires said that they gave them a release. That the myth of the vampire gave them a place to escape to and express themselves in a manner that they have never had the opportunity to do in the past. Their happy with their lives and happy that the vampire has made it possible to express themselves in ways they never imagined.

    It is interesting that most of the vampire fans in this study are located in the south while the major cities for vampire activity are New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. There is however a lot of vampire activity in New Orleans. Perhaps in future studies a larger group of subjects could be taken too see if these findings holds true. Further studies need to be done to see if these findings can be replicated, but the results of this study prove what has been found in the literature.

    References
    Brite, Poppy Z. (1993). Lost Souls. New York, NY: Dell Publishing Co.
    Dresser, Norine. (1989). American Vampires: Fans, Fictions & Practitioners. New York, NY: Norton.
    Jordan, Niel (Director). (1994). Interview with the Vampire. Geffen Pictures.
    Melton, J. Gordon. (1998). The Vampire Gallery: A Who’s Who of the Undead. Farmington Hills, MI: Visible Ink Press.
    Ramsland, Katherine. 1989. Hunger for the Marvelous: The Vampire Craze in the Computer Age. Psychology Today. 31-35.
    Ramsland, Katherine. 1999. Piercing the Darkness: Undercover with Vampires in American Today. New York, NY: Harper Prism.
    Schopp, Andrew. (1997). Cruising the Alternatives: Homoeroticism and the Contemporary Vampire. Journal of Popular Culture. 1-13.
    Simon, Armando. (1998). Emotional Stability Pertaining to the game Vampire: the Masquerade. Psychological Reports. 732-734.

    Click here to view the Survey used in the project.


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