b) Faith in the magical “power” of blood.

About point a), it must be specified that this Life after Death should have place in an another world like Valhalla, Ade, Paradise and so on. The death is the limit between the real and the after-death world. This passage is very considered by every culture, and celebrated with special and peculiar ceremonies. A spirit or a dead corpse walking another time in the world of living beings means that the ceremony was not complete, not well-performed or, worse at all, it was stained by some kind of fault; now the spirit wants revenge! Also vampires fall in this category, dead in body but living in spirit, suspended forever on the thin borderline between Life and Death.

Regard to the second point, it is easy to see that in many pre-industrial cultures blood is not only a symbol of vigour, life and health, but it is considered also the container of these mystical forces. Drinking the blood of a strong animal or enemy, or eating his flesh, was a way

In the XV century, the Balkans became the field on which the Roman Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church contended for religious supremacy. Needless to say, both the Churches tried to use the popular superstition to frighten and to force their believers not to give up their religion. In 1490 Pope Innocenzo VIII with the Papal bull “Malleus Maleficarum” fixed that suicides and excommunicates were destined to “live” again as vampires, because they were out of God’s Grace and therefore Evil One’s easy preys. The Bull reduced strongly the abjurations among the ignorant rural populations; consequently both Churches developed their own peculiar methods against “vampires”. The Roman Catholic one set up that same complex ritual described by Bram Stoker in “Dracula”; the first step is the staking of vampire’s heart, then the chopping of his head off and the final step is the filling of the mouth with garlic. The stake must be made with the same wood used for crucifixes, like oak or ash. It is interesting to note that there are many pagan reminiscences in this rituals, as in many other Catholic ones: ash, for example, represented among Vikings the Life forces because the Cosmic Tree, Yggsadrill, was an ash-tree. On the other hand, the Orthodox Church periodically screened the graveyards , re-exhuming the graves and checking their degree of putrefaction. If the body showed no decomposition or less than expected, that one was the body of a vampire.

Summary: Jack Crow is the leader of a group of professional Vampire Hunters waged secretly by Roman Catholic Church. After the tragical conclusion of one of his missions, that almost wiped out his entire squad, he discovers that a vampire, named Ross Stewart, knows his name. Crow and his squad, strengthened by Felix, a shooter, Father Adam, a priest sent by the Pope, and Davette, a reporter, get another mission, that reveals to be a trap. They kill, after some efforts, Ross Stewart, and come back home. Here, other vampires are waiting for them. One of Crow’s squad dies, and the survivors take shelter in Dallas Bishop house. Vampires attack the house, too, but in a whirlwind of blood and destruction the vampire hunters manage to escape another time. But Annabelle, one of the group, is wounded: she must be hospitalised, where she can not be protected by vampires. Here she commits suicide in order not to put in danger the entire squad. But the vampires wants Jack Crow: at the end, on the balcony of an hotel, at night, Jack and three companions meet a vampire: in the subsequent fight, Jack, Father Adams and the vampire falls by the balcony. Felix, Davette and Chatty Cat (the only survivor of the original Crow’s squad) go to Rome, where Felix became the leader of a new team of vampire hunters, picking up the job of Jack Crow, only after we have assisted to the return of Crow as a vampire and his dramatic meeting with the Pope himself in which he find at least eternal, peaceful rest.

If Byron in his novel had thought of himself as a model for the aristocratic Darvell, Polidori almost certainly drew on Byron’s character and his own relationship to the poet for the “development”. Lord Byron is the model for Lord Ruthven, named after Ruthven Glenarvon, haughty and cynical hero of Lady Caroline Lamb’s romantic Glenarvon (1816). Polidori’s Lady Mercer appears to be based on Lady Caroline. Some features of the Byron-Polidori relationship find several echoes in that of Ruthven and Aubrey.

In the same way, vampires are periodically “burned” in a sort of global tradition, to exorcise manhood fears.

This is an atypical vampire story: it close on the near total triumph of the vampire, painted as a too powerful and intelligent enemy for his adversaries. The parallelism with Dracula is obvious but interesting: Barlow seems a kind of Dracula that reached full maturity, using Van Helsing’s metaphor. The Vampire Hunters, on the other hand, suspend their disbeli

Some topics in this essay:
Van Helsing’s, Vampires Furies, Ross Stewart, Ruthven Aubrey, Snatchers Moreover, Steakley’s Vampires, Melancholia Romanticism, Jack Crow, Danse Macabre, Salem’s Barlow, vampire hunters, jack crow, van helsing, inside evil, outside evil, roman catholic, van helsing’s, mina harker, catholic church, victorian age, roman catholic church, mina harker lucy, “the vampire tale”, van helsing’s words, goes little town,