Why is Dracula Catholic? The Influence of Eastern European Folklore on the Modern Vampire

Bram Stoker’s Dracula was drawing on a two century legacy of vampire stories. The concept of the modern vampire was developed by Western Europe starting in the late 17th century, through compiling and conflating various superstitions. While the origins of the vampire are from Eastern Europe and the Balkans, these superstitions were never developed into a singular monster until Austrian soldiers stationed in Eastern Europe began to hear reports of vampirism.  

When they investigated, they found that various beliefs concerning corpses rising from the dead and sucking the blood of the living were widespread. But this belief in vampires was not contained to folktales and superstition, but instead was viewed by the locals as a fact of everyday life. In a Serbian village, when a dead man named Arnold Paole was suspected of vampirism, “the villagers ‘drove a stake through his heart, according to their custom, whereby he gave an audible groan and bled copiously’”.¹

These beliefs both arose from traditional superstition as well as the mysticism of Catholicism and Eastern Orthodox (the most predominant religions in the area). In Greece, for example, vampirism functioned to “[strengthen] the position of the Church as a social institution,” as they believed that the cause of “vampirism lay in practices that weaken religious belief, such as insufficient attendance at Mass, or behavior that violates religious norms such as conceiving children on holy days”.²

There were vampire stories before Dracula, but the uniqueness of the novel is in the way Stoker transformed Eastern European superstition into a real and present danger for Western Europe. In Western European, where the ideas of the Enlightenment and rationalism had spread, these accounts were viewed as simple superstition. They were curiosities— interesting to discuss and to include in scary stories, but no more. While Bram Stoker begins the novel with an English solicitor bemused by the local superstitions of “‘vrolok’ and ‘vlkoslak”—both of which mean the same thing…something that is either were-wolf or vampire,” these superstitions are soon revealed to be true.³ 

Soon after Dracula is revealed to be a vampire, he moves from Transylvania to England, where he then begins to menace the central cast of characters. It is by transporting the vampire into Western society that Stoker convinces his contemporary Protestant audience to view the vampire as anything more than so-called primitive Catholic superstition. 

In contrast to Protestantism, Catholicism and Orthodoxy believed in very physical manifestations of their beliefs, such as the literal transubstantiation of communion hosts into Jesus’ body or the presence of stigmata and incorruptibility in saints. For Western Europe, in the midst of the Age of Reason, vampires “became historicized as ancient legend and dark folklore (rather than acknowledged as the uncomfortably modern phenomenon it really was..in an attempt to confine them to a remote Catholic past”.⁴

Stoker’s novel is filled with references to Catholicism, the classic example being the crucifix used as protection against vampires. Stoker’s most original addition to the vampire legend then, might be his depiction of the female vampire. 

Historically, vampirism has been believed to be spread in numerous ways. In the Paole case, for example, vampirism can be contracted from eating the soil of a vampire’s grave or by eating sheep that a vampire has killed. But despite the potential for women to become afflicted with vampirism, cases of women being accused to be vampires appears to be exceedingly rare. 

In the novel, vampirism is spreads through Dracula drinking his victim’s blood, and then coercing the victim to drink some of his blood in turn. This is widely read as a sexual metaphor, especially when Dracula only drinks the blood of young women, and attacks the male characters by other means. The transformation of a young woman into a vampire, however, necessitates a more complicated interpretation. 

A large section of the book is devoted to Lucy Westenra, who has been bitten by a vampire and is now wasting away in bed. Lucy’s character is built on contradiction. In some ways she is an archetypal Victorian woman. She is both chaste and beautiful—even in frail condition. When she is first introduced to the reader, she has been proposed to by three different men, yet when she asks her fiance for a kiss “in a soft, voluptuous voice” the characters immediately realize that she is under Dracula’s influence.⁵ However, she has a notably livelier personality than the heroine Mina, and flippantly asks “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as many as want her[?]”.⁶ In contrast, Mina writes in her diary that she “suppose[s] the New Woman won’t condescend in future to accept; she will do the proposing herself. And a nice job she will make of it, too!”.⁷ 

When she is finally transformed into a vampire, it is difficult to know if Bram Stoker is intending to shock the audience with her change in character or to punish Lucy for her feisty personality. The vampire Lucy is a very different creature from Dracula. She, like him, uses charm and hypnosis to lure in victims, attempting to seduce the male characters of the novel. However, none of the men fall prey to her “voluptuous wantonness”.⁸ In pre-Dracula works—most obviously Carmilla—women vampires not only had a more tenuous connection to Eastern European folklore, but solely prayed on women as well. 

Instead, Lucy begins to prey on children, a “rejection of motherhood, so basic to the good woman of the time…motherhood was thought to be [women’s] natural essence”.⁹

In comparison to the carefully planned murders carried out by Dracula, Lucy acts more like cautionary tales of witches than a seductive vampire. In fact, Eastern Europe had a rich history of folklore that makes little distinction between vampire and witch. In Albania, for example, they were called the shtriga. Witches were warnings to women about behaviors considered wicked or sinful, but they were also used to scare children into behaving as a version of the boogeyman. Indeed, Lucy quickly becomes a local legend, with children calling her the “bloofer lady.”

Stoker combining and contrasting Eastern European Catholic folklore with Western European rationalism is only a part of his contribution to the concept of the vampire. Equally as important is his creation of the vampire women, which had to be created separately from the seventeenth century conception of the male vampire. The vampire woman, as a mixture of vampiric Eastern European folklore and Victorian England’s values about women, is a more obviously moralistic creature than the vampire man—a warning against promiscuity and the rejection of motherhood. 

Bram Stoker was not only the creator of the now-ubiquitous version of the vampire, but a creator of a new monster all together—the vampire woman. 

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