The literary vampire is also a shape shifter.

In nineteenthcentury British fiction there are a number of famou

s vampires, each unique. In 1819 in The Vampyre, John Polidori introduced Lord Ruthven, the vampire as t
ypical gothic villain, and established the vampire craze of the nineteenth century that resulted in a flood of
German vampire poetry, French vampire drama, and British vampire fiction. Sheridan Le Fanu published t
he famous story “Carmilla" in 1872, introducing readers to an erotic lesbian vampire. In 1897 Bram Stoker
published Dracula, fixing the character of the Transylvanian nobleman as the archetypal vampire firmly in t
he public imagination. (“Introduction to the Fantastic Vampire” by James Craig Holte 2002: XI)

In Roger Avary's 1994 film Killing Zoe, a vampire subtext resonant with popcultural conceptions of vampire
s, AIDS, and homosexuality functions as a means of encoding character and propelling the narrative. While
not a vampire film proper, Killing Zoe draws on a wealth of popular associations between vampirism and the
spread of HI V infection. According to these contemporary allegories, a person infected with the virus beco
mes the metaphorical vampire. The popular rationale underlying Killing Zoe's vampire imagery, in turn,esta
blishes the infected person as a monster who seeks to infect others.Significantly, this danger is a sexual one,
as in traditional vampire lore where the vampire affects a sexual conquest through a bite to the neck, turning
his (less frequently her) victims into fellow vampires when an exchange of blood occurs. The vampire “infec
ts” the victim through his tainted blood.( “A Girl Like That Will Give You AIDS!”:Vampirism as AIDS Me
taphor in Killing Zoe by Jeane Rose, 2002, 175)

Poppy Z. Brite’s ‘The Sixth Sentinel’ (see Wisker 2014), exposes romantic love as deadly, an eternal
bondage. Families and domestic bliss, the stuff of complacent, conventional life narratives for women, are
turned on their heads. In Melanie and Steve Tem’s ‘Mama’ (1995), the vampire mother eats flies in the
kitchen and embarrasses then tyrannises her teenage daughter. Anne Rice challenges concentrations of
women’s power and powerlessness with the mythically, monstrously maternal and dominant Akasha in
Queen of the Damned (1988). Many contemporary radical women vampire writers move on to offer
alternative readings of women’s sexuality and agency, celebrating the lesbian vampire and the S&M
relationship alongside the re-reading of the vampire narrative as one which can empower women rather than
destroy them. The norms of romantic narratives tend to be exposed in contemporary women’s vampire
fictions. As cultural indices, vampires expose lies and contradictions, and also offer
new opportunities for agency. (Contemporary Women’s Gothic Fiction by G. Wisker 2015: 203)

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), whose characters include two doctor/psychologists, describes its vampire in
terms explicitly borrowed from criminal anthropology, degeneration theory, and alienism, late-Victorian
sociomedical disciplines that worked to classify and comprehend the abnormal human subject. Though these
sciences of the criminal, the unfit, and the insane fail to account for the vampire’s longevity or shape-
shifting abilities, Dr. Van Helsing has faith that science will explain even these things some day, when it has
fully comprehended “all the forces of nature that are occult and deep and strong” – for it is Nature that has
shaped Dracula, not some supernatural force. (“British Gothic fiction, 1885–1930” by Kelly Hurley 2002:
192)