A vampire is a mythical monster that feeds on the vital essence of living people (usually in the form of blood). Vampires are undead beings that visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the areas where they lived when living, according to European mythology. They wore shrouds and were characterized as bloated, reddish, or dark-skinned, in stark contrast to today’s gaunt, pale vampire, who dates from the early 1800s.

Vampiric creatures have been documented in most civilizations; the word vampire was popularised in Western Europe after tales of an 18th-century public panic in the Balkans and Eastern Europe, which culminated in the staking of corpses and the accusation of vampirism in certain cases. Local variations in Eastern Europe were called Striga in Albania, vrykolakas in Greece, and strigoi in Romania, among other names.

Although belief in comparable vampiric animals such as the chupacabra remains in various cultures, the vampire is widely considered a fictional phenomenon in modern times. Early folk belief in vampires has been attributed to a lack of understanding of the body’s decomposition process after death and how people in pre-industrial cultures attempted to justify this by inventing the vampire figure to explain the mysteries of death. In 1985, porphyria was related to vampire stories and gained a lot of media attention, although it has since been widely debunked.

With the publication of “The Vampyre” by English writer John Polidori in 1819, the charismatic and sophisticated vampire of contemporary literature was created; the novel was immensely popular and perhaps the most important vampire work of the early 19th century. Despite the fact that it was released after fellow Irish author Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 work Carmilla, Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula is recognized as the classic vampire story and supplied the basis for the contemporary vampire mythology. The success of this novel established a unique vampire genre, which has produced books, films, television series, and video games that are still popular in the twenty-first century. Since then, the vampire has established himself as a major figure in the horror genre.

The term vampire (as Vampyre) first appeared in English in 1734, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, in a travelogue titled Travels of Three English Gentlemen, published in The Harleian Miscellany in 1745. Vampires have been mentioned in French and German literature before. Officials noticed the local tradition of exhuming remains and “killing vampires” after Austria took control of northern Serbia and Oltenia with the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718.

Bulgarian and Macedonian вамиp (vampir), Bosnian vampir/вамир, Croatian vampire, Czech and Slovak up, Polish wipers, and (perhaps East Slavic-influenced) upiór, Ukrainian уир (upyr), Russian ур (up), Belarusian ур (upyr), from Old East Slavic уир (upper) (several of these languages

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