760 Auditory.

Up until the late 1970s, “zombie” meant a person killed and reanimated via black magic, typically to serve as a slave for the magician who did the reanimating. This has some basis in fact within the Voudun religion, though in reality it’s a form of chemically-enabled brainwashing. The victim would given a paralytic, which would trick the victims family into believing he/she was dead. After the funeral, the magician would sneakily steal back the “corpse”, and when the drug wore off, the victim would be informed of their new alleged soulless slave existence. In many cases, faith and superstition alone would cause the victim to believe this explanation, and act accordingly, but sometimes psychotropics were used to keep the victim muddled, and sometimes the victim would actually have been brain damaged to some degree due to hypoxia while being sealed in their coffin and/or buried.

During the 1970s the paralytic used to zombify people this way, a refinement of the venom of a particular species of pufferfish, was researched by pharmaceutical companies to see if it would make a good general anesthetic. It was found unsuitable do to the fact that it actually left the subject fully conscious and able to feel sensation, just unable to respond.

The modern concept of the zombie comes from the “Living Dead” films of George Romero. In these films the cause of reanimation was unknown. It was not an infection that was passed through bodily fluids, but rather something unknown that was ubiquitously present in the environment: all dead became zombies, regardless of how they died or whether they’d had contact with other zombies, and zombie bites killed through toxic shock and/or “normal” sepsis due to the general rotten nastiness in the mouth of any corpse.

The idea of a zombie “infection” comes partly from the “Return of the Living Dead” movie series (a copycat franchise attempting to cash in on the Romero movies), in which the zombifying agent was a chemical agent, but somehow still spread through contact like a disease, and part from audiences misunderstanding or not paying attention during the Romero movies.

The idea of a zombie virus, as far as I know, was first codified by the Resident Evil game series, though I’ll bet it actually showed up in literature earlier.

A zombie virus is kinda cracktalk though. A bacteria, fungus or macroorganism parasite might make some degree of sense, but not a virus. Unfortunately, “virus” seems to have become confabulated with disease or infection of any kind in pop culture to the point where even infections that are explicitly stated to be something else, like the red fungus in Steven King’s Dreamcatcher or the body-stealing creature in John Carpenter’s The Thing, are referred to as viruses in other media. This says disturbing things about the general state of public health education.

The idea of vampirism, lycanthropy, or for that matter the non-zombie Resident Evil monsters being down to viruses does kinda work though. Certainly not normal though: one has to wonder what kind of evolutionary history such an unnecessarily complex bug would have. In fact, if I lived in a world where there were viral vampires or werewolves, I’d assume it was bioengineered, not natural. Which would raise very interesting questions if they’d already been around for centuries or millennia. Questions way more interesting than the petty turf wars these stories usually concern themselves with.

All that is only realistic for a given value of real though, these creatures being so fantastical in other ways as to make such nitpicking silly and irrelevant.

The Rage virus of 28 Days Later however is, with the exception of the lightning-fast incubation period, entirely possible & plausible within real world biology.

The original novel “Frankenstein” is a cautionary tale about parental responsibility, not about the perils of dabbling in Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. The “modern Prometheus” part was just Dr. Frankenstein’s after-the-fact excuse for abandoning his “Son”. Seriously: go read the book. It’s about a guy who decides have a kid because he’s fantasizing about how cool the accomplishment would be, and how prestigious the kid will be to show off. Then when he actually sees the kid for the first time it hits him all at once that this is an actual living person that he is now responsible for, not just a trophy, and he runs away. So the kid has to grow up all on his own, being treated with unrelenting cruelty by the world because he looks strange, and along the way he comes to resent and then hate the father who should have been there for him but chose not to be. Neither ever learns to let go, and they both end up destroying themselves in a decades-long spiral of hate and revenge.

Frankenstein is an epic tragedy of deadbeat dad and unwanted son. Thanks to the early pop-culture influence of the Karloff movie though, everyone now thinks that it’s about forbidden knowledge and abominations of scientific hubris. And stitching together dead body parts. That’s not in the book either.

Vampires of various sorts:

Anne Rice: Death by fire/sunlight, weakened by blood deprivation by either lack of feeding or deep wounds. Crosses/holy symbols have no effect. Transferred by draining, then feeding vampiric blood, to the target. Need coffins to rest.
Vampire: The Masquerade: Death by fire/sunlight, paralyzed by staking, or by fragments of the cross Jesus died on. The first vampire was Caine/Cain (biblical dude, intentional misspelling was his name once he got the dark gift.) Can be repelled by devout trust in a power other than yourself, known as “True Faith” (need not be religious: A yuppie has successfully repelled a vampire with his credit card because he believed, without any reservation, that money could solve all problems). Needs earth from birthplace to rest. Cannot be appeased by offerings.
Folklore: repelled by Garlic, crosses, fires/bright lights, cannot cross running water, created by the dead possessing the living or by the restless spirits of evil men (murderers and rapists), stopped by staking them while ‘asleep’ or burning them, need burial earth to rest, cannot enter a house unless invited, only gives real name or an anagram thereof because otherwise you are protected from him.
Then there’s Underworld, Blade(meh), and it gets worse from there. Then there’s Eastern Vampires, which drain energy from their targets, but I don’t know them in near as much detail.

I didn’t intend to write a novel, heh, but I could go on for days about all the folklore and mythology of various places around the world… I’m a big fan~

Maybe the reason that there is no auditorium is because it burned down?

Seems like the ideas of famous and classic monsters have changed so much over time that many people don’t know the stuff that used to surround them. It’s kinda like ninjas: they were originally cheap assassins with a “do whatever it takes to win” attitude (to my knowledge). Somewhere along the way they were romanticized and turned into beings of honor and mystic abilities.

Vampries and Werewolves have been romanticized for years now, and it (of course) didn’t start with Twilight, though granted, Twilight certainly gave vampires the least amount of reasons to have a depressing existense yet still made them depressed ‘n such (you just sparkle in the light, buddy, at least you don’t combust.)

The classic ideas for vampires, of course, are the weaknesses to crosses and garlic, then there’s the “can’t come in unless invited thing” (which has an interesting reaction if you come in uninvited, if you’ve ever read “Let the Right One In.”) Sunlight, stake to the heart (gotta be wood in some cases), etc. That’s what I can remember, anyway. Then all those things have different effects depending on what you’re reading. For instance, I believe the movie Fright Night shows a vampire being immune to the cross ’cause the one holding it didn’t actually believe in the religion. Then there’s the varying degrees of what sunlight can do and sometimes the stake doesn’t actually kill (just stops them until it’s taken out).

I’m not even sure where the original ideas came from, and hell, there are so many diffrent kinds of things that fall under the term “vampire” that any one of those things could count for one ‘pire and not the other. Maybe they’re all various ways to kill various vampires that have been lumped together over the years? I mean, one vampire thing called a Manananggal can be defeated by sprinkling crushed garlic on it’s bottom half (look it up; the sucker breaks in half. Even worse is the Penanggalan…look that one up with a google image search!) So who knows if maybe THAT was the first thing to be effected by garlic? Maybe that was carried over?

Anyway, just thoughts and ideas. Perhaps these are all easy questions that I could just look up (and perhaps I’ll try). I just wouldn’t be surprised if people don’t know the old ways of classic monsters, ’cause they’re always changing.

Vampires: do not appear in reflections of silver (everything else does reflect their image cuz silver is typified as holy), they hate the smell of garlic due to sensitive noses, crucifixes specifically cause them to flee in terror (they are eternally damned, Dracula cursed God and was doomed), an oak stake through the heart will only subdue them long enough for you to behead them (required to kill), holy water burns them, real direct sunlight immolates them, dead man’s blood is like poison to them, they shapeshift into bats, wolves or mist…. You know what?

WATCH CHRISTOPHER LEE’S DOCUMENTARY ON VAMPIRES. All the info that isn’t from folktales or Bram Stoker is garbage.

Dullahans: use chariots or ghost-horses for travel, use axes whips or swords, mark prey with thrown saucers of blood, freezes you with gaze from severed head (head also can breath fire), all doors unlock for it, if it wants to kill you it can track you down anywhere. Only weakness is gold in any amount.

Others: Leshy, berserker, puca/pooka (famously real in the movie “Harvey”), wendigo, Aswang

Crave–

“I recognize that my fans may not be the best gauge of what typical people know…”

So, at what point did you realize you had fans? How did that understanding affect you? B{)}

Let’s see — everything I know about vampires I learned from reading Dracula and Salem’s Lot. You just aren’t going to get that much from the movies or television; you need to go to the source. Bram Stoker set the stage for much of what we know about vampires; he did some research, but like many Victorian-era researchers, he quickly discovered that there wasn’t much in the literature of the day, so he fell back on what most of them did.

He made it up.

That said, most people think sunlight will destroy a vampire, but that’s Hollywood lore. In Dracula, Stoker has the Count walking around London on a hot, sunny August afternoon. Vampires are strongest at night, but daylight is hardly lethal. The business with garlic deterring them is right out of Stoker (I think Herr Dr. Van Helsing pushed it on Harker). A stake through the heart or beheading are equally effective. Some sources (CBS’s Moonlight comes to mind) suggest fire worked, too. I seem to recall — from various sources — that vampires can also be destroyed with silver bullets. They had this whole aversion to silver thing going: bullets, mirrors (the glass won’t reflect their images because it’s silvered) and photographs (the chemistry is silver-based). Silver coins placed on his eyes while he’s in his coffin will prevent him from rising (from an old Dell Gold Key comic book, I think). The garlic was also a good repellant. And I’ve always heard about the invitation into the house. They can only cross open or running water with assistance, and if they strike the surface, they will sink like a stone. They are unable to enter any consecrated place of worship, and religious talismans such as crosses or Stars of David are repellant, but only if the person brandishing it is a believer. What did I forget?

Werewolves… Really not a lot of literature until the 1940s and the first Wolfman flick. Werewolves of [Paris | London]. Hmm… Relying on Dark Shadows and old comics, they can make themselves a werewolf by wearing a belt made of Human skin, or be infected by the [bite | scratch] of another werewolf. They can be destroyed in the werewolf state by silver bullets, silver knives, or hanging and dismemberment (required — remember to dismember)! Wolfsbane (Aconite or Monkshood, a group of flowers in the Buttercup family) will repel werewolves as effectively as garlic does vampires. One text (probably another comic book) said that a necklace of the flowers would prevent the victim from turning under a full moon (“Hey dude, you a wolfman or did you just get lei’d?“).

I’ll tackle zombies because of their recent popularity. Originally, zombies were created from recent cadavers but Voodoo priests, using magic spells, charms and herbs. A living person could also be ‘zombified’ by the same process. Any zombie could be returned to its original state by allowing it to see the ocean. I guess if you’re the voodoo priest keeping the zombie as a slave, that’s something you want to avoid.

If anyone has caught Being Human, either the original British version on BBC Three or the North American series on SyFy, you’ll recall they have unusual takes on the lore of vampires, werewolves and ghosts.

–Perfesser

P.S. And no, I never finished reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. It’s huge and gawdawful boring. I’ll say this, though; if I ever encounter such a synthetic creature, I’ll ‘throw the book at him’; the weight alone of the damned thing is sure to destroy him!

To add something about werewolves not yet written: If you go by the medieval tales, a werewolf actually turns by shedding his human skin and hiding it in a hollow tree. He turns back by donning it again. If you find the human skin and take it, you can keep the were from assuming his human form.

well i supose it depends on your defintion of monster if you want classic like wolfman , vampire, mummies and the like then you have dont get bit on a blood moon or get turned into a werewolf yourself tho it would seem that rule has ben laxed some what

never look a mummy in the eyes or you’ll be its slave so your suposed to do like you do with a medusa and use a mirror to look behind you

as to fairy folk alldepends on which part of the owrld your in and whom your talking to celtic fae are probly the most unfriendly dont matter if you talking about the seelie or the unseelie the both lure human children in to the fairy world in order to train them to be great and powerful worriors the unseelie do this to sow choas inthe human world cuz they dis like humans and see them as a young and useless race the seelie on the other hand send the kids back into the human world to test humans to see if they are worthy of the gifts that the seelie can bistow upon them they are much like the fox spirits in oriental legends they are great tricksters but if you prove your self wise and capable they would most often reward you with som secret or a a powerful magical item, now if you are to talk about the fae in thegermanic world inthe region of the black forest well they were rather unsavory to they often lead travelers atray to get lost in the woods to be devoured by wolves or other creatures

Well, by the transient properties, witches weigh the same as ducks. And very small rocks. And churches.

Vampires:die in sunlight, garlic is poisonous, cross will repel them, A method for distracting them is to leave a large number of small grains upon your doorstep they would be compelled to count them, beheading can kill them, stakeing through the heart, stuffing the mouth full of garlic and burning them was the most usual way to kill them, believed they could transform into mist, wolves and bats, hypnotic powers,stakeing didnt kill them in and of itself it served to keep them in their graves, people would also take the bones of the vampire they burned and rearrange them so that they would not be able to pull themselves together so to speak
Werewolves: cursed to change in the light of the full moon, it is said that you can become a were wolf by drinking from the foot print of a wolf filled with water, silver will kill them(most popularly a silver bullet)
Zombies:funny thing is there is no real lore concerning zombies as we know them it is mostly hollywood we have to thank for that, how ever there are alot of other undead
Ghouls:Undead risen and posessed by demons to defile and devour other corpses and graves, Holy water and fire generally worked (they were kinda multi purpose tools)
Im a bit of a monster buff though i know alot of old lore about them, mostly eroupean though

Vampires have multiple mythos; all with their own traits. I feel like the defaults are Van Hellsing/Bram Stoker vampires (old school) and Anne Rice’s vampires (new school). Anne Rice’s vampires have far fewer weaknesses; mostly sunlight. They also can’t sire other vampires that easily. Van Hellsing types have tons of weaknesses and restrictions, but have more powers. Most other vampires fit somewhere between. Twilight vampires don’t really count in there… as they more closely resemble fairies than vampires.