Vampire Hunting Kit

However, it is Bram Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula that is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and which provided the basis of modern vampire fiction. Dracula drew on earlier mythologies of werewolves and similar legendary demons and "was to voice the anxieties of an age", and the "fears of late Victorian patriarchy". The success of this book spawned a distinctive vampire genre, still popular in the 21st century, with books, films, video games, and television shows. The vampire is such a dominant figure in the horror and supernatural genres that literary historian Susan Sellers places the current vampire myth in the "comparative safety of nightmare fantasy".
Etymology
The Oxford English Dictionary dates the first appearance of the word vampire in English from 1734, in a travelogue titled Travels of Three English Gentlemen published in the Harleian Miscellany in 1745. However, it should be noted that the original article did not actually use the spelling vampire, but used vampyre. Even earlier English language references to the word vampire can be found in the form of vampyre. An example is found in re-telling the famous case of Arnold Paole, where the London Journal of March 11, 1732, describes vampyres in Hungary (actually northern Serbia) as sucking the blood of the living. Vampires had already been discussed in French and German literature. After Austria gained control of northern Serbia and Oltenia with the Treaty of Passarowitz in 1718, officials noted the local practice of exhuming bodies and "killing vampires". These reports, prepared between 1725 and 1732, received widespread publicity.