Not Your Usual Rotary Luncheon Fare—The Art of Savoring Blood From the Neck (With a Topping of Sex)

A self-described "diehard vampire fanatic," El Cerrito attorney Kathleen Hunt has turned her childhood fascination with the blood-craving creatures into an adult contemplation of their remarkable transformation since they first emerged as subjects of literature.

The modern vampire has evolved from an incarnation of dreaded, pure evil into a sexy, smart, successful creature with a conscience, she told the in a brisk and colorful survey of how popular culture has reshaped vampires.

Her interest, she said, does not stem from being a lawyer. "Yes, lawyers are known as blood-suckers," she acknowledged to audience laughter. But she became hooked much earlier.

"I was kind of a strange kid," she said. She was also a bright kid, entering UC Berkeley at age 14. While there, she began to share her enthusiasm and growing knowledge, teaching two classes on vampires through the DeCal program (Democratic Education at Cal).

"Almost every culture on almost every continent has a version of a vampire," Hunt told her fellow Rotarians at their Thursday luncheon at the .

"In all these different cultures in all kinds of different ways, we have this fear of creatures that are going to suck a life force from us," she said.

"In China, traditional vampires don't suck blood with fangs. They use ear trumpets to suck spinal fluid," she said, eliciting a collective "Ewww" from the audience of about 30 people.

In Eastern Europe, cradle of American and European vampire images, vampires were seen as "really stupid," she said. "That's actually how the custom of burying people at crossroads began—not because of Christian crosses—but because if you buried somebody at a crossroads, and if he woke up a vampire and got up out his grave, he'd stand there all night long (wondering) which way to go."

A little known fact, Hunt said, is that the Frankenstein monster and the first vampire in fiction were literary litter mates, born at the same time in the same place, a lodge in Switzerland in 1816, when Lord Byron stopped to wait out a storm with his literary friends, which included fellow poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, Shelley's wife Mary and John Polidori.

"The very first vampire story that was written by a person with the idea of I'm going to tell a story that I'm making up—it's not folkore, it's not passed down—the very first one was ... 'The Vampyre' by John Polidori," she said.

Byron challenged his companions to write frightening tales. It was the work of the less famous members of the group—Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Polidori's vampire story—that had the most impact.

"Lord Byron said, 'Let's have a contest who can write the scariest story.' From that night we have Frankenstein and we have the first vampire story," she said.

The vampire link with sex can be traced to the Victorian era in England, she said. "For some reason, which I have not been able to puzzle out, the Victorians had a complete fascination not only with death but also with sex. It wasn't going to take long before they put them together."

The story "Carmilla" in 1872 introduced female vampires, and insofar as a woman biting other women for blood and sexual pleasure rang loud taboo alarms in Victorian minds, the Camilla story "took things by storm," Hunt said. "It was reprinted everywhere."

Another vampire landmark came in 1897 with the publication of Dracula by Bram Stoker, a syphillis victim who became fixated on "the evils of sex and death," she said.

Vampires continued to be seen as fearsome and purely evil until the late '60s, when the TV series "Dark Shadows" introduced Barnabas, a remorseful and somewhat ineffectual vampire, Hunt said. "Nobody felt afraid of him."

And then in the early '70s, for the first time, Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire introduced "a powerful, successful vampire who feels bad about it, who is sexy," Hunt said. "...Vampire stories exploded everywhere. It was all about the bad boy all of a sudden."

The hero of the story was "somebody who does terrible, terrible sexy things but regrets them."

And then came the teen sensation, the Twilight series of books and films "all about teenager sex, blood, romance," she said.

"What it's come down to in the last 150 years," Hunt concluded, "is how can you present sex and power through vampires. Once vampires became sexy, became people we wanted to imagine ourselves either as the vampire or as the vampire's victim, or maybe both, then the whole power play of the relationship became more and more explicit.

"It became who's in charge here. Is it the vampire who taking the life force, or is it the vampire's victim who is leading, who is coaxing, who'd doing all those things to entice the vampire? And the more the vampires feel bad about what they're doing, the easier they are to manipulate."

The new vampire thinking has spawned a number of pop culture books on how to manipulate vampires, such as How to Get a Date with a Vampire, she said.

Vampires have "become about who's in charge, power," Hunt said. "They've become about sex. Of course with all of that, they've become about death. There are certainly lots of other places where people can conflate those things—sex and power, sex and death, power and death—but there's almost none where you can get them all in one place. One-stop shopping."

"There are a lot of supernatural creatures," she said. "Vampires are special."