	The legend of the vampire has been one that has existed since our earliest recorded history.  From the ancient legends of the Chaldeans up to Buffy the Vampire Slayer, these creatures have become a part of human culture.  With such an expansive history, a common idea to ponder is how these vampires came out of our mythology and pervaded our literature and television screens.  Maybe not all questions can be answered, but a good starting point would have to be Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula.  In this book, Stoker took what he knew of vampire myth and lore, and added his own spin on it so that he could tell the best story possible.  In doing so, some characteristics of vampires were eliminated, while others were added.  It was so effective that Stoker ended up influencing the way we see vampires, even to this day.  This would make Dracula was the turning point in the evolution of the vampire, from the unrealistic and somewhat vague legends of old, to the relatable, somewhat hokey, yet believable vampires that we know today.
	In discussing just how far vampires have come since Count Dracula, it is important to discuss where they were before Stoker’s inspiration.  Evidence of vampire stories can be found on the stone tablets of the Assyrians, as well as the writings of the Chaldeans in Mesopotamia.  The ancient Greeks believed in monsters that ate children and would drink their blood.  They called them the strigoe.  In India, ancient paintings on cave walls depicted what looked like creatures that drank blood.  There was also a creature in Indian lore called a baital, which hung upside down from trees and didn’t have any blood.  In Africa, some old tribes believed that the dead could return and survive on the blood of the living.  Even the Bible, the most popular book in the history of mankind, is not without its own vampire.  In the book of Isaiah, a woman named Lilith is described.  She was able to take the form of an owl at night and would hunt newborn children and pregnant women.
	As we moved into the second millennium A.D., the vampire stopped being such a myth, story or superstition, and started to hit a little bit closer to home.  In 1560, Elizabeth Bathory was born in Transylvania.  As she grew up, she started a sadistic reign of terror by torturing her servant girls, with the help of her major-domo and several witches of the day.  She would drain the blood of her victims and bathe in it, with the belief that it would beautify her body.  She is often considered one of history’s “true” vampires.  Also in Transylvania, a man named Vlad III Dracula lived during the fifteenth century.  With the help of the Turks, he took the throne of Walachia.  He was a very cruel ruler, and his favorite form of execution was impalement.  According to Christopher Frayling, "When Vlad Tepes inherited the name, "Dracul" also came to mean "the Devil" - among other reasons because of the atrocities he committed (impaling, roasting, decapitation, and so on) when fighting the Turks, who had imprisoned him during his youth and had taught him the value of terror tactics." This idea of Dracula being the Devil is an idea that Stoker later plays with in his own work.  When Vlad was deposed in 1462, he had killed tens of thousands of people.  He was killed while at war in 1476, though supposedly when his tomb was excavated in the twentieth century, no sign of his coffin could be found.  It is a common belief that Stoker’s Dracula was based on this man.
