CINDERELLA MEETS DRACULA AND OTHER UNHEARD STORIES

It is well known that, after midnight, Cinderella's spell breaks and her couch turns into a pumpkin. But pumpkins, apparently, are mysterious props that fascinate fiction crafters and myth tellers beyond the fairy tale genre. As it turns out, pumpkins are also at the roots of Vampire stories.

Long before Bram Stoker wrote his novel "Dracula", and even before that legendary reunion convened by Lord Byron at Lake Geneva where Byron's physician John Polidori produced his “The Vampyre: A Tale”, Vampires inhabited the imagination--and the nightmares--of Eastern Europeans.

According to Tatomir P. Vukanović, a historian and ethnologist of the Balkans*, there is an old Serbian Gypsy belief that pumpkins, if left outdoors after midnight (especially on Christmas), turn into vampires:

"[T]he gathered pumpkins stir all by themselves and make a sound like 'brrrl, brrrl, brrrl!' and begin to shake themselves (...) sometimes a trace of blood can be seen on the pumpkins [then they ] go round the houses, stables, and rooms at night, all by themselves, and do harm to people."

Of course, this is not quite the idea we have of Vampires today. But then again, what's the idea we really have of them? After all, there are Vampire stories for all tastes and sensibilites. Probably you know by now the existence of Gayracula and Lust for Dracula two pronographic films all-male and all-female respectively (if you do, I wonder why...). But my favorite--if only for its weirdness--is Deafula, a film of a deaf vampire, performed entirely in American Sign Language for the hearing-impaired.

With this variety of identities, no doubt philosophers go mad trying to give an account of how to individuate the referents of fictional names.

Anyway, for more on Vampires, The New Yorker publishes this week a comprehensive article on the topic. Interestigly enough, it is written by Joan Acocella, the magazine's dance critic. Who knows, perhaps she was going to write about Cinderella (the ballet) but she was driven by the path of the pumpkins.

*with this name he couldn't have had another profession, I guess

Comments

written on 13-Mar-2009

cristian.saracco says:

Considering actual vampires... It could be good if they are walking along the street during midnight, they become pumpkins... If this is plausible, we could see a pumpkins field in, lets say, Wall Street... Just an example without any realism!
written on 18-Mar-2009

patencia says:

That would be a wonderful world. Unfortunatelly, our world seems to be closer to the horror genre than to the fairy tale genre--despite what "HOLA" magazine and all of its ilk try to make us believe.
Oh well...

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Writing Desk » CINDERELLA MEETS DRACULA AND OTHER UNHEARD STORIES

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