At least since the 1897
publication of Bram Stoker’s Dracula,
the need to sleep in native soil has been an integral part of the vampire myth.
For example, one of the novel’s narrators, real estate representative Jonathan
Harker, remarks on the “earth placed in wooden boxes” (54) and on “a pile of
newly dug earth lay the Count!” (54), while exploring Dracula’s castle. Later
we learn that the Count has transported “fifty cases of common earth” (244) to
his new home in England and that it is best to attack Dracula at certain times
when he has “limited freedom” (258). As the journal entry asserts, “whereas he
can do as he will within his limit, when he have his earth-home, his
coffin-home, the place unhallowed, as we saw when he went to the grave of the
suicide at Whitby, still at other times he can only change when the time has
come” (258). These comments in the novel emphasize the importance of home and
earth in the Dracula narrative.
This connection between
vampires and their native soil continues in films from adaptations of the novel such
as Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (1933), The Vampire Returns (1944), The
Horror of Dracula (1958), Dracula
Rises from the Grave (1967), and Bram
Stoker’s Dracula (1992), to genre stretches such as the popular Van Helsing (2004, 2012) and Underworld (2003, 2006, 2009, 2012)
films, the coming of age tale, Let the
Right One In (2007), or the comedy, Vamps
(2012). As in the Dracula novel, these vampire films underline the connection
between soil and home, and consequently emphasize their link to ecology,
literally the study of homes. Although some popular media representations of
vampires eschew traditional vampire mythology altogether, many do include some
version of native soil, even, as in novelist Chelsea Quinn Yarbro’s Saint Germain Chronicles series, placing
it in a hidden compartment within the heels of vampires’ shoes.
Early in the novel Dracula, however, Count Dracula broaches
another connection with native soil that moves beyond his need to become
reinvigorated in his nation’s earth. When describing some of the “strange
things of the preceding night” on the journey to his castle, Dracula connects
soil with blood, declaring to Harker, “there is hardly a foot of soil in all
this region that has not been enriched by the blood of men, patriots or
invaders” (25). This direct relationship between blood, soil, and vampires is
overlooked in most representations of vampires in popular culture, despite its
origin in Stoker’s novel.
The Pack and
Strigoi examine this interconnected
relationship between blood, soil, and vampirism, highlighting the environmental
underpinnings of the vampire myth in relation to a shattered ecology or home.
This connection between ecology and home illuminates the truly interdependent
relationship between human and nonhuman nature illustrated by both The Pack and Strigoi. The roots of that connection rest with the human ecology
movement, which grew out of the work of human ecologist Ellen Swallow Richards.
Destroying that human ecology may lead to what clinical psychologist Tina
Amorok calls an “eco-trauma of Being” (29). In both The Pack and Strigoi,
vampires rather than eco-trauma are the product of this devastated home, a soil
desecrated by blood of war or exploitation of human and nonhuman nature. In The Pack and Strigoi, a mistreated earth bites back.
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