A New Look at Vampires and Native Soil

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.