Together with the golem in his guise as frankensteins monster, the 
vampire has become the worlds best known supernatural monster. the
result of decades of horror films capitalizing on the imagination
and researches of an irish author named bram stoker. Before stoker, 
the vampire legend had attracted attention, and had even become
something of a fad in  Europe,but it was jumbled, tangled, overgrown.
Stoker pruned it, performed some judicious grafting, dressed it up
in a richly purple prose, and added "Dracula" to the list of classic 
horror stories.
/     The name of his vampire was borrowed from the name of a 15th 
century Balkan nobleman whose sadistic cruelties justified his name; 
Dracul means "devil" in Rumanian. Corollaries and ancestors of the
vampire several times remove, are fairly plentiful. Evil blood sucking
demons or witches and blood hungry ghosts abound in primitive belief.
There  is also the demonic lilith of ancient Hebrew legend, who had 
many vampire traits, and the Romans conceived of the lamia, a near
relation of the vampire, who enticed men sexually and then feasted 
on their blood. Almost exclusively a creature of the slavic regions
and Balkan states of eastern Europe, the vampire made its appearance 
in its present form in the 16th century. The word vampire comes from 
various eastern European terms, including the magyar "vampir".
and from greece we get the term "vrykolakas". It must be remembered
that the vampire is a  resuscitated corpse not an immaterial spirit.
As a cadaver, the vampire looks cadaverous; lean,pale with the pallor 
of death, Icy cold to the touch. ******* enough *******************
/*********************** the magician *****************************