You got Laurence Rickel-Rolled!

In Laurence Rickels’ book The Vampire Lectures, Rickels brings up Freud’s idea of the uncanny and relates this to vampirism. The word for uncanny in german is unheimliche, which literally means un-home-like. In Greek the word for blood is hemo (for example hemoglobin is the scientific name for red blood cells). Blood and home are essentially the same thing. Your family household is your bloodline. Your blood relatives are the members of your home. A loved one that comes back from the dead is the same, yet different. A vampire is unheimliche, un-home-like, or un-blood-like. A shell of a person once known. They are similar to the member of the household, of the bloodline, yet different; uncanny.

It is possible that vampires represent the deep subconscious wish all humans have for eternal life, or at least a second chance at life. Rickels mentions that in Europe, during the vampire mania that spread, men who died as bachelors or people who committed suicide were most feared to come back as vampires. Could this be because people believed a bachelor or suicide victim deserved a second chance? Rickels hypothesizes that it was due to improper burial rights. Suicides were not allowed a Christian burial, and bachelors didn’t have a family to properly mourn their passing. This would lead to the inability of the deceased to rest in peace, and therefore allow for their return as a vampire. This idea is similar to the rule that if a person has unfinished business when they die, they are likely to come back as a ghost until that business is finished. In Hamlet for example, the prince’s father visits him as a ghost so that his son may avenge his murder.

One of the more obscure rules a vampire must follow is that it cannot enter a household without an invitation. A vampire must be let into the house by the consent of the owner. The origin of this rule seems mysterious. Rickels discusses the idea of “no vampirism without the desire to be vampirized” and this idea seems to fit with the invitation rule. People who attend horror films seem to be in a similar vein (no pun intended). People pay money to see a horror movie and be scared. They desire fright.