Vampire Wannabees

"The folkloric vampires had been peasants but, in the eighteenth century, authors were still reluctant to make peasants into major characters in stories so the fictional vampire was moved into the upper classes. By the time of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897) he had became a pallid count, rather than the ruddy peasant of the folklore...

"The baffling part of this is that modern 'vampires' are claiming kinship not with the vampire that our ancestors actually believed in but with the fictional vampire derived from that one. This is like somebody claiming to be related to Rhett Butler in the movie Gone with the Wind. 'You mean Clark Gable,' you say. 'No, no. Rhett Butler. The character in the movie. He's my cousin.'"

- Historian Paul Barber in Skeptical Enquirer magazine (1996).