The vampire is a creature in folklore and fiction who has had a long life and whose appeal seems never to diminish. The best known vampire in literature is Dracula, from the novel of the same name written by Bram Stoker at the end of the nineteenth century. A more recent example is the vampire in a series of books by Anne Rice, and this character as well has proven quite popular since his debut in Interview with the Vampire in 1976. Using a more recent use of the character in The Vampire Lestat (1985), the second installment in the author's Chronicles of the Vampires, we can analyze the sexuality of this character, one of the important elements of its appeal, and their beauty and irresistibility as shown by Rice in the novel.
The vampire has always been a character who evokes a dual response in the reader, and the same response can be discerned in other characters in these novels. On the one hand, there is the expected horror at the nature of the existence of the vampire and at the way the creature goes out in the night and seeks victims, draining their blood in order to sustain his or her own existence. On the other hand, there is a strong sense of sexuality and personal appeal which brings readers back again and again and which makes it easier for the vampire to find victims. There is generally a sexual component in literary and film renditions of the vampire, which sets the creature apart from other horror characters. This sexuality has usually been strictly heterosexual in nature, but writers such as Anne Rice have expanded the appeal of the vampire in a more bisexual direction.
Bram Stoker in Dracula details much of what would become the lore of the vampire, a lore that Rice would exploit in a different way, and Stoker at the same time was dealing with an inversion of the resurrection myth in the character of Dracula himself, a character who dies and is reborn but who is evil rather than good and destructive rather ...