The Dark Imitation: Vampires and Eternal Life
In the 1992 film Bram Stoker’s Dracula, the titular character, played by Gary Oldman, offers Mina a familiar refrain as he draws her head toward his chest to drink from him: “I am the resurrection and the life.” As Christians, we immediately recognize the words. They belong not to Dracula, but to Christ, spoken to Martha before He raises Lazarus from the dead: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live” (John 11:25).
The scene becomes even more striking when placed alongside Christ’s words in the Bread of Life discourse: “He who eats my flesh and drinks my blood has eternal life, and I will raise him up at the last day” (John 6:54). Dracula offers Mina something that looks, at first glance, remarkably similar. Drink my blood. Escape death. Live forever.
And that is precisely what makes the vampire such a fascinating monster.
The vampire is not simply the opposite of Christianity. He is a parody of it.
Christ offers His Blood so that we might live. The vampire takes blood from others so that he might continue living. Christ enters death and conquers it through Resurrection. The vampire crawls back out of the grave without ever truly escaping death at all. Christianity promises eternal life; the vampire offers eternal undeath.
The similarities are close enough to be unsettling, but every one of them has been turned inside out. And perhaps that unsettling quality is precisely the point. We recognize instinctively that this is an inversion, a mockery, of something sacred. It is no accident, then, that aversion to sacred objects—most famously the Cross—has become one of the defining tropes of vampire mythology. The vampire can imitate resurrection. He can imitate immortality. He can even imitate the drinking of blood. But when confronted with the sign of Christ’s actual victory over death, the imitation recoils before the reality.
That is the dark imitation, the inversion before the Lord for which vampires are famous. The first and most obvious inversion is resurrection itself.
Christianity does not merely promise that we will continue existing forever. It promises resurrection: the restoration of the whole person, body and soul, into a life transformed by God. The resurrected Christ is not a corpse animated by some unnatural force. He is alive in the fullest sense of the word. Death has been conquered, not merely postponed.
The vampire, by contrast, rises without truly living.
He leaves the grave, but carries the grave with him. His body remains bound to death. He cannot endure the light of day. He does not eat as the living eat. He does not age as the living age. His continued existence depends upon taking life from others. What appears at first to be a triumph over death is really an imprisonment within it.
The Christian hope is that death will one day be left behind. The vampire's curse is that death never leaves him.
The vampire will never again feel the warmth of the sun upon his face. He is forever doomed to recoil from the light, condemned to a life of shadow and grave dirt. Here the contrast becomes especially stark. The Christian partakes of the Flesh and Blood of Christ in order to participate in the divine life of God; the strigoi partakes of blood merely to sustain its own decaying existence.
One receives Blood as gift. The other takes blood as prey.
In the Eucharist, Christ gives Himself away so that others may live. The vampire, by contrast, consumes others so that he may continue living. The Eucharistic mystery is founded upon self-sacrifice: “This is my body, which is given for you.” Vampirism reverses the direction entirely. The body of the other becomes something to be taken, drained, and used. Humanity ceases to be a community of persons and becomes little more than a herd to be fed upon.
That is what makes the vampire such a powerful anti-Eucharistic image. Both Christianity and vampirism speak of blood, life, death, and immortality. But where Christ says, in effect, “Take my life so that you may live,” the vampire says, “Give me your life so that I may continue existing.”
But of course the vampyr is not all-powerful. Besides the Cross and the sun, it has other weaknesses. One of the more curious—at least in certain strands of vampire lore—is the inability to enter a dwelling without consent.
The evil must be invited in.
There is something deeply Christian in that image as well. Evil is real, and temptation can be powerful, but sin does not ordinarily conquer the human person by kicking down the door. It entices. It persuades. It waits for an opening. The vampire standing at the threshold becomes, almost accidentally, a picture of temptation itself: he may desire entrance, he may manipulate, flatter, threaten, or seduce, but the final crossing still requires an invitation.
Christ Himself uses remarkably similar imagery when describing the return of an unclean spirit. The spirit says, “I will return to my house from which I came.” Upon finding it swept and put in order, it returns with seven other spirits more evil than itself, and “the last state of that person is worse than the first” (Luke 11:24–26).
The warning is unsettling precisely because the house is not simply attacked from without. Evil has already known the house. It has occupied it before. And when it returns, it does not return alone.
So too with the vampire. Once the threshold has been crossed, the danger is no longer something lurking outside the window. It has been welcomed into the home. What had once needed permission now has access. What had been external has become intimate.
And sin often works the same way. What is first entertained becomes familiar. What is familiar becomes tolerated. What is tolerated may eventually come to rule.
The vampire therefore offers another dark imitation of the Christian life. Christ also stands at the door and knocks. But where Christ enters to dwell with man and give him life, the vampire enters to feed upon him.
Perhaps that is why the vampire has endured for so long in the Christian imagination. He takes some of Christianity’s most beautiful promises and asks us to imagine them devoid of God.
What if you could rise from the grave, but there were no Resurrection?
What if you could live forever, but there were no Heaven?
What if blood could sustain your life, but only because someone else had to die to give it to you?
The result is not salvation. It is horror.
The vampire possesses immortality, but not eternal life. He rises, but is not resurrected. He drinks blood, but knows no communion. He enters the homes of others, but only after twisting invitation into vulnerability. He flees from the Cross because the Cross reveals everything his existence lacks: sacrifice, love, redemption, and a death that actually leads to life.
And perhaps this is why the old image of the vampire recoiling before the Crucifix remains so powerful. It is more than a monster being frightened by a religious object. The counterfeit has been confronted by the real thing.
The vampire may crawl from his coffin. Christ walked out of His tomb.
The vampire may promise that we need never die. Christ promises something infinitely greater: that even though we die, we shall live.
St. Athanasius expressed the Christian promise with almost shocking boldness: “He was made man that we might be made God.” In On the Incarnation, he places this claim precisely within Christ’s conquest of death: the Word becomes man, death is overcome, immortality is opened to us, and humanity is drawn into the life of God.
That is the promise the vampire can never reproduce.
The vampire lives forever by taking life into himself.
The Christian lives forever because God has shared His own life with him.
Dracula can imitate the words. He can imitate the blood. He can imitate the rising from the grave. He can offer a kind of immortality and even make others after his own image.
But he cannot imitate divinization.
He cannot make man divine.
He can only make man into his own, damned likeness.
This is the first in a 4 part series on classic movie monsters and how they each parody an aspect on the Christian life or beliefs. We hope you enjoy this first installment just in time for the spooky season!
