Halloween Special: Dracula vs. Blacula

Notes on the social structure of vampirism

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Last year’s Halloween Special was The Sociology of Zombies. This year we take a look at another kind of undead predator.

The basic problem of the vampire is that it needs to feed on people, but people generally object to this: Kill enough of the living and they’re apt to try to kill you back. And the undead have a number of weaknesses, chief among them that they lay dormant and helpless all day for anyone to stake or drag out into the sunlight.

The vampire is basically a serial killer who needs to figure out how to get away with it.

There are a lot of factors that might affect this problem, from frequency of killing (stories often depict nightly killing, but this is almost certainly unsustainable) to technology (modern surveillance and forensics must make life harder) to local belief and custom (it’d be nice if the prey population had no knowlege of vampires or their weaknesses). But here I’ll focus just on the social structure of the killing.

In his book Is Killing Wrong?, sociologist Mark Cooney applies Donald Black’s theory of law to describe “the perfect murder” — one that presents the least chance of punishment for the killer, including little chance of the killing being investigated in the first place. Factors that help one to get away with murder include: