LIVING LONG: CLASSIC COMEBACKS
Our fear of death and the great beyond has fueled a seemingly endless supply of myths and lore, not to mention bad B-movies. Here are a few of our favorites.
Count on “the count.” With Tom Cruise’s portrayal of the Vampire Lestat in Interview with the Vampire, the world marked nearly 1,000 years of vampire lore. Popularized in the late 1800s with the publication of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, the notion of vampires first appeared in 1047, when someone referred to a Russian prince as “Upir Lichy” or wicked vampire. Vampire hysteria ran rampant from 1600 through the 1700s. Things got so bad in Romania that they developed “automatic vampire-piercing devices”-sharpened stakes driven into the grave so that if the body tried to leave, the vampire would be pierced instantly.
Essentially, vampires are thought to be folks who have died before their time, often violently, who have come back to kill their family and friends. Telltale signs of vampires are needle-sharp incisors used to suck blood from their prey. A wooden stake through the heart, cutting off the head, or burning the body to ashes is the best-known ways to bring one down for good.
Do the zombie. Countless cult classics like Night of the Living Dead show once-dead and buried folks clawing their way from their earthly tombs and oozing into nearby neighborhoods to wreak havoc among once-happy, unsuspecting citizens. Though nobody can say for certain where the concept of so-called zombies came from, it’s one we clearly dread-and one that may be more reality-based than you think.
Reportedly, Haitians schooled in the science of voodoo could administer a fish poison known as tetrodotoxin that would induce a state just inches from death. The victim would then be buried and, provided the voodoo maker had administered just the right dose, could later be “resurrected” to terrorize the living.
Tell it to your mummy. Ancient Egyptians believed that they were “magically resuscitated” after they died. To help the dead along, they would first embalm the corpse to mummify it. Then they’d bury it in an elaborate tomb, equipped with furnishings and toilet facilities so that the mummy could live comfortably once he came back to life. Somewhere along the way, people began to worry that maybe the mummy would wake up not in the Egyptian afterlife but in his tomb, mad as hell, and with a hankering to take his anger out on the living.
Today, we’re less nervous about that possibility but just as fascinated with mummies. More than 100,000 people a year travel to Kampehl, Germany, to view the remains of Christian Friedrich von Kahlbutz, a seventeenth-century count who was found naturally mummified in his crypt.
*27/36/5*
