Two infamous Swedish murderers, the “Skara Cannibal” and the “Vampire Woman,” hope to get married, according to Expressen, a Swedish newspaper. The couple met at their high-security psychiatric ward in eastern Sweden, the paper said, and flirted over Internet chat rooms.

Isakin Jonsson, known as the ”Skara Cannibal,” was convicted in March 2011 of killing of his girlfriend, Helle Christensen, a mother of five, Expressen said. After stabbing her to death and cutting off body parts, he ate some of them.

Gustafsson was convicted in 2010 of the stabbing death of a father of four in Stockholm, the paper said. She wrote chilling lyrics on her blog about killing people and posted pictures of herself dressed as a vampire with bloody lips.

First published in 1897, Bram Stoker’s Dracula was destined to become the universally-acknowledged masterwork of vampire fiction, but it was not, by any means, the first of its kind. Stokers genius consisted not in having invented the modern vampire monster, but in the imaginative way he synthesized and expanded upon the ideas that prior authors had already been exploring.

One of these was J. Sheridan Le Fanu, whose 1872 tale Carmilla provided a template for many of Dracula’s best-remembered characters and motifs, including the occult doctor (Dr. Hesselius), and the lonely Gothic castle set in a barbarous region of Europe. Many of the proper names in Dracula, in fact, are direct allusions to Carmilla’s characters and settings: “Karnstein” became “Carfax,” “Reinfeldt” became “Renfield,” and so on. Le Fanu’s protagonist, Laura, corresponds roughly to Stoker’s Mina; both are afflicted young women whose souls come depend upon their families’ efforts to unravel the vampire mystery.

Carmilla is told in the first person, from Laura’s point of view. She is a lonely Englishwoman who lives with her father and governesses in an ancient scholss in Styria (southeast Austria). After receiving word of the sudden death of a would-be guest, Bertha Reinfeldt, Laura and company gather on the castle drawbridge to admire a calm, full-moon night when an out-of-control carriage crashes in upon the scene. A weak, unconscious Carmilla is thrown from the compartment in the accident that ensues. Her “mother,” a mysterious noblewomen, professes to be on an urgent, secret mission, but reluctantly consents to leave Carmilla to recover in the family’s care.

Laura quickly recognizes Carmilla from a dream she had as a child; a dream of being visited in bed at night, and bitten on the shoulder. Carmilla, too, professes to remember Laura from a corresponding dream, wherein she awoke to find herself in an unfamiliar bed chamber, and Laura there. Quickly, they develop an intimate friendship, characterized pressings of hands, kissing of cheeks, and plenty of blushing.

[More at Victorian Gothic]

A St. Petersburg man who had dozed off in his motorized wheelchair woke up to find himself being attacked by a woman, according to police. Morton Ellis, 69, said he fell asleep after parking his wheelchair on the porch of a vacant Hooters to escape the rain.

He said the woman, 22-year-old Josephine Rebecca Smith, told him she was a vampire as she bit off chunks of his face and part of his lip.

Ellis managed to fend her off and called police. Officers found Smith at the restaurant, half naked and covered in blood. Ellis required a number of stitches.

Smith, who is from Pensacola, told police she had no idea what happened.

A man claiming to be a 500-year-old vampire was in the Galveston County jail today after attacking a woman over the weekend. “He was begging us to restrain him because he didn’t want to kill us,” Galveston Officer Daniel Erickson said. “He said he needed to feed.”

Lyle Monroe Bensley, 19, covered with tattoos and wearing only boxer shorts, forced his way into the apartment on Seawall Boulevard and made his way into the bedroom of a woman whose name has not been released, Heyse said.

Bensley made growling and hissing noises while biting and hitting the woman in her bed, Heyse said. Bensley then dragged her out of the apartment and she broke free. She ran into the parking lot where she got into a car driven by a neighbor. Bensley beat on the car before it sped away, Heyse said.

The arrest of a Texas man who broke into a woman’s house, threw her against a wall and tried to suck her blood over the weekend has sparked discussion over the impact of vampire books and movies on U.S. youth culture.

Whether pop culture played a role in the attack remains to be seen, as 19-year-old Lyle Monroe Bensley awaits a psychiatric evaluation in jail on burglary charges in Galveston, Texas, southeast of Houston.

Found growling and hissing in a parking lot and wearing only boxer shorts, the pierced and tattooed Bensley claimed he was a 500-year-old vampire who needed to “feed,” Galveston Police Capt. Jeff Heyse said.

Vampires have been a focal point of literature since Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, “Dracula”. But fascination, particularly among young people, has peaked in recent years with the popularity of the “Twilight” books about teenage vampires and the HBO series, “True Blood.”

“I think the vampire is a metaphor for the outsider and the predator in all of us,” said author Anne Rice, whose Vampire Chronicles series has captured the imaginations of horror fans since the 1970s…

[continues at Reuters]

Released today, the latest installment of Taibbi’s manifesto against all things Goldman sets up a pretty simple proposition based on the recently released 650-page report from Senator Carl Levin’s Subcommittee on Investigations, detailing the collapse of the American financial system. Taibbi wastes no time with whodunnit paragraphs, instead setting the smoking gun on the doorstep of the Department of Justice. Like a rewriting of the Senate investigator’s above quote, Taibbi declares, “Everything’s fucked up, and it’s time for Goldman Sachs to go to jail. You don’t even have to investigate because the Senate did it for you. Just issue those subpoenas.” (The Atlantic Wire)

Apparently the vampire squid also has an appetite for metal. Goldman Sachs is making an estimated $165 million per year though Detroit warehouses jam-packed with more than a million tons of industrial metal aluminum or about a “quarter of global reported inventories,” reports Reuters. The news service’s fascinating investigation finds that by simply storing the metals in its warehouses, the investment bank reaps tens of millions of dollars in rental revenues every year. The warehousing business takes advantage of a regulation imposed by the London Metal Exchange that  allows warehouses to release “only a tiny fraction of their inventories per day, much less than the metal that is regularly taken in for storage.” (The Atlantic Wire)

Military psy ops aren’t limited to leaflets, propaganda broadcasts, and Korean pop music. In the past, the US military has played on their opponent superstitions of vampires, ghosts, and astrology. Here are some strange examples.

In World War II, US forces exploited the Nazi’s predilection to put stock in superstitions and the occult. The Rand Corporation’s 1950 memorandum “The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare” details how pseudoscience connoisseur Joseph Goebbels counteracted Allied attempts to strike fear into the superstitious strata of the German population.

Another curious incident noted in the Rand document occurs in Italy, where British military created a giant manikin to scare rural residents. A large, shambling creature was assembled to freak out superstitious locals…

Read More from Cyriaque Lamar on io9.com

“On the night of September 22, 2010 there will be a Vampire Slaying of Wall Street Bloodsuckers, traitors who wrap themselves in the flag.

Symbolic Slaying 11:09 p.m., arrive at 10:30 p.m. in front of the New York Stock Exchange at Wall & Nassau Streets, NYC 10005. Slayers after–party TBA.”

The mood should be light, as participants are asked to “Dress up, bring lights, noise makers & proper shoes to dance on their collective grave”.

See you there!

It’s a potentially sucky situation. The vampire craze in teen literature – exemplified by the “Twilight” book series – could be affecting the dynamic workings of the teenage brain in ways scientists don’t yet understand.

“We don’t know exactly how literature affects the brain, but we know that it does,” said Maria Nikolajeva, a Cambridge University professor of literature. “Some new findings have identified spots in the brain that respond to literature and art.”

Scientists, authors and educators met in Cambridge, England, Sept. 3-5 for a conference organized by Nikolajeva to discuss how young-adult books and movies affect teenagers’ minds.

“For young people, everything is so strange, and you cannot really say why you react to things – it’s a difficult period to be a human being,” Nikolajeva told LiveScience. The conference, she said, brought together “people from different disciplines to share what we know about this turbulent period we call adolescence.”

Sessions included “What Is It About Good Girls and Vampires?” addressing the huge popularity of Stephenie Meyer’s “Twilight” series and other vampire-themed books.

Brain Science

Teenagers’ minds are more susceptible than adult minds to influence – from peers and experiences as well as from books, movies and music, researchers say.

“What we have learned over the past decade is that the teenage brain processes information differently than a more mature brain,” said conference presenter Karen Coats, a professor of English at Illinois State University who integrates neuroscience into her research. “Brain imaging shows that teens are more likely to respond to situations emotionally, and they are less likely to consider consequences through rational forethought.”…

[continues at Fox News]

Peru’s health ministry has sent emergency teams to a remote Amazon region to battle an outbreak of rabies spread by vampire bats.

Four children in the Awajun indigenous tribe died after being bitten by the bloodsucking mammals.

Health workers have given rabies vaccine to more than 500 people who have also been attacked.

Some experts have linked mass vampire bat attacks on people in the Amazon to deforestation.

The rabies outbreak is focused on the community of Urakusa in the north-eastern Peruvian Amazon, close to the border with Ecuador.

The indigenous community appealed for help after being unable to explain the illness that had killed the children.

Read More: BBC News

A month before the premiere of True Blood’s third season earlier this summer I wrote a post about the first 21st century superhero. The new Iron Man, as reimagined by Jon Favreau and portrayed by Robert Downey Jr., had broken the mold constricting the superhero archetype since its inception back in the late 1930’s, and in its place offered a vibrantly modern model for the character, reflecting the unique culture, ethos, and mores of the 21st century. True Blood, I’m realizing, is now doing the same for that other undying superhuman trope: the vampire.

Of course, the vampire has been undead for a lot longer. The earliest recorded vampire myth dates back to Babylonia, about 4,000 years ago, and over the millennia it has appeared in almost every culture. But lets cut to the chase: 1922 was year vampires broke ground in film (though, technically, they’d made a few cameos before then). It was the year F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” came out.

Take a good look. That’s what a movie vampire used to be. A creature no teen girl, or anyone else for that matter, would want to see as a lead in a summer mystical romance franchise. In all the silent films that featured vampires there was always a clear and consistent view: here be monsters.

While this original archetype might have undergone a radical transformation over the past 80+ years of cinema — from grotesque monster to, ironically, heartthrob, a result of the only evolutionary force vampires are actually subject to: sexual selection, naturally — don’t be fooled. Just because Twilight’s Edward Cullen or the whatever-their-names-are characters of The Vampire Diaries happen to be getting panties in a twist at the moment, they are not in any way contemporary. Much has been made about the exceptionally “old-fashioned” gender roles in Twilight, but that analysis is basically missing the forest for one tree. Think about it: is there ANYTHING that happens in Twilight that could not have happened just as easily 50 years ago? You could turn Twilight into a 1950’s period piece and basically NOTHING about the major plot points, dialogue, personalities, relationships, or motivations — of either the vampires OR humans in this saga — would need to change. This does not a 21st century story make. In fact, if you’re curious about exactly why Twilight is so popular, the mechanics of this process are actually quite timeless:

[continues at social-creature]

Basically, I got the worst deal ever when I became a vampire. Every other vampire in history developed a supernatural level of attractiveness when they transformed. But not me. When I look in the mirror*, I just see a pasty, tired, fifteen-going-on-100-year-old looking back at me.
…
I sat next to Chloe today in Art and I could smell that she had type O- blood, which is rare but especially tasty (my dad calls it the champagne of blood). I told her about the goths, the tough gang and the popular gang, and she said she wouldn’t want to be in the popular gang anyway. She is a girl after my own heart. I told her about the rumour that Mr Byrne was a millionaire before he lost all his money and had to become an English teacher, and about how Darren from our class came in on No Uniform Day wearing his PE kit because he’s so poor that these are the only clothes he owns. She didn’t laugh at this and said she felt sorry for him, and I agreed to make myself look caring and sensitive.

You get the idea…

Robert Pattinson has a lot to answer for. Ever since his lanky frame immortalised Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight character Edward Cullen with an American twang, all the vampires of the world seem to have lost their British passports. Those populating Bon Temps, the fictional town in Louisiana that is the setting for TV drama True Blood, have a southern American drawl. Meanwhile Mystic Falls, Virginia, where The Vampire Diaries is set, is a long way from the London and Whitby homes of the most famous vampire of all: Count Dracula.

But watch out, bloodsuckers: the Brits want to bring you home. Academics at the University of Hertfordshire are organising a conference that will serve ketchup-smothered food (it’s tastier than blood) from coffins, all in the name of putting British vampire fiction back on the map. It’s the brainchild of Dr Sam George, a lecturer in English literature at Hertfordshire who is fascinated by vampires and keen to use them to make literature exciting.

“British actors have traditionally been cast as vampires on screen, but recently they’re all American, from Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Twilight. I aim to turn the focus back to the texts, which are mainly English, and what they say about our society,” George explains. “I wanted to put them in the setting of a rigorous academic conference on vampire fiction to prove that you can study popular literature in a serious way.

Read More in the Guardian

Among the many medieval plague victims recently unearthed near Venice, Italy, one reportedly had never-before-seen evidence of an unusual affliction: being “undead.”

The partial body and skull of the woman showed her jaw forced open by a brick (above) — an exorcism technique used on suspected vampires.

It’s the first time that archaeological remains have been interpreted as belonging to a suspected vampire, team leader Matteo Borrini, a forensic archaeologist at the University of Florence, told National Geographic News.

“I was lucky. I [didn't] expect to find a vampire during my excavations,” he said. Belief in vampires was rampant in the Middle Ages, mostly because the process of decomposition was not well understood.

For instance, as the human stomach decays, it releases a dark “purge fluid.” This bloodlike liquid can flow freely from a corpse’s nose and mouth, so it was apparently sometimes confused with traces of vampire victims’ blood.

Read More: National Geographic

If you step out of your house late Thursday night, you’ll witness an overwhelming scene. At 12:01 a.m., movie theaters will release “New Moon,” the next film in the “Twilight” series. Anxious viewers will finally discover whether mortal Bella Swan will choose Jacob’s werewolf den over Edward’s sparkly coffin. Clearly, creatures of the night have returned to societal consciousness.

As a testament to their adaptability, vampires are front and center on the pop-culture stage. Television shows such as “True Blood” and “The Vampire Diaries” feature titillating exchanges between fanged supermodels. Movies like “Twilight,” “Let the Right One In” and “Blood: The Last Vampire” explore vampirism through teenage, independent and gore-tinted lenses, respectively. Even the BBC can’t withstand Bram Stoker’s lure, and has come up with “Being Human,” a show that focuses on three housemates who happen to be ghost, werewolf and vampire.

What accounts for this 21st-century obsession? Less than 30 years ago, dealing with blood was considered a risky and unclean business as society encountered the AIDS-laced transfusions of the 1980s. And even though those fears have mostly abated, having blood drawn at the doctor’s office is still enough to bring out the squeamish adolescent in all of us. How, then, have vampires been able to influence cultural discourse without activating our gag reflex?

Sex plays a part, undoubtedly—today’s pop culture champions infinitely virile vampires who resemble Abercrombie & Fitch models…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]