Vampires VS Werewolves

Vampires and werewolves. Each have a large fan base, a substantial collection of stories and myths, and a seemingly never-ending feud. The two are pretty much known by all to hate one another. You have movies like Underworld, books like Twilight and the Anita Blake series, all showing either a strained vampire/werewolf relationship or full out deadly hatred. But fans and haters, werewolves and vampires have a few similarities and ties to one another.

To start off, like vampires, werewolves also caused mass alarm in Europe during the 1500s and onwards. Back in the day people were petrified of becoming a vampire, they did all sorts of insane things to corpses and went all out to prevent vampires from coming into being, there were even “experts” that wrote multiple pamphlets on the subject to inform everyone about these supposed vampire infestations. The same deal went down with werewolves as well, people had the same fear  as they did vampires . Fun fact: there were nearly thirty thousand cases of lycanthropy reported between 1520 and 1630 .

There was also the old belief that someone that was a werewolf in life would then return as a vampire once they died. All due to being ungodly and having a cursed soul and all that not-so-good stuff. Because of this, in Slavic territories (as well as a few others), many names originally used for werewolves eventually came to be used for vampires (vrykolakas, vukodlak, vurkodlak and volkodlak). In France, demonologists wrote of an unique kind of werewolf called the loublin. This werewolf was found in cemeteries, digging up corpses and then eating them. There are also other werewolf myths such as this around the world but also vampire myths as well. In Montenegro, there was a belief that all vampires must spend time in wolf form. In Greece, anyone that ate a sheep that had been originally killed by a wolf would become a vampire.

Vampires and werewolves may hate each other in entertainment but in history and mythology they have many ties to each other. The compatibility of the two was even examined by Ronald Chetwynd Hayes in his story “The Werewolf and the Vampire” (1975).

- Moonlight

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