Some Serious 19th Century Shit

Auerbach writes about how 19th century vampiric literature focused on the vampire as a close friend without the familiar litany of identifying marks that we identify with it today. 

Male vampires, especially Lord Byron/Polidori and Varney the Vampire, offer a close bond or oath in friendship with each other or their prey, whilst the female vampires -- especially Carmilla and Christabel -- center on physical and emotional intimacy.  

Both of these genders' actions and feelings are portrayed as what the succeeding centuries would describe as homosexual, especially the females' obsessive closeness.

Auerbach then goes on to remark of the 19th century, "a century of alluring vampire friends invade erotic sites, the shared reality of bodies, on behalf of an abstract bond and a purely surgical violence." 

BS' 1897 Dracula provided a "lexicon of vampirism for the 20th century. Predators were identifiable by their fangs, victims by two little holes in their neck. After Dracula, contact between vampire and victim is as external to the body as possible. Moving from the erotic to the clinical, from affinity to penetration, vampire iconography abandons bosoms, fastening with scientific precision on higher, cleaner wounds."