It’s the ultimate scam-eternal life for a mere $1,000-but Vlad Llecyina doesn’t have the heart to go for the jugular.
Sure, he regularly nicks his wife’s tender thigh for a few sips of warm blood. And he and Lynda rode to their wedding, which was in a Chicago suburban cemetery, in a hearse while lying side by side in a queen-size coffin.
But Llecyina will sternly explain through his pointy, retractable fangs, There is no such thing as a vampire.
And as much as he’d love the money, he can’t turn you into one.
“I’m the closest you’ll get, and anyone who calls themselves a vampire and who truly believes this mythical creature exists is nuts,” says Llecyina, a Chicago Goth-rock musician who, on an agent’s advice, went public with his blood drinking a few years ago to distinguish his group Dark Theater.
His admission instantly landed him on “Sally Jessy Raphael,” “Joan Rivers,” “Montel Williams,” “Talk Soup” and “Entertainment Tonight.”
“A woman even offered me a new car to make her a vampire,” says Llecyina, who indignantly denies that his drinking is a publicity stunt to promote his “industrial-Egyptian-metal” music. “I try to tell them they’re mixing up books with real life. It’s not going to happen. I don’t bite unless I’m (ticked) off. Anyway, how are you going to prove to me you’re not immortal after you’re dead?”
He has a point. But logic hardly seems to bother vampire fans, a group that has been swelling steadily since the late 1980s. While the black-cloaked, blood-sipping Llecyina may be a bit extreme, he is part of the subculture that includes vampire movies, television shows, literature, jargon, music and art.
According to J. Gordon Melton, an American religion expert who spent the last two years unearthing material for “The Vampire Book: The Encyclopedia of the Undead” (Visible Ink Press), the modern wave of interest began in 1986 with a rise in the number of vampire novels and comic books.
The monstrous 852-page tome is the most comprehensive collection of vampire lore, with entries on everything from African vampires to Yama, the god of death and a Hindu vampiric deity.
Forget the title of the Siouxsie and the Banshees song that equated vampires with leeches, rust corrosion and rotting seeds? It’s under Vampire Music (“We Hunger”). Wondering about lesbian vampires, decapitation or Tolstoy?
All are entries in the encyclopedia, which also lists vampire films, dramas and novels, the 60 vampire-interest groups in North America, Europe and Australia, computer bulletin boards, clubs for role-playing games and publications devoted to Gothic music and lifestyles.
“The one rabbit trail I didn’t follow, and the real underbelly of the movement, is the blood drinkers, but I will,” promises Melton, a frequent consultant to the media on religion and cults who founded the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara, Calif.
“While many like Vlad are otherwise perfectly normal, others are questionable and hooked on blood for various psychopathic and sociopathic reasons.”
Llecyina, who has his own pagelong entry in the book and isn’t nearly as creepy as his fang-baring photo might suggest, believes blood drinking allows one to retain memories and characteristics from one lifetime to another.
Chatty and amiable with the same long, bottle-black hair as his wife (who becomes furious when compared to Elvira), Vlad Llecyina claims to be an indirect descendant of Vlad the Impaler, the historical figure who inspired Bram Stoker’s title character of his novel “Dracula.”
Unlike some fetish drinkers, Llecyina, who is in his late 20s, says he doesn’t like the taste of blood. He downs the red stuff because it’s part of his belief system and something he learned in an earlier life (which began, he says, 563 years ago).
“You’re not weird if you do it,” insists Llecyina, who also admits with a sad sigh that it helps sell records. “But for me, it’s a matter of my soul. The energy inside us is too strong to dissipate and float off into the stratosphere when we die. It comes back.
“It’s a matter of remembering who you were and what you were. I plan on existing through this life. The world is such a marvelous place, there’s no way I’m giving up.”
Vlad says only four or five true blood drinkers-those who do it to keep them connected to their earlier lives-exist worldwide. And according to Martin Riccardo of Berwyn, who wrote the introductory chapter of “The Vampire Book” titled “A Brief Cultural History of the Vampire,” blood drinkers make up about 1 percent of vampire fans. Most others are attracted to the fantasy image.
Fantasy dream companion
“The vampire is the all-purpose fantasy outlet,” said Riccardo, a lecturer on vampires and the occult, who helped build the list of organizations for the book. “It can provide romance, intimacy and mystery without having to deal with real relationships. It’s the fantasy dream companion, and there is a lot of fear in the dating world right now.”
Vampires have also become sexy, sensual and sanitized over the last 20 years. While they are supposed to be ghoulish reanimated corpses, Hollywood gave us Frank Langella, Christopher Lee, and Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt, currently starring in the movie of Anne Rice’s 1976 novel, “Interview With the Vampire.”
Children eat Count Chocula and learn numbers from the Count on “Sesame Street.” Good Guys Wear Fangs is an annual vampire fanzine out of Plymouth, Mich., dedicated to good-guy vampires, who have heroic qualities and get their blood from animals, blood banks and willing donors.
“If your husband comes home, sits in front of the TV, drinks beer, burps and farts, you’re going to be in love with the elegantly caped vampire,” assures Jeanne Youngson, who founded the Count Dracula Fan Club in 1965 and also runs the Dracula Museum in New York City. Today the club has more than 2,500 members worldwide, many of whom are expected to converge at the First World Dracula Congress next May in Romania.
“It’s given us a lot of wannabes who dress in black, try to sleep all day and drink tomato juice,” Youngson says brightly. “It’s rather impractical unless you want to work in a morgue. I usually tell them if they get out in the sunshine, they’ll feel better.”
Youngson, who also writes vampire books and poetry, is the very last entry in the encyclopedia. But Melton says he could already add 50 to 100 more selections to the book, which was published in September and is in its second printing.
“I keep thinking the theme must have been exhausted, but new twists keep coming up,” says Melton, an avid vampire memorabilia collector for more than 20 years, whose Santa Barbara living room features vampire books, Dracula swizzle sticks and dolls.
“The fantasy vampires offer us is continued existence. Not heaven, not hell, not eternity, but continuance.”
Fear of infiltrators
An ordained minister in the United Methodist Church, with a Ph.D. from Northwestern and a master of divinity degree in church history from Garret Evangelical Theological Seminary in Evanston, Melton says vampires are an incredible subject that he tries to speak credibly about.
He is frequently invited to speak in court and to the media about cults, but after double bypass surgery in 1993, he spent most of his recovery time reading vampire novels and watching vampire movies.
“It’s the first book since the Encyclopedia of American Religions I put so much into,” says Melton, who is the American representative for the Transylvania Society of Dracula, an international organization that strives to keep the myth of Dracula alive. Vampire fans, he says, “aren’t a cult but they carry characteristics of a loosely organized religious movement.”
But Stephen Kaplan, who founded the Vampire Research Center in New York in 1972, warns vampire fans to be careful of some organizations.
“I’m concerned with S&M practicers and blood cults infiltrating vampire groups,” says Kaplan, clearly disgusted with the trend. “In a tragic way computers have made hunting for victims easier. They prey on young people and teenagers who don’t know any better and say, `Hey, you like vampires? Come and join my group.’ “
Through interviews, research and questionnaires, Kaplan has located an estimated 850 vampires in the world, 40 of whom live in California. But he has abandoned the common definition of vampires as the “undead” who return to take blood from the living.
Some of his vampires are people who have a need to drink blood every day, while others are “vampirelike” and sleep in a coffin, wear black clothes, work at night or occasionally drink blood. He painstakingly weeds out those he calls “wacko.”
So the search for the undead continues. But not without an incentive.
Vincent Hillyer of Los Banos, Calif., who claims to be the first person to receive permission from the Romanian government to spend a night alone in Count Dracula’s castle, is offering a $10,000 reward to anyone who can produce a true undead.
He doesn’t feel he’s sticking his neck out. “Since they have to die first, it’s quite unlikely,” Hillyer says. “And since modern-day burial practices withdraw blood and replace it with a chemical, I’m a little worried we may never find one. Vampires could be an endangered species.”
In the meantime, vampire fans do what they can. In the Halloween issue of the Count Dracula Fan Club News Journal, Allison Lahihainen of Massachusetts is looking for a pair of “Vampyre” color contact lenses. Prescription preferred.
