I have always felt that the vampire myth stems from our need to explain the things we don't understand, and in the past there were many diseases that weren't understood (like porphyria and xeroderma pigmentosa) and the ever-so famous coma- people 'dying' and then waking up. Even though the vampire myth is very old, it is used to cover a wide variety of events that may not be connected. The idea of the 'holy ground/holy water/crucifix' came from the historical figure Vlad Dracul, aka Vlad Tepes, who started out as a christian, and was possibly politically manipulated by the church and declared heretical and came back with a vengeance fighting against the church- and the culture romanticized one very bloody ruler and combined the vampyr beliefs into a single phenomenon.
Then came Bram Stoker with 'Dracula', which took the romanticized figure of the historical (and mythologized) Vlad Dracula, and reduced the figure to the most attractive attributes of the myth. (live forever, very potent, and shuns the light (making him 'mysterious') and left out the grossest of the attributes a slavic vampyr had. And it was a huge hit. And the rest, is, shall we say, history (or myth, depending how you look at it).
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