The scientificized vampire: Biological explanations of vampirism in "Blade I" and "I Am Legend."

1 Introduction.
The motif of the vampire has now been widely spread through all kinds of genres, movies and literary works. Many of these texts treat and depict vampirism as a mythical, religious or supernatural phenomenon or a mixture of all three of these. As the vampire is a figure which - concerning its existence in literary texts - is rooted in gothic and fantastic fiction, the causes and reasons for its existence given in these texts are not based on what one might call the empirical world. Apart from these works, which accept the inexplicability of the phenomenon of the vampire, the…