Phantoms form out of aerial dust and celluloid grain, but are their grisly shapes real or imaginary? Are they possible to identify with certainty, or are we left to grasp at the gossamer, to remember what never really was? In Stoker's Dracula, Jonathan Harker's journal explains, “Let me begin with facts – bare, meagre facts, verified by books and figures, and of which there can be no doubt. I must not confuse them with experiences which will have to rest on my own observation, or my memory of them.” In the awful den of hellish infamy, such is not an easy task.

During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, cinema and vampirism underwent various evolutions that impacted heavily on the ability of audiences to comprehend them, to make sense of them. The two invariably pose questions, but those questions are particularly pronounced when considering the first two decades of film exhibition. To explore this issue, the United States serves as an important case study, as it represents a geographical location in which these issues converge, collide, and even collapse. The protean vampire was never more unstable than in America during the early cinema period.

Consider the following account from Rhode Island, published in March 1896, only days before Edison's Vitascope premiered at Koster and Bial's in New York City:

In this case, the understanding of and belief in supernatural vampires was so strong that a suspected corpse was exhumed. The incident stems from longstanding folkloric superstitions.

But only one year later, Philip Burne-Jones's painting The Vampire (1897), and Rudyard Kipling's companion poem of the same name, depicted the creature as a mortal woman who metaphorically bleeds men of their lives.