Life involves change, from youth to old age. Death, too, is a transformative state, the cadaver decomposing into dust. But to be undead is to never grow old. It is to be static and unchanging. A supernatural vampire does not evolve. A “vamp,” on the other hand, can change, and did, frequently, during the first two decades of the twentieth century.

In 1920, as the “vamp” film craze was on the wane, a newspaper reporter observed, “So many misleading things have been written about these often gentle and inoffensive creatures, and there is so much popular ignorance on the subject, it would seem high time that they be given a hearing.” That comment had great merit. Only one year earlier another journalist asked readers, “Do you really know what a vamp is?” To help readers, he clarified, “we are not talking about honest-to-goodness vampires, but rather of the vamp, who is shown in a variety of ways to be different. Just what the difference – and how much the difference – is hard to figure out.”

Such questions were easier to ask than to answer, in part because the vamp was arguably as chimerical as she was vampirical. She developed, and she transformed, so much so that even her origins are difficult to pinpoint. In the early twentieth century, some writers cited Salome and Cleopatra as early examples of vamps, and yet they were much further from folkloric vampires than some of their early twentieth-century counterparts. A definition published in 1920 explained, “Vamp is an abbreviation of the word ‘vampire,’ which means a person who preys on others … The term has been popularized by Kipling's famous poem, The Vampire.”

Along with Rudyard Kipling, it is crucial to mention Philip Burne-Jones and his painting The Vampire (1897). The resulting vamp became the most notable of the metaphorical vampires of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, due not only to its popularity but also its ability to invoke the uncanny, even the supernatural, through visual and thematic means.