Among all the wonderful characters, the most unusual fate befell the vampire. He went from an invisible or deformed creature that had nothing human in him, to a corpse moved by the spirit, but endowed with human habits, and then to a living person, first immortal and then mortal. The feared, rejected monster was eventually recognized as a civilized citizen, a loyal friend, an ardent lover and a spiritual leader. Currently, even the quality that made a vampire a vampire, and not a ghost, sorcerer, cannibal, etc., has been called into question - his thirst for blood. By tracking the various signs of a vampire as they arise and die out, the author builds a complex evolutionary chain, based on which contains ancient beliefs about blood, historical evidence about bloodsuckers, documentary and folklore data about creatures from Eastern Europe christened vampires, works of the 18th–21st centuries - fiction, cinema, comics, as well as hypotheses of ethnographers, historians, and doctors about the origin of this amazing creature .Mark of information products 16+