'I hereby resolve to kill every vampire in America" writes the young Abraham Lincoln in the best-selling 2010 novel "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter." Honest Abe doesn't quite make good on his promise, and the grim results are all around us. Today, vampires spring from the shadows of our popular culture with deadening regularity, from the Anne Rice novels to the Twilight juggernaut to this year's film adaptation about the ghoul-slaying Great Emancipator. Lately we've also endured a decadelong bout with the vampire's undead cousin, the zombie, who has stalked films from "28 Days Later" to "Resident Evil" (the next sequel of which is due out this fall) and the popular TV show "The Walking Dead."

Purists will hold forth on the differences between vampire and zombie, but the family resemblance is unmistakable. Both are human forms seized by an animal aggression, which manifests itself in an insatiable desire to feed on the flesh of innocents. (Blood, brains, whatever; it's a matter of taste.) Moreover, that very act of biting, in most contemporary versions of both myths, transforms the victims into undead ghouls themselves.

A fatal infection of the brain, rabies is particularly devastating to the limbic system, one of the most primitive parts of the brain. Fear, anger and desire are hijacked by the virus, which meanwhile replicates prolifically in the salivary glands. The infected host, deprived of any sense of caution, is driven to furious attack and sometimes also racked with intense sexual urges. Today we know that most new diseases come from our contact with animal populations, but with rabies this transition is visible, visceral, horrible. A maddened creature bites a human, and some time later, the human is seized with the same animal madness.

Known and feared for all of human history—references to it survive from Sumerian times—rabies has served for nearly as long as a literary metaphor. For the Greeks, the medical term for rabies (lyssa) also described an extreme sort of murderous hate, an insensate, animal rage that seizes Hector in "The Iliad" and, in Euripides' tragedy of Heracles, goads the hero to slay his own family. The Oxford English Dictionary documents how the word "rabid" found similar purchase in English during the 17th century, as a term of illness but also as a wrenching state of agitation: "rabid with anguish" (1621), "rabid Griefe" (1646).