The fanged seducer with shiny black hair and a Romanian accent may be a 19th-century creation, but a very real fear of corpses that rise from the dead stretches much further back into our history. Records from the 11th century tell the story of a bloke who hid up in the eaves in Alnwick Castle, Northumberland, to see if his wife was cheating on him. When he saw her with another man, he fell to the floor and died. The locals were convinced, after his burial, that he was still wandering the village, spreading pestilence. They opened his grave and put a stake through him. Even up until the 1820s, there was a law in the case of a suicide which allowed local people to apply to the magistrates to exhume the body and drive a stake through it.