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The Goths
1. To assert of someone that they are “dead” can sometimes be intended, beyond the bare biological fact this might report, to mean that that person no longer matters, that they now belong to an irrelevant past.
Yet when, in the 1979 Bauhaus dirge, “ Bela Lugosi’s Dead ”, Peter Murphy attached this epithet to one Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, born in 1882 into a Hungarian community in the Transylvanian town of Lugoj or Lugos, in context it functioned not as a final nail in the old ghoul’s coffin, but rather as an act of revival — a word, you will note, containing the Latin root for “life”. The initial impetus for the flurry of early modern texts on the undead and related phenomena, to be precise, was the expansion of the Habsburg administrative apparatus into newly annexed regions of the Balkans, and the assignment to mostly hapless Austrian clerks of the task of sending reports back to the capital on the peculiar customs of the South Slavic villagers. The vampire myth is thus born out of proto-ethnography, as the natives periodically grew restless after reported nocturnal sightings of some poor old widow’s dead husband, and sought to remedy the problem with garlic, crucifixes, and wooden stakes driven through the hearts of exhumed corpses, and as the lowly Beamter sent news of these queer goings-on all the way back to Vienna.
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