Query: Vampires were living beings.

Relevant passages:
Vampire <=SEP=> A vampire is a being from folklore that subsists by feeding on the life essence ( generally in the form of blood ) of the living . In European folklore , vampires were undead beings that often visited loved ones and caused mischief or deaths in the neighbourhoods they inhabited when they were alive . They wore shrouds and were often described as bloated and of ruddy or dark countenance , markedly different from today 's gaunt , pale vampire which dates from the early 19th century .   Vampiric entities have been recorded in most cultures ; the term vampire , previously an arcane subject , was popularised in the West in the early 19th century , after an influx of vampire superstition into Western Europe from areas where vampire legends were frequent , such as the Balkans and Eastern Europe ; local variants were also known by different names , such as shtriga in Albania , vrykolakas in Greece and strigoi in Romania . This increased level of vampire superstition in Europe led to mass hysteria and in some cases resulted in corpses being staked and people being accused of vampirism .   In modern times , the vampire is generally held to be a fictitious entity , although belief in similar vampiric creatures such as the chupacabra still persists in some cultures . Early folk belief in vampires has sometimes been ascribed to the ignorance of the body 's process of decomposition after death and how people in pre-industrial societies tried to rationalise this , creating the figure of the vampire to explain the mysteries of death . Porphyria was also linked with legends of vampirism in 1985 and received much media exposure , but has since been largely discredited .   The charismatic and sophisticated vampire of modern fiction was born in 1819 with the publication of The Vampyre by John Polidori ; the story was highly successful and arguably the most influential vampire work of the early 19th century . Bram Stoker 's 1897 novel Dracula is remembered as the quintessential vampire novel and provided the basis of the modern vampire legend . The success of this book spawned a distinctive vampire genre , still popular in the 21st century , with books , films , and television shows . The vampire has since become a dominant figure in the horror genre .

Undead <=SEP=> The undead are beings in mythology , legend , or fiction that are deceased but behave as if alive . A common example of an undead being is a corpse re-animated by supernatural forces , by the application of the deceased 's own life force , or that of another being ( such as a demon ) .  The undead may be incorporeal like ghosts , or corporeal like vampires and zombies . The undead are featured in the belief systems of most cultures , and appear in many works of fantasy and horror fiction . The term is also occasionally used for putative non-supernatural cases of re-animation , from early experiments like Robert E. Cornish 's to future sciences such as cryonics and chemical brain preservation .   Bram Stoker considered using the title The Un-Dead for his novel Dracula ( 1897 ) , and use of the term in the novel is mostly responsible for the modern sense of the word . The word does appear in English before Stoker but with the more literal sense of `` alive '' or `` not dead '' , for which citations can be found in the Oxford English Dictionary . In one passage , nosferatu is given as an `` Eastern European '' synonym for `` un-dead '' . Stoker 's use of the term refers only to vampires , and the extension to other types of supernatural beings arose later . Most commonly , it is now taken to refer to supernatural beings which had at one time been alive and continue to display some aspects of life after death , but the usage is highly variable .