VAMPIRE MYTH TODAY
A vampire is a creature whose corpse by an evil spirit has been brought to life after death as a human being, and who attacks innocent people at night and sucks their lives out with their blood. The most famous image of a vampire of our times is Bram Stokers Dracula, the count, neatly dressed in a black and red coat (his inseparable attribute), with demonic eyes and characteristic long fangs. ... The motif of a vampire is very popular in pop culture these days, when a lot of films are made and books are written on this subject. And when assuming that the motif of a vampire, functions in our culture as a myth, we can try to interpret its meanings operating in our society. Yet first, to interpret a myth, one has to answer the question: what is myth today? According to a dictionary, a myth is a story which is not true and which as a rule involves supernatural or supra-human beings; concerned with creation, it explains how something came to exist. ... Roland Barthes in his "Mythologies" defines myth as a system of communication - a message - that consists of representations. Being made of two semiological systems, myth is "metalanguage" in the Saussurian model of a sign, as the sign of the linguistic level has constituted the signifier of the mythical level, the mythical signified is also a concept, but its sign becomes a signification. Also, a myth has been suggested to be an ultimate model of reading a text (which is "not only written discourse, but also photography, cinema, reporting, sport, shows, publicity" - Barthes), an ultimate way of interpretation,which brings us to a conclusion that myth is a metaphor.