Section /creature
A comparative bestiary of names, regions, earliest accounts, rules and transformations from folklore to screen.
The returning dead: a broad category for the dead who physically return among the living, attested in medieval chronicles long before the vampire.
A figure in Romanian folklore: a restless soul or body, living or dead, associated with unusual births and irregular deaths. Often conflated with the cinematic vampire.
The dead who return to feed on the living. The term entered European languages in the eighteenth century through Habsburg administrative reports on Serbian cases.
A dead person who returns and feeds first on those closest to them. Less a folkloric term than a nineteenth-century Russian literary form, made familiar by cinema.