 No effort to depict vampires in popular fiction was as influential or as definitive as Bram Stoker 's Dracula ( 1897 ) . Its portrayal of vampirism as a disease of contagious demonic possession , with its undertones of sex , blood and death , struck a chord in Victorian Europe where tuberculosis and syphilis were common . The vampiric traits described in Stoker 's work merged with and dominated folkloric tradition , eventually evolving into the modern fictional vampire . 
