Vampires have captivated the attention of readers, writers, and critics for centuries. As literary figures, vampires fascinate due to the powerful but subtle manner in which they reflect upon a particular societal order—its precepts, prohibitions, and fears—and thus make visible the cultural and social dynamics in relation to the individual subject. The transgression they embody marks cultural, social, and personal boundaries and, time and again, offers alternatives to dichotomous constructions of these categories. Uncovering the limits of the social order through attacking, challenging, and eluding them, the vampire reveals their production, their failures and silences, their gaps. As a result, the disguise of the social as the ‘natural’ order of things and the relations of power through which it maintains itself become discernible. It is in this sense that the vampire always also opens up possibilities of subversion and deconstruction of these boundaries: of seemingly fixed categories of the societal. In this game of social power, it is language which constitutes the essential instrument of challenge and collaboration, signifying both the speakable and the unspeakable, and ultimately revealing the constructedness of the social order. Language is, moreover, crucial in negotiating and locating the so-called individual subject, and its (im)possible positions of power within the social world.