Monsters and gay men share a similar stigma of textuality in their anatomy. In these horror stories, the monster usually passes as a human, at least for some of the time: werewolves appear only during the full moon and vampires victims carry the stigma of penetration literally as the bite marks on their necks. ■ Reading bodily signs of course also has useful real life applications in fields such as medical sciences, biology and so on. Many diseases have been and are still recognized by first hand visual observations, from different rashes and allergies to skin cancers and the notorious AIDS-defining Kaposi’s sarcoma. However, the human history has also witnessed pseudosciences where the bodily marks or different features of the body have been theorized to be signs of witchhood, racial inferiority or general proclivity to crime. ■ In 1897, Bram Stoker hit the goldmine when Dracula—a story filled with sex, blood and death—was published. The description of vampirism as a contagious demonic disease sank into the public in Victorian Europe, where tuberculosis and syphilis were common. According to Schaffer (1997), the epidemiological horror fiction, including Dracula, encodes the fear and anxiety of the homophobic society, that is, homosexuals want to “corrupt” heterosexuals (p. 481). ■ Schaffrath (2002) analyses how, in Bram Stoker’s book, the vampire represents social chaos and threatens English gender roles (p. 98). According to the author, blood-sucking is a metaphor for intercourse when a vampire’s tusks sink into the victim’s neck and the act gives birth to a new vampire. As the victims of vampire are both men and women, so the vampire can be interpreted as bisexual, but also “hermaphroditic”, possessing both male and female “essence”. This vampiric two-sex model can be associated with homosexuality, because at the turn of the century, homosexuals were seen neither as men or women, but as their intermediate form. (Schaffer 1997, p. 472). ■ ​Although vampire tales precede the Victorian era by centuries, these creatures gained huge popularity and were closely tied—as was homosexuality—with the science of the era. Fears of disease and decay, elicited by venerial diseases and plagues, were reflected in the vampire stories and other gothic novels.