Letting the Right One In
Bill: Someone who lives here must invite me in!
Mr. Hamby: No! Don’t do it, he will kill us all!”
Bill (to Eden): Come here, little girl. I am here to protect you and your mother and your father. I am your friend. All you have to do is invite me in and I can make it all stop.
Eden: Please sir, won’t you come in?S2 E2 True Blood
One of the rules of Vampires among humans is the rule that they must be invited into a mortal’s home. This is designed to be a protection of the home, for your home is your castle, and to reinforce the notion that evil cannot come into your life unless you expressly invite it to do so.
The origins of Vampires having to have an invitation into a mortal’s home is not clearly recorded in Vampire mythology. There is a vague notion that early people believed that disease came into the house with the night air. Early Romans believed it came on the mists and fogs that sometimes traveled through the foul Roman streets, looking for open doors and windows to come and cause illness. And in ancient times most illness was thought to be caused by evil spirits.
In more modern times, tuberculosis, or consumption, was thought of as the Vampire disease because the patients would usually have long periods of illness followed by a short respite where the tubercular patient would have an unearthly, rosy, healthy appearance. The notion that TB was a Vampiric disease was later more firmly asserted as other members of the family and community fell ill with the disease. Especially those who had close contact with the patient.
As all myths carry some cautionary element, the notion that you do not open the door after dark, that monsters lived in the night’s shadows, may have been a concoction to make sure that no one answered the door after dark. This was a good rule to follow because not only did the children of the night walk the darkness, thieves and murderers and other human monsters did as well.
We see these vague notions really take shape in the 1700’s early Vampire literature with early Gothic stories of the Vampire entity, usually in the form of someone the person has known, asking for entrance into the house. Even Bram Stoker’s Dracula awaits invitation into Lucy Westerna’s house and into Mina’s house. Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot also works with the old belief that Vampires must be invited into the home.
The notion of rescinding the invitation is first seen here as well, as Abraham Van Helsing finds Dracula in his wolf form feeding from Lucy and he rescinds the invitation. This is a fairly new construct in the Vampire mythos and gives the human characters one more weapon in their arsenal. The only exception to this rule is it does not work in public places, like Merlotte’s for example, as Liam, Diane and Malcom showed us last season.
In the Sookie Stackhouse novels and in True Blood, we see this tradition being carried through with Sookie first inviting Bill into her house, then rescinding her invitation. And in future scenes, this rule of fang will be further applied.
Source: The Encyclopedia of Vampires, Werewolves, and Other Monsters
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