Vampiric Transformations emerged from an ongoing research collaboration, through which the editors and contributors to this Special Issue explored the idealism that surrounds the figure of the vampire in relation to the persistence of – and resistance to – (post) Romanticist ideas within the genres of the fantastic. Our earlier research pursued pathways of inquiry relating to changing representations of the vampire in popular fiction and entertainment culture, such as tropes of hospitality and violation, the formation of vampiric identity, taste and fan culture, conventions of desire and the tensions between death and longevity that the figure of the vampire so frequently invokes (Baker, Green, Stasiewicz-Bieńkowska 2017). In Vampiric Transformations we set out to take a fresh approach; to consider the vampire as a social and political figure, one that encapsulates an ambivalent idealism forged partly from its European late-Romanticist formation as a popular monster/hero. The vampire first emerged in Europe just prior to the rise of revolutionary rights discourse (Butler 2010, 1–18), gaining in popularity by the 1820s with John Polidori’s tale The Vampyre (1819). This text would help to establish the self-consciousness that characterized key literary transitions of the mid-late nineteenth century (Thomas 2016, 6–7), fuelled by the clashes of the industrial age between nature, wealth and power, and setting key tropes in place for a new vampire wave, with Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897). At the same time, the conflicted legacies of colonialization and globalization caused the vampire to gain recognition within a diversity of cultural traditions and contexts, each with their own tropes and characteristics, as a metaphor for economic and political predation, as exemplified by powerful bloodsuckers from African and Asian traditions (Vrbančić 2007, 2; Ancuta 2011, 131). The vampires of contemporary popular culture now struggle with selfhood and social responsibility, the rights of others and themselves. They are fierce, swift and troubled by personal and social questions: close yet always at once removed from the human. As Butler remarks, ‘the vampire belongs to multiple worlds … [I]t therefore reflects an anxiety that we, perhaps, do not know at all who “we” are’ (2010, 9).