A typological inquiry into Asian undead beings, or, why there are no vampires in the east

Investigating four East and Southeast Asian undead entities, this essay attempts to demon- strate why the practice of labeling non-Western undead beings as vampires observable in both popular culture (particularly on the Internet in the twenty-first century) and academia is shortsighted and reductive because it fails to account for the uniqueness associated with any undead being, whether Eastern or Western, that is determined by its respective cultural- historical and cosmological contexts.