Is it Real? Vampires - For most of us, the vampire is a fictional count who became a horror movie icon. But is there more to the legend than fiction? Have the undead actually been walking among us for centuries? From a self-proclaimed modern-day blood drinking vampire, to a bishop who claims to have exorcised vampires and demons, experts in anthropology, archaeology, forensics, folklore and vampirism shed light on why this archetypal image has haunted us for so long. Vampires in Venice - Venice, 1575 the jewelled city of northern Italy is in the throes of unimaginable horror as one of the worst plagues ever to strike mankind: the Black Death takes hold. Mass graves swell with thousands of bodies. A legend grows that a vampire known as a 'Shroud-eater' is the cause of the plague. The Shroud-eater feasts on corpses and then rises from the earth to infect the living. More than four hundred years later Italian forensic anthropologist and CSI specialist Matteo Borrini leads a team excavating a 16th Century mass grave on one of Venice's outlying islands. He uncovers a skeleton unlike any he had ever seen before. A brick appears to have been inserted between the jaws of the skull. Why? The answer shocks him. He believes the object was part of a macabre ritual designed to 'kill' a vampire. The discovery launches Borrini on a forensic investigation unlike any he has ever attempted as he attempts to put a face and a life to the Vampire of Venice.
