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This article reflects on iconology, in which the author has numerous years of experience. It offers a pragmatic answer to the question “What does it mean to read an image?” by deploying a method that uses an example accompanied by a critical discourse. The remarks aim to look into the origins of the emblematic images that anticipate, feed, or impact the analyzed image. It focuses on the circulation of symbols that these images convey in the social body through cultural history, taking into account different media forms (engravings, posters, paintings, movies, comic books, street stencils). With humor and erudition, the author analyzes Eugène Ogé’s emblematic drawing “Voilà l’ennemi,” published by the “anticlerical republican newspaper” La Lanterne in 1902, and explores its inspiration throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries in order to retrace the lineages of the mythical figure of the vampire, which is still visible today, even in contemporary street art.