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Oh hey, it's the lady recording a podcast at a rental car in an airport parking lot for real, ali wart, I'm here. It's Spooketober. Okay, it's Halloween week. This episode is so robust, it's so meaty and juicy, it's just going to bleed into November. This is a two parter because it's that good. So this is part one. I talked to this ologist for nearly two hours, and I felt like I should have paid a price of admission for the conversation, which is, I guess what his college
students do via tuition. But I can tell you you're in for a treat, and the trick is that you get it for free, So get excited now. This ologist came to my attention when someone encountered doctor Lauren Esposito, the scorpiology guest, and grabbed laurence phone and texted me from her phone to please hunt this vampire guide down. So, Miranda Mosley, I'm talking about you. You hooked it up. Well done. Thank you. Also, thank you to everyone for
supporting at patreon dot com slash ologies. You support the show and you send in your vampire questions and I love you. You can join for as little as a dollar a month, So thank you to everyone also wearing ologies merch fromologiesmerch dot com and for supporting the show. You can do it for zero dollars just by subscribing and rating and reviewing. Help so much. Yemagge left a review this week that said you will squeal with delight and hmm in thought almost every episode. So I hope you
do that. You're going to do a lot of h and a lot of what.
So.
Vampiology came from the word vampire, which may come from an old Slavic word vape here or Turkish, for which it's disputed, but vampiology is definitely a term. It's a word for the scholarly pursuit of this field, and this guest is just one of the world's finest, a legend.
No other vamproologist would do so. He got his PhD in Slavic Languages at Ohio State University and is now a senior lecturer in Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University in Bloomington, and one of the school's no doubt most popular courses is his The Vampire in European and American Culture. This episode is a wild ride. I don't know how we got him, but I love
that we did. You're gonna love him, So find a shady spot and prepare to drink in the functions of folklore, the mysteries of medicine, Pale Tailer's subtweeting, Lithario's ghost story competitions, penny dreadfuls, plagiarism, zene art, lawsuits, destruction, resurrection, social taboos, weaponized fiction, escalating monster warfare, romanticism, and propagandism. With a professor who proves not all heroes wear vampire capes. Vamprologist Doctor Jeff Poldeman.
Hi, my name is Jeff holdeman and I use he hymn pronouns.
And we edit too so we can stop starring. We're not live at all wonderful.
We are undead. Ali, we are undead.
I couldn't have said it better than myself. I'm definitely talking to I think the best person in the world for an episode on vampirology. I think that would be the ology.
This is well, you know that I love your other podcasts where you have you know, other great Greek sounding names, and vampire vampire ology just is a little bit too transparent. So maybe like fangy Bytology if you want to have another option there, But vampirology is completely fine.
Hemo heemophageology very good.
Yes, blood eating maybe, yeah, exactly. But please understand that not all vampires drink blood, so they're not all hemophages.
Yeah, who doesn't Which vampires don't drink blood? This is exciting already?
Oh our psychic vampires?
Oh my gosh, Okay, have you been actually tell you?
I can tell you all about our different types of vampires as you like and stuff. But I already when you say have you been watching, I already know that you're going to ask am I watching What We Do in the Shadows with Colin Robinson.
Absolutely, it's so good. It's so good. So many people asked, have you been watching it? And I've been watching it too, and it's just in my head. I just keep thinking Loslow, Loslow, all day Letlow so good. So now you are a professor in this in Indiana? How did you come to be a lecturer? You're in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literature, is correct.
Slavic and Eest European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University at Bloomington.
Yes, at what point did that even become an option?
So full disclosure. My maternal grandmother was born in Transylvania, and so the roots go back very far. But she only mentioned wolves. So she came to the United States right before at the out of World War One, the last sailing of her ship. You know, if somebody had had pink eye, I would not be talking to you right now. But she came with her entire family, but
she would still talk about the old country. And my mom and I actually got to go back and visit in nineteen ninety nine, back to her village and everything, and it was just as magical as you would expect, but she would talk about wolves at night and maybe some mentions of like witch's kind of category, but no vampire talk. And it wasn't until I got to the Ohio State University to do my graduate studies. In my second year there, they called in a hatchet dean to
get rid of our department. And they said, we're going to close your department. And one of my professors, doctor Dan Collins, said, well, you know what's the problem here, and they said, well, your enrollments are low in the department. And he said, oh enrollments. Well, I took a vampire course at the University of Virginia with Jan Perkowski, and if you want to see enrollments, I'll give you enrollments. So he developed the course based on what he had studied.
Another graduate student and I were his assistants and his dual ren Fields, and we got dressed up in peasant shirts. I went down to Star Sales in Columbus, Ohio, and like bought you know, one hundred and forty four packs of plastic vampire teeth. We made flyers, stapled the teeth to the flyer, went out. I put bite marks on my neck and we handed out flyers for the course and got two hundred and twenty students in the class the first year.
That's a lot.
So we had one of the largest classrooms on campus and it was all lecture based and PowerPoint and really there was I was frustrated because students were learning factoids and not really putting it together. And you know, we could give multiple choice tests but not really delve deep. And so I was like, if I ran the zoo, I said, if I ever teach this class, I'm going to make it a boutique course, twenty students, seminar, essay tests, and research projects.
And so when he went to Indiana University in two thousand and two, he pitched this idea and.
They said, nah, we hired you for other things.
So fast forward half a decade.
Five years later, I started as the faculty director of the Global Village Living Learning Center and they said, oh, and by the way, you'll be teaching a seminar every semester. And I was like, on what and they said, oh, whatever you'd like, but it should be something, you know, international, cultural, global, something that you do. I was like, oh, here it is, And I got to then pitch my vampire course, which I taught for the first time in the fall of
two thousand and eight. So this is twenty twenty two, and this is my fifteenth vampire brood of students that I have this year.
Can I tell you secret? Okay? Great? Sometimes when I'm vetting guests, I check out site called rate my Professors, which is like YELP, but it's about college teachers, which is as terrifying as it sounds if you're a college teacher. But this ologous ratings are fawning and appreciative, things like Jeff, a super fun guy with a great sense of humor, knows literally everything there is to know about vampires, and
we'll make sure you know it all too. People say it's one of the wildest classes, one of the weirdest courses they've ever taken, indescribably intriguing, prompting me to consider perspectives I'd never before encountered. So buckle up. We have the best person in the world for this, and for the next two episodes he is your teacher. But with no tests.
It is everything that I wanted it to be, with aforementioned essay tests and analysis projects and class discussions and get to see the sweat on students' faces and the embarrassment when we're talking about really personal vampire stuff.
I mean, how did you become prepared to do that? There is a sixty page syllabus that you hand out and it catalogs every reference of vampires in film, different series, in literature. How do you become acquainted with all the material that is out there?
Elliot's sixty two pages. Okay, So I when I started, and doctor Collins did such an amazing job of coming up with themes and the materials that we covered at Ohio State. When I came here, I didn't have any
vampire movies. I had to go down to the video rental stores and get them to make clips for class, and so I bought my first I was like, I've got to get the standards, and got a couple of those, and then got a couple more, and then you know, it's like in the United States during one summer and it's like, maybe I'll check on Amazon and eBay.
To see what there is.
And now I have a collection of about six hundred DVD titles of as many vampire movies that aren't completely terrible from around the world. So it's taken fifteen years to collect all of that, and so the syllabus has continued to grow in detail, but then also in the resources the references that are there as well. So this year I added in a section on vampire themed video games,
for instance, So it's always evolving and expanding. And of course there are about twenty new vampire movies that come out a good vampire movies that come out at a year.
Twenty vampire movies a year. We as human beings, are thirsty for blood sucking.
So there's always room for growth there.
And now fifteen years in the making, say for you, but how many years in the making have vampires been in lore? When did it first pop up? Did it start with Flad.
Oh way before him? And again that's my countryman you're talking about, so we'll be kind of careful.
There, mister Impaler. I'm so sorry.
Exactly.
Yes. Now, to understand movie vampires, we have to go way, way, way way back in time. And this is just so much history and context. You didn't know that you needed to know. It'll change halloweens and horror movies for the rest of your life.
It didn't happen overnight. We study first the folkloric vampire, the vampire central and Eastern Europe, which is the type of vampire that we inherit now through various means. But we had to have a whole bunch of elements there in place. We couldn't have gotten our folkloric vampire that we know anywhere else because we had to be in
Central and Eastern Europe. There had to be people living in these conditions in these rural areas, and both mountains and fields and swamps and short growing seasons and long winters, and certain prevalent diseases, and religions that were in the area pre Christian religions and then Christianity. And we had to have Indo Iranian dualism come up and spread among the people and slowly work its way into their belief
systems and their world views. And we had to be living in these extended families that were subsisting on farming, living year to year in these sort of patriarchal patrilineal social organizations of this extended family. We had to have all of those things in order to have our folkloric vampire.
Ps I google this for us. Because Indo Iranian dualism not a phrase that I casually use. And according to a paper based on a lecture by Professor doctor Jamsheed K. Showski at the second Indo Iranian International Congress, it means in the broadest strokes, just the notion of good versus evil. That quote, good cannot arise from evil, nor evil from good. Thus it should be understood that something completely perfect in terms of goodness cannot produce evil, and vice versa. Evil
shit cannot turn cool. And where where do you think the Genesis itself was? When is the first recorded history of something of this nature, something that maybe creeps only in the night and is not necessarily alive, but is undead, like where do you find that germ?
Yeah? One of the problems is that the Slavs of Central and East Europeans didn't get writing until Christianization. And so you know in nine eighty eight in Kievan Rus, we didn't have records before that.
Did I know what he was talking about? Of course I didn't. I've only been studying Eastern European history for like the last fifteen minutes. But yes, there was a state in Eastern and Northern Europe Kievan Rus up until about the twelve hundreds, But in the late nine hundreds, Vladimir the Great was like, enough of paganism, I'm over it, let's do let's see is on does let us drink, Let's do Christianity. And then they started using written language
for religion. So before that time, a lot of history and knowledge was oral history and yes, folklore.
So we reconstruct a proto vampire, which was a demon which sucked water from the clouds, causing drought, causing the crops to wither, causing people to not have food and causing them to wither through starvation leading to death. Especially once we get dualism and this belief in good and evil being equal forces which have always existed and exists now and will always exist, and one's not going to win out over the other, and the soul is good
and the body is bad. That slowly got to take form that formless demon which would have sucked rain from the clouds, to a being which then would suck blood from human victims, causing withering, leading to death.
Death by desiccation. Our most primal fears are losing fluids, precious bodily of fluids.
So it's this beautiful analogy that the similarity between those two things, and it translates very well into a physical manifestation, into an anthropomorphisation of the unexplained phenomena that they were experiencing. That's just incarnation of that big g greed personification.
It speaks to so many human fears. I mean, that's kind of what monsters and lore and myth really do, right, It's what are we afraid of? And what can we learn from it? Is that the function of vampires.
So I would push back a little bit on that, okay, in that we are our modern interpretation, especially as a literary vampire or a cinematic vampires, a kind of literary vampire where it's by definition false, it's by definition fiction. The folkloric vampire had two functions. One and arguably first, was a psychological function to explain certain very specific phenomena that people were experiencing living in Central and Eastern Europe in a pre modern period.
So vampires weren't just art and entertainment with like a buried lesson. Folkloric vampires were the explanation.
We get types of death, so it's not any death, it's wasting diseases, so things which will cause people to slowly get weaker and weaker and eventually die. Tuberculosis is a really good one there, with a withering disease where a strong person can suddenly get weaker and weaker and pass away. There are internal cancers that are like that
as well. Now we have HIV AIDS which maps on beautifully to that in the modern period, COPD and rheumatoid arthritis and multiple sclerosis and a lot of these diseases which cause physical wasting, coeliac disease. Where you have this, you know, the death certificate says, you know, failure to thrive.
And then we have a whole set of birth anomalies that occur that are specifically tied to vampires and also to wear wolves and sorcerers and things that live in this very similar cluster of supernatural beings in Central and Eastern Europe. And then we have why people are mean, why people do bad things? Why do people have impulses that are uncontrolled, uncontrollable that cause trouble in our society, in our tight knit social organization, which could mean the
death for everybody. And then we have a whole set of phenomena ways of death, types of death, manner of death that we have that are prohibited, that are bad things you shouldn't be doing. And then there are all of the traits of signs after death. These are post mortem if you find a body or if you dig up a body and you see the body that's exhibiting these kind of traits. So you have to have people wasting away, and it's like, I think we've got a
vampire here. You know, who recently died? When did this start? Who recently died? What were they like? Did they have this kind of taking more than their fair share impulse in them? Maybe? How did they die, what were their parents like, and what were they like in life? Analyzing this looking for signs until you said, maybe this might be the source for that. So rather than being an intentional source of fear, it's a psychological explanation for that.
And you can just kind of feel that it took form over centuries to the point where we have this folkloric vampire, which is a reanimated corpse that then feeds on the blood of those closest to them and then spreads outward. So with our reanimated corpse, you can reanimated corpse out of in two ways. Either the soul leaves the body at death and then you're dead. What you
want is for the soul to leave and leave. You want to mourn a person's death, but you don't want to wail so much that they say, Ah, these people can't live without me. I need to come back. You need that person to go on. So there are lots of traditions about how you keep a person's soul from
coming back into the body. The body is laid out in the house, read prayers over it, and then you pull up the threshold on the door and take the coffin underneath the threshold, and then put the threshold back down so that the soul can't come in the way that it came out. So you can have a a corpse reanimated by its own soul which has returned. Or you can have a corpse where the soul leaves and then a demon comes in and then reanimates the corpse.
Ah, just kind of like a squatter.
Right, yeah, And then and then you know, and then this explains, for instance, either that the person who's hit on the head loses consciousness, comes back and is never quite the same. It just it explains a whole lot of or that you know the soul or a demon comes back in the body we put it in the earth, and then it by its nature again, this is a person takes more than their fair share of alcohol, of sexual partners, of food, of things, of life force. In depth,
the only thing that they're missing is life force. And as we learn from movies, the blood did life means the rinfield. The blood is seen as being the locusts of the life force, and so that would be the only thing that a vampire in death or in undeath would need, and that's why they come back, and that's
why they drink blood specifically. And it's really meant to be an explanation because then when we have a name for it, when we know what it's like, when we know how to spot the signs, when we know what to do about it to either keep it away from us, or if we can't keep it away from us, how to destroy it. There's that anxiety reduction that comes with having the diagnosis and suggested cures for it.
Do you think that that is part of that origin story though, in the absence of WebMD and Google just looking for some kind of medical explanations of why someone wasted.
Yes, and that entire set of beliefs coalesces around the vampire. But this explanation of how someone who's healthy suddenly keeps getting weaker and weaker and there's no sign, there's no physical manifestation of why they should be getting sicker. Definitely, that medical explanation, that pre modern medicine interpretation of that, it's really genius. It accounts for a lot of phenomena that they were afraid of, hurt by, their communal social
order was disturbed by. It definitely fits into that. So we talk about psychological functions of the folkloric vampire, and there's a second set of functions, and those are the sociological functions. There's the psychological explanation for unexplained phenomena surrounding
people's nature and death. And then there are the prohibitions against all of the things which cause disorder when you're living in an extended family and you are trying to survive from year to year, and we can kind of feel that get hijacked into what we call social control. So people then say, well, if you do these things,
you might become a vampire. And when you become a vampire, you're going to feed on your family, the family that you might not like them all the time, but you love them, you depend upon them, and the worst thing for you to do living in a communal society would
be to feed on the rest of the community. And that's part of why it's so difficult to explain all of this to modern Western people, because we're so individualistic, and you know, all of our movies and everything, it's one vampire going after one victim, and we don't see that communal threat of the folkloric vampire. It's just so hard for us to understand that anyone could have actually believed in that folkloric vampire. And that's why we say
it it was real. The folk ork vampire was real in the belief system of the people who held it.
So folkloreic vampires weren't just about a mysterious adversary, but about community survival. And psychologists and evolutionary biology and anthropologists know this is part of the human survival instinct, as noted in the nineteen ninety five paper the need to belong desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation, and it says that existing evidence supports the hypothesis that the need to belong is a powerful, fundamental and extremely
pervasive motivation. So yes, vampire folklore helped keep groups safe. How does this relate to twilight.
That allows us to be descriptive about that versus a vampire in literature or movies where it's patently by definition not true.
When did it go from that folklore to entertainment and literature and pop culture.
So the industrial revolution killed the folkloric vampire when people started moving into the cities, when that urbanization happened, and they left their villages and were suddenly in cities with other people from other places who had other beliefs, and you had structured mandatory education, and you had access to hospitals and emerging modern medicine and emerging modern social organizations. In the village, the patriarch was in control, had to
keep order there. What do you do if someone is a glutton or an alcoholic, or a troublemaker or a thief or a murderer when it's one of your family members, the best thing to do is to just keep them from doing those kind of things. When people come into the cities and do those things, and they're doing them to people who they're not related to, We then need a modern legal system to say what is right and what is wrong. And we have to have a law
enforcement system that would then arrest those people. And we need a judicial system which would try those people, and we need a penal system to lock those people up and away from society. We need all of these modern urban services and beliefs and access to having a church on the corner as opposed to one that takes half a day to get to where you live, so where you might only go to church once a year at Easter or something, and here everybody is around, and everybody's
from somewhere else. And then, especially as generations go or as people will take your belief systems and say that that's superstition, right. Everybody's religion is somebody else's superstition, and vice versa. And this is one of the hard things, is to keep people from being judgmental about these kind of things.
Everybody's religion is somebody else's superstition.
Ah.
I find that to be a beautiful sentiment. So the rural folkloric vampire and the newly industrializing urban environment collide around the turn of the eighteenth century, like the spooky life eating creep hits a big time. I like to imagine him stepping off a bus and taking things in like someone who just moved from Iowa.
Once we move into the cities, once we have access to my modern sciences big s, plural, modern biology, modern epidemiology, as these are growing, modern psychology, modern criminal justice and criminal psychology, abnormal psychology, which explained away all of the psychological functions the vampire was explaining away, and then all of the modern social organizations which kept people in line. The folkloric vampires out of a job at that point
because they're not needed anymore. They're not needed to explain things and the threat of the folkloric vampire isn't needed to keep people in line. We can mark the end of the folkloric vampire period at the beginning of urbanization that comes along with the industrial revolution in Central and Eastern Europe. It takes a lot longer in Central and Eastern Europe versus Western Europe for those effects to take place.
We still have big empires Russian Empire, Austro Hungarian Empire overseeing people, but they're still very often living in rural places. And then as you get into Southern Europe, as the mountains get higher, you can have isolate beliefs where that modernization isn't reaching. And so there are still people who
hold these beliefs as part of their belief systems. They're numerically probably pretty small, and they probably won't readily admit it to you for fear of people saying that, you know, they're stupid and uneducated and superstitious.
Let's talk about the big novel that established vampires. When Dracula the novel came out, was the general public, the international public? Was this the first kind of like depiction of it in written literature as a character as a caricature too? No, so we know I was very wrong about Dracula being the first vampire novel. I did not know what I was talking about. I mean, we're not even there yet, We're like one hundred years away. This is so exciting.
No, so right at the point where the folklore vampire is running out of a job, starting in the probably by the early eighteen hundreds or so late seventeen nineties, we also get Romanticism that comes in. So through the sixteen seventeen hundreds we have the Enlightenment, which is supposed to be pulling us out of the dark ages of backward thinking, out of the darkness of ignorance, and showing people the light through education, through civilization, through striving for
greater things. And we strive and strive and strive, and we get to the seventeen nineties and at some point people are like, this isn't working, and we get this beautiful period of Romanticism, not kissy kissy romanticism, but capital are Romanticism, which has as part of Gothic literature.
Romanticism was emerging in Europe in the seventeen nineties, partly inspired by the French Revolution, which we happened to discuss in the I Go France minnesote and the Catacombs episode from last week. But yes, after upheaval of a monarchy and a lot of science and the Enlightenment, Romanticism is bending things back to art, involving these really extreme emotions and drama and horror and the majesty and the power
of nature. And we will be right back to talk about this first ever vampire novel in a quick second, But first let's toss some cash at a worthy cause. And this week Jeff chose the Red Cross because he donates blood as often as he humanly can every fifty six days. Bo wait, actually no. A few days after the interview, I got an email from Jeff saying he'd like to change the donation. He said, I didn't see the news that you lost your father to multiple maloma,
a blood cancer, so recently. I just saw his beautiful obituary posted on your Facebook page, and with tears in my eyes, and in keeping with the blood theme of the episode, I would like to ask if our episode's charity could be the Multiple Maloma Research Foundation in his honor and memory Augh Jeff, what a gem. So yes, a donation will go to my looma dot Org in Jeff Holdeman's honor, in memory of my dad, Larry p Ward my heart. Okay. That donation was made possible by sponsors of the.
Show, Bionantma got Burga Onnlu, the Hartnir, the Holla, the hayman A Hecko ah ersuen As Lance LADENI Detained, Nudovshu will Kill Katarhu La Hula tchomparods on udros Ors, lance Is Phaser, Latgun's Throw, Tasha Tapa Seranashka Agustnava Is FuGO more Heyrick h i a punk i e is called relala a On Tudoros or raslanse if we realed this in the Heron.
All right, let's get back to when the first vampire novel arose in modern fiction. The Birth of the un Dead coming to you.
Now, and it's this rejection of this striving for enlightenment and everything, and it's a return to the fascination with the sublime, with the dark powers of nature. This is where Lord Byron and Percy Bisch Shelley get into the picture. As they're writing romantic dark Gothic literature. We get our first short story, originally in English published in eighteen nineteen called The Vampire with a Y John Polydori in England,
and it is written at the same time. The idea comes from this fascinating story where John Polydori is hired. He was the youngest medical student at his institution. Lord Byron hires him as his personal physician to take the Grand Tour of Europe and goes with Percy bish Shelley and Mary Walstoncraft, who will then later become his wife, and her half sister Claire Claremont So.
A bunch of goth writers, including the poet and heart throb. Lord Byron now Percy Bishelley, was also a writer. He died tragically at twenty nine in a boating accident, leaving a widow, Mary and then Claire Claremont was Mary's stepsister and freshly preggers with lord Byron's baby, a daughter that they would name Allegra, who turns out as a small child, was sent to live in a convent, where she died
at the age of five. What oh, gosh and yes, John Polydori, lord Byron's doctor, is also on vacation with this group of emo poets.
And they are at this villa and this was the year without a summer. There was a volcanic eruption and it was cold all summer long. And they were in this villa and it's dark and cold and rainy, and they're inside and they say, how about if we write ghosts stories? So they had been consuming German ghost stories that had been translated into English, and they were like, habout if we you know, we got some some people
with literary talent here. How about if we have a ghost story writing competition, right right, scary stories for each other. This is when Mary Walstoncraft creates Frankenstein.
Oh wow.
And then this is then when Lord Byron comes up with the idea for a vampire. So that's this fragment of a novel. He has an idea, doesn't like it, puts it away. Percy Bushelley is like, I just published some stuff. I don't really want to play with this, and clear Claremont was there on the side. And then John PAULADORI this young upstart. He was a self made man. And here's Lord Byron, you know, mad, bad and dangerous to know Lothario.
Lord Byron had quite a love life. Let's just say. Rumor had it he fathered a daughter with his half who at the time was married to her first cousin. But yes, Lord Byron had also recently gotten Claire impregnated, even though he blew her off and barely liked her according to letters, So he was kind of a proto fuck boy. But I guess in this case he was a lord. He was a fuck lord. I'll due respect.
And John Polydor, you can just feel this frustration. He's like, self made man, works really hard, gets educated, and here is this guy who has all of this access to money and access to education, access to intelligence and power and has literature as a way of reaching the people. And he still goes and does these mean things, less than enlightened things, and John Polydori writes this story about a skull headed lady and they all laugh at him.
He almost gets into a duel and he gets sent home and he goes back to England and he's like, you know, I'm gonna write this story. I'll show you, and he writes The Vampire about Lord Riven and it's this characterization of Lord Byron as a vampire, and it gets published, gets misattributed as by Lord Byron, and Lord Byron writes back like I wouldn't write this crap, you know, retract this. But we get our we get our first short story, originally in England, written at this at this time,
about a vampire. So that's that's our birth of vampire literature.
Can you imagine if you publish a snarky piece of literature about someone you low key hate and it gets popular and then people think your hater wrote it, and then your hater just hates on it more. But anyway, thus a monster was born, the first vampire in modern literary history, which started as a little fuck you.
And that's so think about that. That's two hundred plus three years ago, so we have two hundred years of vampire literature. In eighteen forty five to eighteen forty seven, James Malcolm Rhymer gives us Varney the Vampire. This is true pulp fiction. I don't know if you've ever read this, no it sounds fake. It's called the first novel. It
was done in installments. And you know, lest you poo poo, that Dostayevski published like that too, so but he sort of eight pages or so of this story, and it really reads like a soap opera, and the beginning is very over the top.
So yes, James Malcolm Rhymer's Varney the Vampire was published in these installments called Penny Dreadfuls, which were horror and pulp books put out in these slim volumes on cheap paper and sold for a penny apiece. And I found a link to the whole damn book, and I'll put it up on my website. But the full title is Varney the Vampire, The Feast of Blood, and it opens the solemn tones of an old cathedral clock. Once midnight. The air is thick and heavy, a strange deathlike stillness
pervades all nature, and then a storm erupts. Anyway, the cover I looked it up, is kind of a crude sketch of like a skeleton coming out of a grave, and it looks so much like a punk scene from the early nineties. I would wear this on a shirt. And the novel bills itself as a romance of exciting interest. And also the cover poses the question art thou a spirit of health or a goblin damned? Which is really the best question I've ever heard, because sometimes I'm jogging,
I'm eating vegetables, breakfast is a smoothie. I am a spirit of health. Last night, no lie, I ate Cheetos for dinner, and I fell asleep in jean shorts, and I'm a goblin damned. I've never appreciated a dichotomy more. I might have to make much of this.
Romanticism is jumped the shark by this point, and it's just really flowery and over the top and military and everything. And it also has one of the greatest endings to a novel. But because the other four hundred and fifty pages are almost interminable, most people have not read that work. I think there were some threats of making shows out of it, and I still haven't seen any of those.
So that was Varney the Vampire, The Feast of Blood, You Goblins Damned.
And then in eighteen seventy two we get Shardan Lefaneu with Carmilla, and this is our first female vampire. So he writes this novella about a female vampire. My students don't connect with the vampire. My students don't connect with Varney. They connect with Carmilla, and they will say, this is genuinely scary, this is genuinely disturbing, and the language and the style and everything are so much more approachable. But
that's still one hundred and fifty years old. Carmela is still one hundred and fifty years old.
Camilla spooked people so much because, first off, it was homo erotic, which made people feel all kinds of feelings that scared them because of a repressive time, and because it was more psychological about manipulation and reincarnation and trust and betrayal. Also in terms of ladies with ladies, must the narrative be so cursed? Sadly, the popular culture at the time didn't allow for just a more lighthearted LGBTQ plus romcom without the plague of the Undead, which was
a bummer. So that was in eighteen seventy two, and finally twenty five years after Camilla onto the main vampire event.
And then we jump ahead to eighteen ninety seven and that's when we get Dracula. So we had Lefenew and Stoker knew each other. They're both irishmen who moved to England to London. They knew each other. Stoker used to write theater reviews and things like that, and LeFanu was a publisher and so there was a mutual admiration society there. And Stoker takes all of those elements. Carmilla is, you know,
Dracula's mother. There's so many of the vampire literary conventions that get used that Stoker takes, and he takes things from Polydori and from Rhymer as well.
So those were the guys who wrote The Vampire. Loosely about Lord Byron and Varney the vampire. The Penny Dreadful series is okay, there's a lot of names, a lot of vampires up on this and.
Then also goes back into the folklore and studies up on this, and we know the sources that Stoker is accessing to create Dracula, and he's he's going to call him Count Vampire.
Ooh, that's original.
And then he stumbles on this character from Romanian history with the name Dracula, and that's just so perfect. It just sounds so so ominous. Are our word Raku in Romanian means the devil. It's also the dragon that Saint George slays.
So Saint George was a figure who slayed this village beast and saved a princess. And thus vampires kind of became the new dragons. Dragons are over. They're chugi Chugi is cringe, cringe is crnch Either way, vampires are dragons. Does that also have a direct connection to Vlad the Impaler as well?
Historically, so this is the time when the Turks are invading Southeastern Europe and the Christians. This is orthodoxyes, Central and Eastern Europe, So this is Eastern Orthodoxy and they're fighting against the Muslim Turks. And so Vlod's father belongs to the Order of the Dragon. Vlod's father would have been Drakul of the Order of the Dragon. And Vlad is the son of the person who belongs to the
Order of the Dragon. Very often you'll see that Order of the Devil or something like trying to tie him into demonic kind of stuff. This is the defenders of Christianity, this is the evil slayer.
And Vlad the Impaler did not have an easy life. His father and brother were both killed by an invader. People betrayed him left and right so much that he cleaned house and impaled a bunch of his enemies, and it was just known as a Romanian hero and a real person to not fuck with. And Bram Stoker's extensive research and notes are one hundred pages long, and nowhere in there does he mention flat even though Vlad the Impaler straight up signed his name Dracula, but with a K,
which is cute. So historians are divided there. Did he have anything historically that did correlate to what we think of notions with vampires now or was it just really like he was a pretty badass dude, pretty scary, impaled some people, kind of a good nod, right.
That's what makes Romanians so mad is that they took this national hero and made him a vampire. These were coral times that you know, he was he was defending Christianity, he was defending the church and his beliefs, for his for his state. And then at that point, the ends of the stakes justify the means. You know, if you're going to impale somebody, if you're going to show them that you shouldn't come around here, that's a pretty graphic
way of doing that. There are some reports of, you know, maybe he was doing something that farious like dipping his bread in the blood of the people he had been paled and everything, and then other people will say, oh, that's that's Hungarian propaganda, trying to deface the name of this person who was otherwise defending Christianity as well. Neighbors never like each other, so they're always going to talk crap about each other. That's true.
And what about when it just took off in Hollywood cinema in what the early twenties did it just hit a new boom when it came to this new medium.
Bram Stoker worked for Sir Henry Irving in his theater company.
Sir Henry Irving was a stage actor. Side note sounds like kind of.
A dick in Stoker's writing on the side as well. He's got multiple novels published. I have not read any of them other than Dracula. And I've read Dracula a whole bunch of times too, because it's compelling literature. But it is very theatrical. It's very pre cinematic. And the first thing that Stoker does being in the theater, he writes this novel and then he has a reading of the entire novel on a stage, which then establishes copyright
for the stage. Oh smart. And then later somebody comes along and Sir Henry Irving is like, this is garbage, and you know, humor him for now, and he's not going to say bad things to bram Stoker because bram Stoker is organizing his tours of the United States and all over. And somebody says, actually, this would make pretty good theater, and you know, other than like, I mean, how do you do a ghost on stage? Or how do you make somebody turn into a werewolf on stage?
But a vampire on stage isn't too terribly hard to do. So we get our first theatrical treatments of Dracula as a stage play, and actually Belle Lagosi is on the stage and the theater performances of this, so he gets part of his start there in the theater, and twenty.
Five years later, vampires just jazz handered their way onto the silver screen.
In nineteen twenty two, the movie nos Ferratu comes out by more Now German movie, German expressionism. Everybody who's ever taken a film class has or should have watched nos Ferratu.
Stlift Girl.
Laid there again. That's one hundred years old this year, nineteen twenty two, and that was after World War One. Germany starts this mess and then loses the war and then has its military taken away from it, and then also has to pay reparations under the Treaty of Versailles, and more Now feels this connection between, you know, having the life force drained out of Germany by the conditions of the Treaty of Versailles, just like a vampire.
Germany just throwing a huge ass pity party for its all after World War One. Germany, come on, don't do this again.
So you get this novel that comes out in eighteen ninety seven. But they're in Germany, in post war Germany, and they don't have money to pay the copyright and so they make changes and turn Count draculind account or lock, and they conflate some characters and change the time and change the place and change the setting. Hope, hopefully this
will be enough to not violate copyright. Bram Stoker has died by then, but his wife is still alive, and she is not a wealthy woman, and so she sues to have the movie destroyed, and the court say, you know, yes, this is copyright violation, and all of the copies were destroyed of the movie.
Oh my gosh, I don't know that. Wait, what how I've seen this film with the tall, gaunt ashen ghoul with no hair but really long nails and those sharpened beaver teeth. How did I see it?
Except for a couple that were in some film archives. And so the the nos Ferratu that you have seen now, and hopefully you've seen the Keno International restored copy, which is beautiful Frankenstein stitched together from existing copies. Quino International is rehand tinted to show daylight and sunlight and night time,
and it's it's really truly beautiful. And I hope that it's one hundredth anniversary is going to lead to a lot of showings this this fall as well, but that you know again, it's like you can imagine how celluloid burns, and so they're like, burn the vampire and destroy all these destroy all these copies of the movie. But vampires
always have a way of coming back. So just like just like our folklore vampire, which could have you know, died and disappeared, it shape shifts into a into a a literary device, into a metaphor and gets picked up in the literature and then gets picked up into cinema.
And because right at that time we also have the special effects of having stop animation and slow crank and the tinting and intertitles and everything else, it makes really compelling film, except it gets destroyed and so a lot of people then never get to see this movie.
By now, of course, Nosfatu is immortal, and these recent restorations are apparently just powerfully stunning. They're much more crisp, more detailed, although to be fair, some people prefer the grainy versions because they have kind of more of a
ghosty feel and they're fuzzier and more amorphous. And the lead actor Max Shrek inhabits the role so fully in the older versions and the new versions, but in the older ones partly because you can't make out details that could ruin the vibe, like the edges of his bald cap that you can see in the restored versions. So sometimes the devil is in the details. Sometimes less is more.
Yeah, people who take a shortcut and go to YouTube are going to find the unrestored copies, because that's of course no longer under copyright. But the restored copies, and they're very easy to find, are truly beautiful, and they have music to them in English translation, intertitles and everything. It's really truly wonderful to get to see. And of course, you know, as we're watching it in class, I'm like, oh, that's an image that you'll see in any film textbook.
Oh and that one too, Oh, and that one too, Oh, and that one. And they're probably fifteen or twenty stills from that movie that will be in just about any film history book or film studies book or film storytelling book as well.
So this print is playing all over the UK through October and November. Dances Are Your town, no matter where you live, has a small cluster of cinema dorks watching No Sparatu around Halloween, and if not, the full movie is on YouTube, so you can gather your own nerd brigade to watch this once banned Dracula knockoff. So why
so many Dracula adaptations now? So in around nineteen sixty the copyright for Bram Stoker's novel expired all over the world and it was fair game for night feeding blood creeps.
Our next big Dracula triumph then is nineteen thirty one with bel Lagosi Universal Films. Again, this is two years after the stock market crash and the Great Depression and everything, and they just build all these huge studios with these amazing, soaring sound stages and everything, and the theater play is okay, but you've got to do it over and over. And they're like, well, we've got these studios collecting cobwebs and everything, Like hey, what's better than that than make a vampire movie?
And so they make Dracula in nineteen thirty one, and there you've got bell Legosi in this tuxedo and he's got his accent because it's we have sound by now, and he really plays this East European count.
My blood now flows through ir veins.
And think about this, this is nineteen thirty one. We had a lot of nobility who came to the United States fleeing, especially after the Russian Revolution.
Just a quick side note for all of us who don't have the dates for the Russian Revolution just etched in our memories. We're talking nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty three. That's more than a century after the French Revolution, which we touched on in the field trip minnesot I go France a few weeks ago. There's just so many revolutions, there's so little time, and so.
We have these East Europeans that are both working in factories and building skyscrapers and things like that, but also these educated people, wealthy people who are from the dark East, and they're still scary, and they still practice religions that we don't know, and we put a lot of our fears into these possibly powerful people who are wealthy and educated and come from this area of the world and practice those religions. That's very different from nos Ferratu. He
looks like a rat. He's got these long, pointy ears and a beaky nose. And there are lots of analyzes about how this is very anti Semitic.
So you do not have to dig deep underground to find scholarly papers about literary and cinematic vampires and how they've been used and sometimes co opted by anti Semites. Many film and literature scholars draw parallels between vamporism and something called blood libel, which is old and hateful slander about Jewish people needing human blood for passover, and lies like these have fueled genocide. And though this screenwriter for Nosaratu was himself Jewish, as were many of the actors
in the director F. W. Murnaut, was Queer. The film's premiere in nineteen twenty two was attended by none other than the head of propaganda for what would become the Nazi Party, which adopted and co opted some of the imagery and messaging of vampires in further anti Semitic hate, which, given the hatred and the awful messaging from Kanye West this week, it just feels like this horrifying resurrection of
history itself now. In the twenty twenty two essay Bloodsuckers, Vampires, Anti Semitism and nos Feratu at one hundred, writer Nora Berlatsky also notes that the cinematic vampires tend to share the trait of wealth, and writes quote, A narrative that is inherent to the story of nos Faratu and other expressionist films of the time is the threat of authoritarian and aristocratic figures seeking to take control. And Noah continues, Nosaratu is not a movie that welcomes me in, but
count orlock in the best traditions of the diaspora. Refused to stay in the box the Gentiles built for him.
So it's like they're these conditions, were living under their awful and this nos Ferratu style vampire, so that's our first stylized, visually stylized vampire. He's tall and skinny. He looks like death. He looks like the anthropomorphisation of death. The French call him a philambulist, a walking fallus.
How do you do?
He's very irorect and he has these long nails which which grow. Throughout the movie. He'll be framed in the doorway and it looks like he's in a coffin. He's got these darkened eyes and the prosthetic nose and these gaunt, gaunt features as opposed to Belle Lagosi, who's you know, chubby, and you never see him run or uh lift heavy boxes or anything. At most, he's carrying off the Mina Harker character, and that's about it. He's not physically threatening.
We have to make him threatening by shining a light on his eyes, and you know, are implying that he's hypnotizing people as well. We have this first nos Ferratu type vampire, and then we have the bel Lagosi type vampire, except the nos Feratu doesn't survive in people's mental image or in the you know, equivalent of the video stores of the time, and so the bell Lagosi style Dracula becomes our standard image of the vampire, the cinematic vampire for a while until up until the end of World
War two. And World War two ends with a nuclear bomb, the you know, man's triumph over nature and technology and everything out that is, like the cars all of a sudden look like rocket ships, and you know, everything's space, aliens and mutants, and the supernatural vampire doesn't have a place in that world, and true to its nature, the
vampire just goes underground and waits everybody out. And then it isn't until nineteen fifty eight when we get the horror of Dracula with Christopher Lee, who reinvents the Dracula character.
So Christopher Lee was like a career villain, so good at it and so good at his haunting portrayal of Dracula that he played him nine times. Because if the cap fits, wear it and eats someone, he.
Has an impeccable British accent, no more of this thick Hungarian accent from bel Lagosi. And he's lean and fit, and they shoot him up, and he's tall, and he runs up the stairs two by two and he turns into this snow narling beast. They have destroyed my servant. They will be destroyed. Belle Lugosi didn't have fangs. Christopher Lee does, and he's got these red eyes. And this
is this is our first technicolor vampire movie. So it starts out with his heavy Gothic Germanic sounding, you know, Nazi salute music pounding, and you've got this grave of Dracula and then this bright red blood dripping onto it, and it's the kind of the Wizard of Oz effect. This like we're not in Kansas anymore, and like this is really red blood on this, on this grave. And
then Christopher Lee just reinvents the the Dracula genre. But that's a huge shift that we get this powerful, English speaking, really compelling, scary person and who's living in our basement.
But you said he had fangs, when other vampires previous to him didn't.
Bella Lugosi did not have fangs. He had his cape. Never realized that he was buried in his cape, but no fangs. And when you see the image, just google image Christopher Lee Vampire Transformation, and you'll see him with these blood red I don't even know what they did to his eyes to make them so red, but these mouth of teeth and his swept back hair, and he really looks scary. He really looks snarling. He turns from this debonair English speaking noble into this snarling beast.
Ps. I looked up his makeup regimen for this, and oh how I wish that Christopher Lee had done like a Get Ready with Me Undead Corpse Edition video series. But instead all I found was that he had to wear contact lenses that covered even the whites of his eyes to make them bloody red, which kind of sounds like some kind of torture that a monster would inflict.
It's really really amazing. But the pace of the music and the videography. The shots that they have are really amazing because again, this is not just color but technic color, and it was really transformational.
Is that kind of an added cinematic touch that they decided like, let's take some artistic liberty, since we've got color, and since we've got you know, really great optics here, Like let's add some eyes, let's add some fangs, Let's put someone in a tuxedo because it just looks nice. I know bel Agosi was in kind of a tuxedo. But at some point did they decide like, let's just up its game a little bit.
Yeah, we always talk about arms escalation in vampires. Bell Agosi is not really very threatening. Again, he's got that hypnosis thing, and that's that's scary to not have control over your body, to have somebody else controlling you. That is very much in the novel Dracula, Right, So Dracula has mind control over the women he's turning into vampires. That's the emergence of modern psychology and that fear of being mesmerized, being hypnotized, brainwashing and all these kinds of
things that we can hack other people's heads. And that's just scary, and then you know he's then stronger and he runs, you know, Christopher Lee runs faster, and he's physically stronger. He can throw people around like Dracula, like bell Legosi never could for me. And our vampires just keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger through time to the point where it has now gotten pretty ridiculous as to what vampires can do.
But we are.
Our theme for the course is every age creates the vampire that it needs. It's a quote by Nina Auerbach.
Just a quick aside. Nina Auerbach is the late University of Pennsylvania professor who taught courses on Victorian literature and horror and film and culture history, and wrote the nineteen ninety five classic Our Vampires Ourselves.
Every age creates the vampire that it needs. That time period, those people in that place, under these conditions, with this background in belief systems or religions or living conditions and things, creates the vampire. And these are all the features that the vampire has, from its name, to its origin story, to its attributes, to its activity patterns, the things that it does, to how you can keep it away from you, and then how you can destroy it if you need to.
And all of those things develop and intensify over time, and then finally, every age creates the vampire that it needs, and that's that function that we talked about with the folkloric vampire. The folkloric vampire has a psychological function of explaining unexplainable biological natural things and has the sociological functions of social control of keeping people from doing things which harm our social order, and all of that stuff is
still needed. We're still wondering why people, you know, people do bad things, why people kill, and why people steal, and why people have drinking problems, and why people are greedy and gluttonous and all the other deadly sins that we have out there. We're still, you know, trying to understand genetically why people are the way they are, and then we're still looking for ways to keep people under
control from doing bad things. And in looking at our vampires, it will tell us about the time that created that vampire, and that word needs is that function of the vampire. And so when you have a a vampire type that's very popular, that then tells you about that age, about those people who need that vampire, who find it compelling. No longer do we need it to explain things that
we don't have modern scientific explanations for. But now we have explanations that still are unresolved, and having a way of showing that that there are people out there that are like this, and that they're ways of destroying them or keeping them at bay, or things that we maybe could do to protect ourselves from them. And if we can't protect ourselves from them, because remember, they're getting stronger and stronger, then maybe at least we can spot the signs to be able to stay away from them.
Unless they're hot and drink vegan blood. I don't know. We'll discuss it next week. Can I ask you some listener questions?
Oh?
Absolutely, they had great ones. So yes, we all have a new favorite vampire expert. Jeff is the best. He will be back next week with all of your questions. We will discuss so many modern vampires, vampires of late, how vampires have changed their backstories, so much else. Questions about Garlic come back next week and you'll get that. Meanwhile, you can follow him. We'll put links to find him in the show notes along with links to myloma dot org. You can find us at ali ward dot com slash
Ologies slash Vampirology. There'll be more about this episode there. We are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at ali Ward with one L on both. You can support the show and you can submit questions for the next guests at patreon dot com slash ologies for as little as twenty five cents an episode. You can get merch at ologies merch dot com. Thank you so much Susan Hale for managing all of that and doing so much else.
Noel Dilworth handles all of our scheduling. Aaron Talbert admin's Theologies podcast Facebook group with assists from Bonnie Dutch and Sham and Feltis, Emily White of the word remakes our professional transcripts, and Caleb Patton bleeps them. We have Smologies episodes. We just released a new one about entomology bugs this week, and those are kid friendly and short versions their classroom safe,
bare bones. They're there for you in the feed. You can also find them at alleyboard dot com slash smologies. Thank you Mercedes Maitland and Zeke Rodriguez Thomas of mind Jam Media for putting those together. Our website gets updated by Kellyardwire, she can make you a website. Nick Thorburn made the theme music and lead editor and Forever Crush Jarrett Sleeper of Mind Jam Media edits the's and puts them all together. And at the very end of the episode,
I tell you a secret. And right now my secret is very, very practical. I was shooting for Innovation Nation for CBS Today in Dearborn and I'm catching a nine to fifteen flight out of Detroit and it is eight fifteen. I'm in a parking lot at the airport.
I have to be so.
And I've got to go return this rental car and then I have to catch this flight and I am sweating. In case you're wondering, but this episode is so good. I'm really excited for next week too. Oh so good. Okay, hot miss. Will my life ever be normal? Will I ever be normal? Probably not? But stay tuned. Okay, bye bye. These people are our food, not our allies.