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It's no longer a lady recording from a rental car think all that is holy, but it's ali Ward. This is ologies, and this is part two of back to back Spooktobery Vampire episodes. And we're getting this up a day early to celebrate Halloween. But this info on spirits and superstition, disembodied gools, grain, alcohol, pickles, whaling, teeth, horniness, dinner invitations, the changing needs of culture, and vegan vampire. It's necessary all year long. It'll stick with you, so
let's get into it first. Thank you to everyone at Patreon dot com slash ologies for supporting the show. This episode is all your questions and you two can join. You can submit questions for twenty five cents an episode. That's Patreon dot com slash ologies. And thank you also to everyone who rates and subscribes. Subscribing really helps the show,
so do that. Also, if you leave reviews, I read them all, such as this really fucking nice one from Golden Girl eleven, who says I love it so much that I have started to wonder what will happen when you run out of ologies?
And Golden Girl eleven, don't worry.
I have had this exact nightmare and I woke up sweating, only to remember that there's thousands of ologies with new ones invented all the time. There's also a lot of isms, which is a clue that your internet dad here is hatching something what. Okay, stay tuned. Also thank you to compose Yourself, who loved a review that said the show is beautiful and that they are wishing you the beat of lick Ali and that made me care I love you. You
can listen to the Catacombs to understand that reference. Okay, on to part two with Beloved Indiana University, professor of Slavic and Eastern European Languages and Culture, who helms the bonkers popular course The Vampire in European and American Culture, vamprologist doctor Jeff Holdeman. Can I ask you some listener questions?
Oh?
Absolutely, they had great ones. You know, you mentioned that every vampire is the one that the age needs, and so many people.
Looking at you.
Patrons Anthony Cherbino, Ali Vessels, Greg Wallach, Lauren Mesca Broda, Kelly King, Kathlyn Daling, Caitlin Owens, Alex Joseph Tarina, Felix Wolf, Paul Cerrillo, Deli, Dame Samantha Tuvy, Nicole Ursula Wood swoon with us, and first time question asking Maddy Hobson. They all want to know when did vampires get so horny? Why are they such heart throbs?
And when did this idea that you're going to get seduced by a vampire?
When did it start turning into that?
So, if we think about it, the folkloric vampire is a reanimated corpse. It's going to stink like a reanimated corpse.
That's hot, it's.
Going to have a bloody mouth because it's perceived to be feeding on people. You do not want to be around a reanimated corpse.
ORed.
When we get through the nineteenth century of literature, all of these vampires, our very first vampires.
Are all nobles.
Lord Riven in the Vampire, Sir Francis Varney the Vampire, and Carmilla's a countess and Dracula's account the nobility has a castle and everything. So already in nineteenth century, when we're trying to demonize the nobility, right, what better way of trying to tear them down than to call him vampires people who take more than their fair share, who suck us dry of our life force.
News flash, John, the super rich, they're not like us.
We get the introduction of beauty. Lord Riven is hypnotizing. He's got this weird gray eye, but he's still captivating, charming, mesmerizing, and people still keep inviting him into their house to meet their daughters.
That was the story based on Lord Byron Varney.
The vampire is still a noble and is clever and smart and powerful. Carmilla is described as being just supernaturally beautiful, and she's charming, and she's coquettish, and she is passionate, and then Count Dracula is hypnotizing, and he's wealthy. He's got piles of money with dust on him in his castle, and he, you know, can control the weather, and he can control people's actions, and he can control wolves and everything else that arms escalation starts already by then, with
beauty and with abilities and with wealth. When you're undead. When you're undying, you remember the old times, which then means that you're this automatic historian. So you're smart and you remember things and you've seen people's actions over a very long period of time. Nos Ferratu dead end because nobody wants to be with mos Ferratu.
Belle Lagos.
He's like, he's kind of older, he's like but he's got tuxedo on, and he's like he's debonair, and he's got this way of speaking, and he's kind of, you know, mysterious, and he's got these eyes that are enchanting, and he can control people. And I tell my students that were one of the mysteries we have to solve is how do you go from a reanimated corpse to a.
Viilf This is a vampire like counicate with.
A Phil bless this man, protect him.
So why in the world would you want to be with this gross, re animated corpse. Well, you clean them up and you give them lots of money, and you make them really smart, and then what we need that they're still predators, right, there's still dangerous. In nineteen seventy three, we get Jack Paul Lance from do you remember Ripley's Believe.
It or Not? Oh?
Yeah, I remember that show. But maybe what some people immediately think of with Jack Palance is him winning an Academy Award for City Slickers in nineteen ninety one, and during his Oscar acceptance speech he paused to do some one handed pushups. He was seventy three at the time. And one thing I never associate Jack Palince with as a leathery fitness buff is the nineteen seventy four British made for TV version of Dracula starring him.
Many motion pictures claim to be horrific. Now comes one which reaches a new height in Unobated Terror, the bram Stoko masterpiece Dracula.
Jack plans an amazing voice and everything, and he is our first remorseful vampire. He feels bad about being a vampire about having to drink human's blood and he still has to do it, but he feels bad about it. Introducing that to make us want to have compassion for him then takes off, and then we get this bifurcation of vampire types where there either is the solely evil vampire or there's a vampire that's remorseful about their nature.
And again, this is the seventies, and we're like trying to understand psychologically why people are the way they are, and we're in therapy and we're trying to heal and I'm okay, You're okay, And this is the way that people are different, and maybe I can overcome my alcohol are my addictions, and maybe there's something about my nature that I can overcome. I'm still redeemable.
Of course, every human is redeemable. But before the nineteen fifties or so, the notion of introspection wasn't super popular. So what changed things? Well, rewind a few decades actually, to nineteen thirty six, when Dale Carnegie published How to Win Friends and Influence People, and then a year later
Napoleon Hill wrote the book Think and Grow Rich. But by the early nineteen fifties, self help was beginning to grow as kind of an industry, And what corracked the door open a little more was a clergyman, an author named Norman Vincent Peel, writing this massively popular best selling title, The Power of Positive Thinking. So by the nineteen seventies, a whole generation had been raised with this mindset that
maybe we could control our lives with our minds. And now the self help industry has a firm hold on us. It makes about ten billion dollars a year in the US alone, which is why I'm really excited to announce I'm finally writing a book. It's called how to Stop buying self help books and spend the money feeding raccoons corn dogs instead. That's not true, but I bet if I wrote that book, I could probably buy a boat. Also, do not feed raccoons any corn dogs. They can have
worms that can eat your brain and kill you. You can see the Prosionology two parter on raccoons for more on that.
But anyway.
In nineteen seventy two, the book I'm Okay, You're Okay, by California based psychiatrist Thomas Anthony Harris enjoyed just a cozy spot on the bestseller list for years and in the nineteen seventies. This was a big breakthrough for pop psychology and the notion that our childhood experiences still affect how we regulate or don't regulate our own emotions and thus our behaviors. So while vampires may not have a reflection, they do mirror the zeitgeist.
I'm not stake worthy anymore. Maybe I should be given a chance. And then that evolves and we get vampires that are then more and more desirable. They go from you know, the kind of bad boy. It's like, I know he's dangerous, bod, he's hot, and he drives a motorcycle, and this James Dean turns into lost boys and there's a desire to be with the demon lover.
I'd like to try.
And then we just keep adding on every movie that we get there's some other way of overcoming this badness, and then we get like, well, maybe I won't drink human blood, but I'll drink animal blood.
Or maybe maybe you know.
Pete is going to get mad at that, so maybe we could come up with a synthetic blood that then doesn't harm anybody.
Which side note is kind of the narrative hook of the HBO series called True Blood, which is set in this time when synthetic blood called true Blood is on the market, leading to what's called the Great Revelation, which allowed vampires to come out of the coffin, they say, and enjoy their parahuman human rights and true blood. The substance wasn't supposed to be delicious. One character described it as giving up your favorite meal for slim fast shakes forever.
But it gets a job done and hello in real life today, somewhere so many people are alive human beings choosing to drink soilent. So true blood is pretty plausible considering it's convenient and portable and allows you to stop murdering people. But is there something more permanent than having to keep buying cases of fake blood at costco.
Maybe there's a cure, right, We still don't get cures for vamporism at that point because rather than fixing people, and there's so many problems that still haven't been fixed, it's like, maybe it's living with this condition, which is the important thing. These people don't deserve to be executed or locked up. Maybe we can reform them. And then we want to hear that story, and we want to hear their backstory too, and that's all of a sudden.
From that point on, all of our vampire movies have the flashback of like, you know why this person became a vampire?
Now you know what we are.
Now you know what you are.
You never growled, Michael, and you'll never die, but you must feed.
It's this exact same fascination with the origin stories of people and then of why they are the way they are in life and can you overcome your dangerous urges? And can you be trusted anymore?
Which brings us to your crotch and the horniest of all the reanimated.
Corpses, Edward Cullen, is the manifestation of this. People always ask me, like, do you like Twilight and this Twilight saga? Do you like those books? Do you like that movie? I'm like, it doesn't matter if I like them. The point is that a lot of people did, and every age creates a vampire that it needs. There had to be something resonating about Edward Cullen that spoke to so many millions and millions and millions of people that they
wanted to be with him. And it's not just the demon lover, and it's the person who is able to stay under control.
Right.
Bella wants it, and Edward's like, oh no, I can't. And it's like the you know, the perfect boyfriend who wants to wait until after they're married, and and you know, she's like begging for it and probing and pushing and everything. He's like, no, no, Bella, I can't, you know, and like pulls himself away and all this kind of wonderful and chaste imagery and everything. He is the ideal boyfriend, right,
And Charlie's you know, got his shotgun. He's like cleaning the gun on the table and it's like ready to meet Edward.
All right, bring me.
To be nice. He's he's important.
Then Edward brings Bella home, you know, like one minute before curfew.
It's hard to not like this guy.
Listen.
I had to edit here because Jeff dropped so many plot points spoilers. I had to cut him out because maybe some people out there are going to queue up Twilight tonight for the first time to psychoanalyze the whole thing, and I didn't want an angry mob trying to burn me in a barn.
Okay, we can have the demon lover who is reformed, who's learned to control his urges, like the whole family has, right, So you know, the Collins House is a halfway house, right. They've all learned to kick the habit and they're all living together this vegetarian lifestyle. Again, Pete's going to get mad or and the Sierra Club is going to get mad because they're out hunting mountain lions. But other than that, you know, at least they're not killing humans.
I immediately was like, dude, why don't they just eat squirrels or start like a gopher catching business at a golf course. But I looked into it and Twilight author Stephanie Meyer apparently has said that she thinks predators would taste better than herb of wares, and that checks out.
But I was like, what is stuff Meyer's deal? And I knew she's like religious, she's a member of the Church of Latter day Saints a kay Mormons, but I didn't realize that that is why there is such a push for abstinence only activities, if you will, until marriage.
In these movies.
This woman delivered us the hottest, most brooding vampire who's also sensitive, and then is like wait for a ring. But you know what, one person's fantasy genre is another's horror. Also, before Twilight, Stephanie Meyer had never written a book. Before she had a dream about the plot. She woke up a little horny injection.
That's pure conjecture, objection overbold.
But anyway, she wrote about it and now she makes tens of millions of dollars a year.
And then E. L.
James, who somehow churned out literary work that we call books the Fifty Shade series, started those books as fanfic of Twilight. What is my point? My point is, if you have an idea for a book, please write it this right here. This is a signal from the univers you've been waiting for. Okay, picture me standing over your bed in the shadowy moonlight. I'm holding a frying pan and I'm telling you I will swat my own head
with it if you don't start your book. And actually, November is National Novel Writing Month via a nonprofit called Nano Raimo, which stands for National Novel Writing Month and Nano Raimo started over twenty years ago as a challenge for people to write fifty thousand words of a novel in thirty days, and according to their site, now each year, on November first, hundreds of thousands of people around the world begin to write, determined to end the month with
fifty thousand words of a brand new novel. They enter the month as elementary school teachers, mechanics, or stay at home parents. They leave novelists. How inspiring is that? So nanoorimo dot org, I'm linking them in the show notes and we're going to donate to them this month as well. So Nana Ramo, write a book, do it for future you and do it for me with a frying pan. But yes, back to Edward and Bella and eating mountain lions instead of people.
And now we can live happily ever after, actually completely ever after, ever after, forever, forever and ever. And so this is that evolution that we get. It's really really amazing, and at each step there is it can't happen overnight.
We had.
Varney the Vampire is actually as technically our first remorseful vampire. Do you think you'll ever read this?
Oh no, but I'll take a spoiler.
Okay, good.
So Varney is unable to control himself and attempts at killing him have failed. And failed and failed all through the four hundred plus pages, and he throws himself into Mount Vesuvius. Oh what a death, and self cremates. Wonderful. He's so remorseful and he can't be killed. And the one way to really truly cremate a vampire. It's one thing to like, you know, decapitate and burn them. It's another to be thrown into the bowels of the earth
and to be cremated by Mount Vesuvius. That's wonderful. Rum The people at that time just did not need that vampire. They still needed nobles to be villains. And we just don't pick up that thread for another one hundred and
thirty years until Jack Palance. That's amazing. We just we needed the literary vampire, the cinematic vampire, to be evil and an enemy and something that we know how to identify and name and stake and destroy up until seventies when we decide that, you know, maybe maybe bad people can be reformed, maybe we can overcome our shortcomings, and then that makes everybody salvageable.
At that point.
Every step is a product of the time, right, every age creates the vampire that it needs. Every step of softening that vampire and making them more attractable and making them more marriageable is important. It's an amazing evolution. I've ordered the movies, the six hundred and fifty or so movies in my syllabus in chronological order, and if you want to watch all of them in chronological order, you can actually see that development over time. It's absolutely fascinating.
We can track when the first time a trait gets introduced.
So set aside a few months and watch six hundred and fifty movies. Okay, So that was the first question. Second question, patrons Ali Vessels, Zombat, Angela Clark, Christian Krup, Alex Parrish, six Sugar, and Pachica asked permission to enter the conversation with the query.
So many people want to know when did they have to get invited in? Was that something that's super historical or did that emerge in like nineteen eighty five?
This is from folklore, so many of these things. Again, the literary vampire didn't just immediately be born out of nothing. This is just importing all of these traits from the folkloric vampire selectively at first, and then when the well runs dry, we dig somewhere else people will go back to these old sources that the Perkowski book has folklore
from lots of countries. And you can tell that people have been reading this book and they hear this word moder roi and they're ooh, I've got to put that in Vampire Academy.
Okay.
Side note for more on vampirology, hit the two thousand and six scholarly reference book Vampire Lore Writings of Jan Lewis Perkowski, which is a textbook in Jeff's class, and buried in all this literary history are mentions of the mroy which now appear as characters in the Netflix series Vampire Academy. And Moroy are mortal, but they're magical creatures who can go out during the day but with parasols, and they have human blood sources called feeders that they
sip from but they don't kill. And they have more troubled and kind of bitchy counterparts called this trigg oi, and those will drink you dead and or infect you with simmering rage and the blood munchies. And in Roman mythology, stragoi means a troubled spirit. And yeah, maybe they're just angry, maybe they have low blood blood.
Sugar, and so there's always this pulling from folklore. And in Central and Eastern Europe you didn't let people who you don't know into your house. So I am an ethnographer and I go out into the villages in Poland and Lithuania every summer, and a stranger walking into a village. Even today, people are suspicious. You can see people watching out of their windows. It doesn't help that I go and work in cemeteries too, but bill often you'll see me.
The road only leads to the cemetery, and then you know, like somebody shows up thirty minutes later just to you know, water the.
Flowers, water coincidence.
And then they're like, so what are you doing here? And then we talk and I explain what I'm doing, and then they're welcoming. Once I'm a known quantity, I'm welcomed in. But you wouldn't welcome in somebody who didn't know, especially in this prema, in time when they're diseases, so you don't know if somebody's a murderer. You don't know if someone's a thief, and you don't know if someone's
a plague bearer. And so it's safer to keep them either keep them completely out of your village, or if they come up to keep them on the other side of the fence and talk at a distance. And I have a lot of people who will do that, and then if they judge that I'm safe, then they'll let me in and then we'll be in their yard for a while. And then if they judge that I'm safe, then they'll invite. You know, oh, you must be thirsty.
How about if you come into the house and then according to Central and East European tradition, you have to feed a person and give them something to drink. And so you know, I go from the person who's looking at me with suspicion to the person who's like feeding me and giving me drink and saying, next time you're in the village, you can come and stay in my spare room. That tradition, though, of not inviting strangers is
very old, and it's very logical. And what the weird thing that has then happened is we've again before it would just be don't invite a person in.
And now you know.
True Blood, if you watch True Blood.
I'm familiar with it, but I haven't watched a lot of it.
Now you'll have a reason to go and watch it. But you'll have a you'll invite a vampire in, and then if they do something you don't like, you say out loud.
I'm sending your invitation to my house.
I rescind my invitation into my house, and then the vampire like gets dragged out supernaturally out of the house. That's that arms escalation, things that just go over the top, and we we get that now. We get either like people will bleed if they come into a house uninvited, or they trick people to being invited, or they buy the house and then it's not their house anymore, and then I can come in wherever I want to. There are always these logical hurdles to get around being invited in,
And again that's the money. We'll get you into people's house. Intelligence will get you into people's house. Brute force will get you into people's house. Your status will get you into people's house.
Just a side note, I watched a scene from True Blood where an invite was rescinded and in the scene, instantly like some thunder rumbles and the front door flings open in a wind and the vampire just glides backwards, and the comments on the YouTube video were about how this breakup scene was supposed to be sad, but how people just howl with laughter at it, and one YouTuber Wika forty nine to ninety one commented, I always picture a random stage crew member pulling him backwards on a skateboard.
Just whoosh, band cut.
We get to see this in a good form in Dracula, where they are these good people who are fighting Dracula, among whom are wealthy people and knowledgeable people and noble people, and they use their status to commit all these crimes. But because they're good people and they're doing it for a good reason, and because nobody would doubt that they were up to anything bad, they can also break into these places like where Dracula lives and where he has his stashed boxes of earth all over London and the
neighboring areas as well. We keep seeing this idea pop up in movies and literature in funny ways. So either we do it and it has become a standard norm, or we've turned it into something that's absolutely ridiculous, and sometimes in a comedy, then that's going to be really really funny.
Well, what about garlic asked patrons Rachel Kashia, Ali Vessels, Melanie Metzger, Britney Peak, Michael McLeod, Lucas O'Neil, Super, Sarah Holly Spencer, Cassie Chowan and hold Avon, Aaron Ryan, Lizzy Carr, r J. Deutche, Hannah Boyd, Michelle Zen Graf, Margo Lex Clearwater and Nicole plus. First time question asker is Janelle Faraj and Olivia French, as well as listener Slash Farmer Scott Nichols, who offered if any of you are having
vampire problems, I have garlic. When did the garlic trope come up?
Garlic is old so in Central and Eastern Europe. Garlic is medicine. Garlic is medicine. Distilled alcohol is medicine. Vocal honey is medicine. Right, honey doesn't go bad, and are distilled alcohol. You can use that to clean cuts and to reduce pain. And garlic is just very healthful. And the interesting thing is, unlike onion, which will make your mouth stink, when you eat garlic, it comes out of
your pores. I can remember being in Russia for the first time in nineteen ninety two and right after the fall of the Soviet Union, alcohol was really really cheap, and people would just like put three fingers on their shirt, meaning you know, I need two other people to split the cost of a bottle of vodka with me. Go into the park, and you can never In Central and Eastern Europe, you never drink without eating. Oh and so one of the things you can eat is garlic.
Okay, look this up and he's not lying. In Ukraine, vodka is known as hurrialka, which derives from a root word meaning it burns. And apparently it's very uncouth to drink harilka without nibbling on things like thinly sliced pork fat which is called sallow, or munch in it with garlic pickles. Will that help you in any way? I
don't know about the heroica, but the garlic mite. And according to many, many, many published stories like the twenty fifteen Journal of Immunology report Immunomodulation and anti inflammatory Effects of garlic compounds. It reports that Alium setavum, which is garlic's birth name, can enhance the immune system by stimulating certain cell types like quote macrophages, lymphocytes, natural killer cells, dendritic cells, and eosinophills by mechanisms including modulation of cytokine secretion,
immunoglobulin production, pagocytosis, and macrophase activation. Sure is, what the fuck does that mean? So it modulates inflammatory responses and also helps your immune system attack invaders like maybe not dead corpse invaders who are mad at you, but it's
worth a shot. But why so, stinky? I needed to know, and I found out that sulfur compounds are released while your body metabolizes garlic, and one chemical alyl methyl sulfide, can't be broken down, so our body is like, Okay, take this to the dump via your blood highway and then just exit via the off ramps your lungs and skin. So yes, even if you are tube fed garlic straight into your stomach, you will still have garlic breath, which is what one physician discovered in the nineteen thirties with
a patient who probably did not appreciate it. But other docs are on the case too. There's this one researcher, doctor Cheryl Barringer of Ohio State University, who has authored so many papers on the matter of garlic breath, including the twenty seventeen Journal of Food science Banger deodorization of garlic breath by foods and the role of polyphenal oxidate and phenola compounds in the deodorization of garlic breath, and
I've read a bunch of it. The TLDR is that drinking milk or something with fat and water with garlic and a meal can help break down that alwyl methyl sulfide that stinks. And if you're like who chugs milk these days unless it's a latte, you can try acidic lemon juice or raw apple, which can also break down that sulfur so that it won't have to take the blood highway out of your lungs and skin. It can
take the regular southbound exits the turnpike to the toilet instead. Now, herbs can also work, and according to doctor Barryh's other paper, Deodorization of Garlic odor by Fresh and dried Herbs from twenty twenty one, the team found that fresh rosemary had the strongest deodorization effect among the fresh herbs, while dried mint had the strongest effect among the dried herbs. So munch some roseberry or have some mint tea. Perhaps now this is only slightly related, but it's my show, so
I'm just gonna do one more tell you. The world garlic capital is Gilroy, California, which is the smallish municipality between San Francisco and Santa Barbara, and the entire freeway stretch through Gilroy smells like fikasha, God bless it. And they have a yearly garlic festival that involves garlic ice cream and so many wonders. And somehow I wound up on Gilroy's official city website and saw that their local botanical gardens host a Halloween show for children. And who's
on stage, Buff Frankenstein. They got a ghost and a vampire. Excuse me, Gilroy, You're the garlic capital of the world, and somehow you casually thoughtlessly feature a vampire in your Halloween show. Your whole October branding message should be the world's safest haven from vampires. No vampires here. Visit Gilroy and leave your chainmail turtlenecks behind. Capitalize on this, Gilroy.
I'm not mad.
I just expected more from you, I guess anyway. Yes, Jeff remembers well the food and beverage culture of Eastern Europe, the hard stuff at lunch with a side of garlic lard, and honestly, it's probably delicious on the way down.
But I can remember being on the trams and just smelling these people who smell like they're pickled between the vodka and the garlic coming out of them. But it's really high in vita vitamins and everything, and it grows well, it grows abundantly in the conditions of Central and Eastern Europe, and it has that magical property of coming out of your skin and it's stinky. So if you can imagine, onion might protect your mouth, which is an important orifice
to protect, but garlic protects your whole body. And so you then have the full traditions of smearing garlic over the window sills, any place where a vampire could come in, any place where something evil could come in, any portal, you then smear with garlic, and that's just a long old tradition. So you can eat it and it makes you healthy, and you can smear your your windows with it in order to protect. And that falls into what we call an apotropaic atropane to turn away an evil
spirit go negi, and so garlic is an apotropaic. It'll repel vampires so an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. Right, So it's it's really hard to kill a vampire. It's a whole lot easier just to keep them away.
And we will devour them in a minute. But first a word about sponsors of ologies who make it possible to donate to a charity of theologists choosing, and this week the gem Jeff chose the donation to go to the Blood Cancer Research Foundation at Miloma dot org. And my dad, your grandpa, passed away from multiple maloma in July, and Jeff, knowing that, wanted to point his donation that way in honor of my dad, which warmed my bloody heart. We're also going to toss this small donation at Nanoreimo
dot org in honor of you. Yes, I'm talking to you, the one who wants to write a book but has needed a little nudge and the courage. I'm telling you do it. Thank you and you're welcome. Okay, those donations were made possible by sponsors.
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Okay.
First up, a bunch of you patrons at Patreon dot comp slashologies such as Lauren Masca, Broda, Justin Socido, take up Elsbury, Nikki DeMarco, Stephanie Leski, Zombat, Chelsea rabble On behalf of Bob Bradley, their boyfriend's dad. And Joel Henderson made me ask this pointed question.
One of the last listener questions. We had a ton of people wanted to know about fangs, which is great. Joe Portefido wanted to know are they able to use their fangs like straws to suck blood or do they pierce and then they suck with their mouth?
Do they pop out? Are the fangs always out?
What do you think historically of different fang styles.
Great, So we have to distinguish between the folkloric vampire and the literary vampire. Here to make that distinction, so the folkloric vampire, there are a lot of things that fit and take our blood in real life. So if you've ever had an outside dog and found an engorged tick on it, you can very quickly see how the you know, the Bulgarians imagine the vampire is just a bag of blood that kind of looks like a like a like a Bulgarian bag pipe full of blood. That
also explains because they don't have bones. That also explains how they would get in and out of a out of a grave. Think of ticks, and think of leeches, and think of fleas, and think of bed bugs and mosquitoes and Ali, did you know that there are vampire finches?
I thought bats were the only ones, But I mean vampire finches amazing.
Madrillennial butterflies, vampires blood suckers. The assassin kissing kissing bug blood suckers. The candidus that's the one that will like you're you know, in South America and you're peeing in the water and it like jumps up into your urethra, no, thank you. And lamb preise and lice and things. These are all natural blood suckers.
Vampire finches. I know that that sounds fake, like attacks evating flamingo, but it's true.
They exist.
And these little birdies with sharp beaks live on two of the Galapagos Islands. And while they would love to be eating seeds and drinking fresh water, the islands are a bit arid, so they're simply forced. They are forced to find a sad sit on its ass and peck its wingtips to drink their blood. They must do it, so, yes, they bloodsuckle blue footed boobies, and the world is weird. Also, vampire bats, which likely started by eating ectoparasites and then just kind of cut out the middle bug and went
straight for the blood. They puncture little fang holes and then they just lap up what bleeds out. But what's even creepier is that vampire bats, unlike most other bats, can run on land on their wings. They just bound around like beautiful furry little ghules. Videos of it are haunting. But out of fourteen hundred species of bats on Earth, only three species are vampire bats, and they are endemic. To northern Mexico and Central America and a few countries
in South America. But speaking of regions and kind of eerie hopping around, patron Nathan Andrew Leaflight left a comment in this week's discussion thread on Patreon to tell me about the folklore of the jungshi, or Chinese hopping vampires, which are a reanimated corpse, sometimes fresh looking, sometimes horrifically decomposed. It really depends on how all in you want to go with your makeup, and jungshi means stiff, and so a proper impersonation involves hopping like a bunny with outstretched
Frankenstein arms. And Nathan Andrew also casually told me to look up Southeast Asian panangallin, which sounds kind of like a type of omelet or like a custard dessert. But no, oh no, I'm going to read you a small slice of the Workipedia entry for penangalon, because that's plenty. It says quote. Its form is that of a floating, disembodied woman's head with its trailing organs still attached from afar. It twinkles like a ball of flame, just a glowing
vampiric ball of decapitation and entrails. Nothing to see here now, Same thing with the African Ashanti folkloric entities called oba Efo, which are vampire witches that at night are said to emit a phosphorescent light from their armpits and anus. Do you know how boring and Dracula costume is at a party when you could have a luminous and butthole, get a couple glow sticks? Think outside the coffin? Will you happy Halloween? Also for more on bats and ticks and
body farms and bones. You can see the other spook Toberologies episodes anytime of the year really, but we'll link them in the show notes for this. But yes, back to Jeff and Eastern European and American vamps.
So you can see that comparison these things around us in Central and Eastern Europe, at least half of those things are feeding blood from us. And then how do you get blood out of a victim? It's got to be something sharp. And if you're living around bed bugs and things, so you've probably got bite marks on you. So that kind of explains bite marks, it explains the diseases that you might get. This area isn't particularly known for malaria, despite its swamps is just to cold for malaria,
and so our folkloric vampires. What we say is we never see a folkloric vampire feeding. We only find its victims. And so when you have a person who's been ex sanguinated, a person who's lost blood, is something's got to be taking that blood from them. Why are they withering? Why are they shrinking? And then that we make that jump in logic to say that this must be something that is sucking the life force of blood out of these victims.
And again that's why the vampires are blamed for wasting diseases. It's not all diseases. It's not bubonic plague, at least in the beginning. Not going to attribute bubonic plag to vampires or measles or chicken pox or something like that, but wasting diseases, anemia and things like that make really logical choices that we have there. So now in terms of literary vampires and cinemat vampires, we can get close
enough to them. As a kid, when I saw vampires drinking, I was completely convinced that they had straws in their teeth. And every kid going to McDonald's, you know, stick two straws up into their mouths and pretend to be a vampire and drink from that, And so I was completely convinced that vampires had came unt you. Then then they were, you know, sucking their blood up through that, and then I was like, actually, it just be easier to put
it down your throat. Yeah, So we can catch a cinematic vampire in the act and do a dental examination, but with folklork vampires, we never see them feeding. We only find the victims.
Thanks not hollow. So if you've been thinking they're like rattlesnake teeth but with a suction function, we have been officially divested of such flim flam by a professional vamprologist.
Last listener question, a few people asked boldly, I thought this was a great question. I wouldn't have thought to ask it. Nancy Kay Clark, World Nurse Collective and Lauren Mascabroda wanted to know if vampires were real and you could be one, would you all in one to know? Would you ever vampire as a verb?
That depends on the conditions under which I'm a vampire. So there's the moral burden of saying, if I am a blood drinking vampire, then do I have to drink human blood? Can I drink animal blood? Or is there a synthetic blood substitute, or is there a way of just like feeling that urge, but you can stop it in some other way. It's bad enough to be human and to see history repeating itself over and over and over. Now you know, make that centuries. I think that would
get really frustrating after a while. And that's also why you have vampires in certain works of vampire fiction that vampires can't kill themselves. There's actually a prohibition against vampire suicide, and so you eat have to I don't pay another vampire to slay you, or provoke a.
Slayer to do that.
But when you're tired and you finally need that, you know.
The.
Literature is still throwing barriers in.
Our way to try to keep us from ending ourselves, which is just a really old tradition of prohibitions against suicide and self harm. And that's that's why we'll have works where vampires can't feed off themselves. It's like perpetual motion vampire machine.
Right, Well, I can just drink.
From myself and then yeah, I'm only harming myself in a movie like Daybreakers, that will accelerate your de evolution into a subsider, and then to drink another vampire's blood will cause that, and then to drink your own will be even worse.
Just a PS. I had never seen Daybreakers, but Daybreakers is the two thousand and nine film starring Ethan Hawke as a hematologist, which is a blood scientist, And yes, we do have a hematology episode. I'll link it in the show notes. But in Daybreakers, vampires have taken over the world after this plague started by a bat rude because we love bats. But in the movie there's a blood shortage, and a subsider is a version of a vampire that's starving and desperate and jonesing for blood. And
I looked into it. Here's my theory based on the filmmakers' ages. They're twin brothers born in nineteen seventy six who attended part of high school in the early nineteen nineties in New Jersey. I think Subsiders were born out of the vestiges of the Reagan era War on Drugs, which taught school children that if you ever tried any
addictive substance. You would live in a sewer, your face would be a battlefield of self inflicted gashes, and you would break into people's homes desperate for your substance of choice, before being killed to the jubulation of cops, which happens in the movie Subsiders should just say no to human blood.
We fixed it, so we throw those prohibitions. So I will try to lead the best and cleanest life that I can while I have it. But the East European life cycle, you want to do your part and complete your life cycle and go, but not too old. So people who lived to a very old age are accused of taking more than their fair share of life force. Hence the prohibition against very old people. And there are a lot of prohibitions. There's a huge list and they're absolutely fascinating.
Okay, So I looked into laws against being old and I couldn't find anything, and so I checked in with Jeff and he meant prohibited in more of a resource sense. But on that note, In March of twenty twenty one, the World Health Organization released its first ever global report on agism, and you can download this two hundred and two page pdf but I'll summarize it for you here. People are mean to old people and disabled people and
it sucks, so knock it off. There you go, and I will link that report on my site if you want more granular details though, But okay, one more listener question asked by Andrea Devlin, Red Cedar, Kathleen Sachs, Alexandra cattoul, Anda Frasier, Shelby Smith, Niki demrco Alia Myers Down Tween, Canna Peters Beck's Woodruff, connie E Carringer, Metta Richardson, Jacqueline Church, Bennet Gerber, Sam Taylor, Anina Jacoby. They all wanted to know if Jeff has a favorite vampire movie or franchise,
and all these people mentioned the following titles. I'm just going to say so that they get on your radar, you ready, Black Youla Fright Night, Once Bitten Vamp, a Vampire in Brooklyn from Dust Till Dawn, Blade, Queen of the Damned, Let the Right One in the Invitation Lost Boys, Buffy the Vampire Slayer of Course, Vamperina Dark Shadows, the new Interview with a Vampire series on AMC. And I had never heard of this, but the mel Brooks Dracula Dead and loving it. So Jeff pressures on pick one.
Is there a vampire in a pop culture that you feel like is your favorite?
Every age creates a vampire that it needs. Every vampire meets a need at a certain time. You know, sometimes I like chocolate ice cream, sometimes I like mint ice cream. So there are certain times when I need a certain type of vampire movie to watch. And if that's frustration, or if that's hope or redemption or something like that, I'll pull those different vampires out. So I don't typically have the one time, all time favorite.
But you're definitely team Edward, right.
Why are you saying that?
From you're asking me to pick a vampire over a werewolf. That's that's not too much of a problem, and I can have any answer. I would say, I would probably say more that I'm Team Cullen than Team Edward, so I'll stick within that general family.
PS.
If you haven't seen Twilight, Edward lives with a whole ass coven of vampires in a cool house, and his adoptive parents are vampires. They're frozen in the ages of like twenty three and twenty six because someone's got to buy wine coolers for these one hundred and four year old teen vampires, except they don't really drink, and they're also teetotalers of human blood. They're just like just puma juice. Please, But Team Jacob, how dare anyone even imply it? To Jeff?
That's a good answer. What about the hardest thing about your job? The hardest thing when it comes to researching this? Is there something that is frustrating about it?
Well, I'm a teacher, so I spend my time teaching about this. It is fascinating, and I think everybody needs to understand vampires in so much more depth than typically what we reduce them to in vampire movies. You can watch a vampire movie for pure entertainment, and that's okay. If all you're doing is passing the time by consuming media, that's completely okay. There are perhaps other better forms of
escapism than vampire movies. But with my job of trying to get people to understand vampires, it is to take that folkloric vampire and understand how and why people held it in their belief system. And it takes four very intense weeks of unprogramming people and getting people to understand how people were living in Central and Eastern Europe in pre modern times, when it was really living year to year in survival kind of mode, and all of the
things that could kill you out there. To get everybody to peel back their their western lenses, their modern lenses, their twentieth and twenty first century lenses, and that attitude of taking someone else's belief system and calling it superstition, so to get people to understand why we needed a
folkloric vampire. So many people can't understand why you would invent a vampire just to be scary, and that's one of the reasons we do it for movies and films, but that wasn't the reason why we developed a folkloric vampire. It takes a very long time to get people to process that and then to get people to really reflect
on that phrase. Every age creates the vampire that it needs to be able to say I can watch this movie for entertainment, but I can also treat it as a cultural artifact and say this is telling me something about the people who created it and the time in which it was created. And to see a vampire movie that is popular over many, many years means that the filmmaker, the author is tapping into these human universals that we are probably never going to solve. Who can you trust?
This has Let the Right One In?
If you're down to be scared as hell. The two thousand and eight original Swedish version of Let the Right One In involves adolescens, trust, and of course vampirism, and it's sports in ninety eight percent fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. One critic Joe Lipsett of the Horror Queers podcast, writing that quote, it's a near perfect horror film that captures the horrors of bullying and coming of age and a ChIL unflinching fashion. Is this a classic queer romance or
a morally conflicted tragedy? The answer may just be yes, Joe writes, and I watched the trailer and I was afflicted with instant goosebumps. So that's two thousand and eights Let the Right One In?
Who can you let into your life, into your bedroom, into your family? And what are the signs of the red flags for dangerous people? Can people overcome their dark pasts or their urges? We're constantly focused on that you can have a really good vampire movie that is popular only in a specific time. Frankl Angela's nineteen seventy nine Dracula is like that, based on marital infidelity, you know,
as divorce rates were rising. That's that's great, But the movies which keep coming back and stay fresh and intriguing. Dracula is again one hundred and twenty five years old,
and it is still completely rereadable. It's still moving because the themes of disease and marital infidelity and the danger of foreigners and the fears that we have of things that are not like us, those will always tap into lizard brain and make us afraid and consuming that as literature will always get that chemical release that we can't control that makes it compelling and interesting to consume.
Which is also why having anchors on cable news screaming opinion pieces generates billions of dollars a year and influences who's in power, while also fomenting hatred and division. But if you lost your older loved ones to political talk radio and the nineteen eighties, should have rubbed some garlic on the dashboard. But on a brighter note, and is there a favorite thing about it? Is there something that
just really hooks you. Is it the tie to your maybe your own history, or is it just kind of how enduring it is.
We learned to spot vampires all around us, and so it is it's a lens to see the world. We have four types of vampires. So we have our folkloric vampire that existed in the belief system. We have our literary vampire with its subtype of cinematic vampire. We have the psychotic vampire, which is a real person who has a mental illness who attacks a person in the style of a folkloric vampire or a cinematic vampire literary vampire.
And it's a criminal act to do that, to attack someone and drink their blood.
Ps.
Just try not to do this, especially if you happen to have open stomach ulcers. It's a great way to catch a disease. And according to a recent and pretty helpful pop science article titled is It Okay to drink blood? And excess of iron can be fatal to humans unless you're into vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, dehydration, or maybe hepatitis. Just grab a cold press beet juice and lie to your vampire friends. Your secrets safe. With me, I'm not going to tell anyone.
And then we have the psychic vampire, the person who seems to suck the psychic energy or energy from your body. This is the now most most commonly known to people through the Colin Robinson image of what we do in The Shadows, the television series. Everybody has known a psychic vampire in their life, and this is the person who uses fear, intimidation, or guilt or shame to weaken another person.
And when you're standing from the outside and looking on it really does look like that person is sucking life force out of the victim there. Well, what really is happening, of courus is that that person who's using that intimidation is getting a rush from it. And these are our user chemicals that our brain creates in using intimidation or seeing the results of our action and having that satisfaction
or that thrill that you're doing that. And at the same time, the person who is undergoing that is having negative chemicals being produced in their body which will lead to loss of appetite and fear and nervousness and anxiety and everything.
And it really.
Looks from the outside that that psychic vampires is draining that person. We can explain that with brain chemistry, So thank you modern modern brain science for giving that reaction.
But we can.
Spot those similarities in our everyday life.
So those are psychic vampires. And maybe ask yourself what media do you consume that leaves you feeling anxious and shitty and afraid and smaller, and what people do you associate with who seem to delight in your defeat? If you're feeling drained, you might have a psycho vampire. And also, conversely, do you hate watch certain people's Instagram stories? Do you tear down cheesy bloggers in the comment section? Check in with yourself. Every vampire rises up depending on need, and
maybe you need different things to fuel you. And if you're actually trying to attack people and consume their blood, which happens from time to time, you might have a condition known as clinical vamporism, sometimes called psychotic vamporism or Renfield syndrome, which is an obsession with drinking blood and in honor of Dracula's sycophantic servant, psychologist doctor Richard Knowles snarkily coined this term Renfield syndrome in protest to psychiatry
having too many diagnoses, and to his dismay, it actually stuck as a term to describe waty to drink blood. So it's like a choke turned reality for him. That's just got to really, I guess it's got to suck.
Every year we're going to have a news article of someone who attacks someone and drinks their blood. And we know psychic vampires in our lives, and we read literary vampires and see those parallels to our own lives, and again, those vampires are processing these basic human existential problems. Good vampire literature never gets old. It might get a little bit worn out, but it's the vampires evolved so much that if we've had enough of remorseful vampires, then we'll
pull out the predator vampire again. And if those are exhausted, we can create that next form of a vampire. And we're held in check by whether that innovation will resonate with the people who are consuming it. And that's why you might have a movie that might be brilliant that just doesn't resonate with people, and that tells us that that age doesn't need that vampire. And then there are other things that are just so well done that just hit those aspects of the frustrations of our human mortal
existence that will make vampire literature undying nothing. Definitely, we will still, we will still be making vampire movies and writing vampire literature far far far into the future.
I think that is so so amazing to have the kind of context that I never realized how much I needed. That I can see why hundreds of people turn up for your course every year.
This has been such a joy.
Thank you so much for letting me drain all of the information out of your veins.
Always always happy to be a willing victim, willing donor. I would I would be that person I would be. I would be the person who's whose friend is a vampire, and I would controlled quantities give them my blood. That's why I donate blood every fifty six days less lest my students think that I'm a vampire. Every fall, I'll roll up my sleeve and let them see my my mark that I've.
Been, indeed been giving blood and not taking it.
Well, it's the good reminder for everyone to go out and give.
Blood absolutely every fifty six days.
So ask smart people sanguine questions, because unlike vampires, you live, but once, and doctor Jeff Holdman is so amazing. If you see him on campus at Indiana University, Bloomington, tell him. Dad Woord says, hi, give him a fist bump or a high five, and take his class. The Vampire in
European and American culture. There are a ton of links to the studies and books we mentioned, and more up at alleyward dot com slash ologies slash Vamproology, which is linked in the show notes so you don't have to write it on your arm as you drive. Please, And if you're looking for classroom friendly ologies episodes, we have smologies which are shorter, condensed versions of classic episodes and they're cleaned and edited of my swearing so they're safe
for work in all ages. Those are right in the feed or we have them all collected at alleyward dot com slash Ology, which is linked to the show notes. Thank you so much Mercedes Maitland and Zeke Rodriguez Thomas of mindgem Media for the edits on those. Thank you to all the patrons from patreon dot com slash ologies for sending in questions for this. You can send yours in for upcoming episodes at Patreon dot com slash Ologies joining costs as little as a dollar per month. Our
hearts are cheap. You can wear Ologies shirts and sweatshirts and socks and stickers and hats and more via ologiesmarch dot com. Thank you to the lovely Susan Hale for managing that and so much else. Noel Dilworth does all our scheduling and so much more. Aaron Talbert Adminciologies podcast Facebook group. The syst from Shannon Feltis and Bonnie Dutch of the podcast You Are That.
Kelly R.
Dwyer does our website. She could do yours too. Emily White of the Wordery makes our professional transcripts and Caleb Patton bleeps them and those are up at alleyboard dot com slash ologiestash extras. Nick Thorburn made the theme music and lead editor is the hot blooded treat Chared Sleeper, who also has to be married to me for eternity, which pleases me. Oh, and happy happy birthday to the perfect and amazing Simon Yetch, who is not only an inventor and an artist, but one of the best pals
a person can have. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret, and this time I'm going to tell someone else's secret because I love it and it's not really a secret. But as you may know, I've become really good friends with panatologist Cole and Perry and her husband Victor, who've moved to la this year, and we were having cocktails
on their patio last week. Victor makes excellent cocktails. We were there with someone and in my pants pocket I found a little cardboard paper tube from a roll of dog Pooh bags that had run out that day, and Victor thought it was a cigar, but and I was like struggling to find a word to explain what it was. And Victor said, oh, his family calls any cardboard tube at the end of a roll of something a dirter,
And I was like, what, what word is that? And they call them a dirter because when you put them to your mouth, you can go.
Like a wrapping.
Paper roll, or a toilet paper roll, or a paper tel roll. All those tubes are called dirters. And this just delighted me.
And Cole, who had been in the house grabbing eyes, came out and I asked, and I asked, I asked her, Cole, what is this in my hand? And she went, oh, and now they're dirterers, and I love them, and I love them for telling me that.
Okay, bye bye, a good boy.
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