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Speaker 2: Oh hey, it's the lady recording a podcast at a
Speaker 2: rental car in an airport parking lot for real, ali wart,
Speaker 2: I'm here. It's Spooketober. Okay, it's Halloween week. This episode
Speaker 2: is so robust, it's so meaty and juicy, it's just
Speaker 2: going to bleed into November. This is a two parter
Speaker 2: because it's that good. So this is part one. I
Speaker 2: talked to this ologist for nearly two hours, and I
Speaker 2: felt like I should have paid a price of admission
Speaker 2: for the conversation, which is, I guess what his college
Speaker 2: students do via tuition. But I can tell you you're
Speaker 2: in for a treat, and the trick is that you
Speaker 2: get it for free, So get excited now. This ologist
Speaker 2: came to my attention when someone encountered doctor Lauren Esposito,
Speaker 2: the scorpiology guest, and grabbed laurence phone and texted me
Speaker 2: from her phone to please hunt this vampire guide down. So,
Speaker 2: Miranda Mosley, I'm talking about you. You hooked it up.
Speaker 2: Well done. Thank you. Also, thank you to everyone for
Speaker 2: supporting at patreon dot com slash ologies. You support the
Speaker 2: show and you send in your vampire questions and I
Speaker 2: love you. You can join for as little as a dollar
Speaker 2: a month, So thank you to everyone also wearing ologies
Speaker 2: merch fromologiesmerch dot com and for supporting the show. You
Speaker 2: can do it for zero dollars just by subscribing and
Speaker 2: rating and reviewing. Help so much. Yemagge left a review
Speaker 2: this week that said you will squeal with delight and
Speaker 2: hmm in thought almost every episode. So I hope you
Speaker 2: do that. You're going to do a lot of h
Speaker 2: and a lot of what.
Speaker 3: So.
Speaker 2: Vampiology came from the word vampire, which may come from
Speaker 2: an old Slavic word vape here or Turkish, for which
Speaker 2: it's disputed, but vampiology is definitely a term. It's a
Speaker 2: word for the scholarly pursuit of this field, and this
Speaker 2: guest is just one of the world's finest, a legend.
Speaker 2: No other vamproologist would do so. He got his PhD
Speaker 2: in Slavic Languages at Ohio State University and is now
Speaker 2: a senior lecturer in Slavic and Eastern European Languages and
Speaker 2: Cultures at Indiana University in Bloomington, and one of the
Speaker 2: school's no doubt most popular courses is his The Vampire
Speaker 2: in European and American Culture. This episode is a wild ride.
Speaker 2: I don't know how we got him, but I love
Speaker 2: that we did. You're gonna love him, So find a
Speaker 2: shady spot and prepare to drink in the functions of folklore,
Speaker 2: the mysteries of medicine, Pale Tailer's subtweeting, Lithario's ghost story competitions,
Speaker 2: penny dreadfuls, plagiarism, zene art, lawsuits, destruction, resurrection, social taboos,
Speaker 2: weaponized fiction, escalating monster warfare, romanticism, and propagandism. With a
Speaker 2: professor who proves not all heroes wear vampire capes. Vamprologist
Speaker 2: Doctor Jeff Poldeman.
Speaker 3: Hi, my name is Jeff holdeman and I use he
Speaker 3: hymn pronouns.
Speaker 2: And we edit too so we can stop starring. We're
Speaker 2: not live at all wonderful.
Speaker 3: We are undead. Ali, we are undead.
Speaker 2: I couldn't have said it better than myself. I'm definitely
Speaker 2: talking to I think the best person in the world
Speaker 2: for an episode on vampirology. I think that would be
Speaker 2: the ology.
Speaker 3: This is well, you know that I love your other
Speaker 3: podcasts where you have you know, other great Greek sounding names,
Speaker 3: and vampire vampire ology just is a little bit too transparent.
Speaker 3: So maybe like fangy Bytology if you want to have
Speaker 3: another option there, But vampirology is completely fine.
Speaker 2: Hemo heemophageology very good.
Speaker 3: Yes, blood eating maybe, yeah, exactly. But please understand that
Speaker 3: not all vampires drink blood, so they're not all hemophages.
Speaker 2: Yeah, who doesn't Which vampires don't drink blood? This is
Speaker 2: exciting already?
Speaker 3: Oh our psychic vampires?
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, Okay, have you been actually tell you?
Speaker 3: I can tell you all about our different types of
Speaker 3: vampires as you like and stuff. But I already when
Speaker 3: you say have you been watching, I already know that
Speaker 3: you're going to ask am I watching What We Do
Speaker 3: in the Shadows with Colin Robinson.
Speaker 2: Absolutely, it's so good. It's so good. So many people asked,
Speaker 2: have you been watching it? And I've been watching it too,
Speaker 2: and it's just in my head. I just keep thinking Loslow, Loslow,
Speaker 2: all day Letlow so good. So now you are a
Speaker 2: professor in this in Indiana? How did you come to
Speaker 2: be a lecturer? You're in the Department of Slavic Languages
Speaker 2: and Literature, is correct.
Speaker 3: Slavic and Eest European Languages and Cultures at Indiana University
Speaker 3: at Bloomington.
Speaker 2: Yes, at what point did that even become an option?
Speaker 3: So full disclosure. My maternal grandmother was born in Transylvania,
Speaker 3: and so the roots go back very far. But she
Speaker 3: only mentioned wolves. So she came to the United States
Speaker 3: right before at the out of World War One, the
Speaker 3: last sailing of her ship. You know, if somebody had
Speaker 3: had pink eye, I would not be talking to you
Speaker 3: right now. But she came with her entire family, but
Speaker 3: she would still talk about the old country. And my
Speaker 3: mom and I actually got to go back and visit
Speaker 3: in nineteen ninety nine, back to her village and everything,
Speaker 3: and it was just as magical as you would expect,
Speaker 3: but she would talk about wolves at night and maybe
Speaker 3: some mentions of like witch's kind of category, but no
Speaker 3: vampire talk. And it wasn't until I got to the
Speaker 3: Ohio State University to do my graduate studies. In my
Speaker 3: second year there, they called in a hatchet dean to
Speaker 3: get rid of our department. And they said, we're going
Speaker 3: to close your department. And one of my professors, doctor
Speaker 3: Dan Collins, said, well, you know what's the problem here,
Speaker 3: and they said, well, your enrollments are low in the department.
Speaker 3: And he said, oh enrollments. Well, I took a vampire
Speaker 3: course at the University of Virginia with Jan Perkowski, and
Speaker 3: if you want to see enrollments, I'll give you enrollments.
Speaker 3: So he developed the course based on what he had studied.
Speaker 3: Another graduate student and I were his assistants and his
Speaker 3: dual ren Fields, and we got dressed up in peasant shirts.
Speaker 3: I went down to Star Sales in Columbus, Ohio, and
Speaker 3: like bought you know, one hundred and forty four packs
Speaker 3: of plastic vampire teeth. We made flyers, stapled the teeth
Speaker 3: to the flyer, went out. I put bite marks on
Speaker 3: my neck and we handed out flyers for the course
Speaker 3: and got two hundred and twenty students in the class
Speaker 3: the first year.
Speaker 2: That's a lot.
Speaker 3: So we had one of the largest classrooms on campus
Speaker 3: and it was all lecture based and PowerPoint and really
Speaker 3: there was I was frustrated because students were learning factoids
Speaker 3: and not really putting it together. And you know, we
Speaker 3: could give multiple choice tests but not really delve deep.
Speaker 3: And so I was like, if I ran the zoo,
Speaker 3: I said, if I ever teach this class, I'm going
Speaker 3: to make it a boutique course, twenty students, seminar, essay tests,
Speaker 3: and research projects.
Speaker 2: And so when he went to Indiana University in two
Speaker 2: thousand and two, he pitched this idea and.
Speaker 3: They said, nah, we hired you for other things.
Speaker 2: So fast forward half a decade.
Speaker 3: Five years later, I started as the faculty director of
Speaker 3: the Global Village Living Learning Center and they said, oh,
Speaker 3: and by the way, you'll be teaching a seminar every semester.
Speaker 3: And I was like, on what and they said, oh,
Speaker 3: whatever you'd like, but it should be something, you know, international, cultural, global,
Speaker 3: something that you do. I was like, oh, here it is,
Speaker 3: And I got to then pitch my vampire course, which
Speaker 3: I taught for the first time in the fall of
Speaker 3: two thousand and eight. So this is twenty twenty two,
Speaker 3: and this is my fifteenth vampire brood of students that
Speaker 3: I have this year.
Speaker 2: Can I tell you secret? Okay? Great? Sometimes when I'm
Speaker 2: vetting guests, I check out site called rate my Professors,
Speaker 2: which is like YELP, but it's about college teachers, which
Speaker 2: is as terrifying as it sounds if you're a college teacher.
Speaker 2: But this ologous ratings are fawning and appreciative, things like Jeff,
Speaker 2: a super fun guy with a great sense of humor,
Speaker 2: knows literally everything there is to know about vampires, and
Speaker 2: we'll make sure you know it all too. People say
Speaker 2: it's one of the wildest classes, one of the weirdest
Speaker 2: courses they've ever taken, indescribably intriguing, prompting me to consider
Speaker 2: perspectives I'd never before encountered. So buckle up. We have
Speaker 2: the best person in the world for this, and for
Speaker 2: the next two episodes he is your teacher. But with
Speaker 2: no tests.
Speaker 3: It is everything that I wanted it to be, with
Speaker 3: aforementioned essay tests and analysis projects and class discussions and
Speaker 3: get to see the sweat on students' faces and the
Speaker 3: embarrassment when we're talking about really personal vampire stuff.
Speaker 2: I mean, how did you become prepared to do that?
Speaker 2: There is a sixty page syllabus that you hand out
Speaker 2: and it catalogs every reference of vampires in film, different series,
Speaker 2: in literature. How do you become acquainted with all the
Speaker 2: material that is out there?
Speaker 3: Elliot's sixty two pages. Okay, So I when I started,
Speaker 3: and doctor Collins did such an amazing job of coming
Speaker 3: up with themes and the materials that we covered at
Speaker 3: Ohio State. When I came here, I didn't have any
Speaker 3: vampire movies. I had to go down to the video
Speaker 3: rental stores and get them to make clips for class,
Speaker 3: and so I bought my first I was like, I've
Speaker 3: got to get the standards, and got a couple of those,
Speaker 3: and then got a couple more, and then you know,
Speaker 3: it's like in the United States during one summer and
Speaker 3: it's like, maybe I'll check on Amazon and eBay.
Speaker 2: To see what there is.
Speaker 3: And now I have a collection of about six hundred
Speaker 3: DVD titles of as many vampire movies that aren't completely
Speaker 3: terrible from around the world. So it's taken fifteen years
Speaker 3: to collect all of that, and so the syllabus has
Speaker 3: continued to grow in detail, but then also in the
Speaker 3: resources the references that are there as well. So this
Speaker 3: year I added in a section on vampire themed video games,
Speaker 3: for instance, So it's always evolving and expanding. And of
Speaker 3: course there are about twenty new vampire movies that come
Speaker 3: out a good vampire movies that come out at a year.
Speaker 2: Twenty vampire movies a year. We as human beings, are
Speaker 2: thirsty for blood sucking.
Speaker 3: So there's always room for growth there.
Speaker 2: And now fifteen years in the making, say for you,
Speaker 2: but how many years in the making have vampires been
Speaker 2: in lore? When did it first pop up? Did it
Speaker 2: start with Flad.
Speaker 3: Oh way before him? And again that's my countryman you're
Speaker 3: talking about, so we'll be kind of careful.
Speaker 2: There, mister Impaler. I'm so sorry.
Speaker 3: Exactly.
Speaker 2: Yes. Now, to understand movie vampires, we have to go way, way,
Speaker 2: way way back in time. And this is just so
Speaker 2: much history and context. You didn't know that you needed
Speaker 2: to know. It'll change halloweens and horror movies for the
Speaker 2: rest of your life.
Speaker 3: It didn't happen overnight. We study first the folkloric vampire,
Speaker 3: the vampire central and Eastern Europe, which is the type
Speaker 3: of vampire that we inherit now through various means. But
Speaker 3: we had to have a whole bunch of elements there
Speaker 3: in place. We couldn't have gotten our folkloric vampire that
Speaker 3: we know anywhere else because we had to be in
Speaker 3: Central and Eastern Europe. There had to be people living
Speaker 3: in these conditions in these rural areas, and both mountains
Speaker 3: and fields and swamps and short growing seasons and long winters,
Speaker 3: and certain prevalent diseases, and religions that were in the
Speaker 3: area pre Christian religions and then Christianity. And we had
Speaker 3: to have Indo Iranian dualism come up and spread among
Speaker 3: the people and slowly work its way into their belief
Speaker 3: systems and their world views. And we had to be
Speaker 3: living in these extended families that were subsisting on farming,
Speaker 3: living year to year in these sort of patriarchal patrilineal
Speaker 3: social organizations of this extended family. We had to have
Speaker 3: all of those things in order to have our folkloric vampire.
Speaker 2: Ps I google this for us. Because Indo Iranian dualism
Speaker 2: not a phrase that I casually use. And according to
Speaker 2: a paper based on a lecture by Professor doctor Jamsheed K.
Speaker 2: Showski at the second Indo Iranian International Congress, it means
Speaker 2: in the broadest strokes, just the notion of good versus evil.
Speaker 2: That quote, good cannot arise from evil, nor evil from good.
Speaker 2: Thus it should be understood that something completely perfect in
Speaker 2: terms of goodness cannot produce evil, and vice versa. Evil
Speaker 2: shit cannot turn cool. And where where do you think
Speaker 2: the Genesis itself was? When is the first recorded history
Speaker 2: of something of this nature, something that maybe creeps only
Speaker 2: in the night and is not necessarily alive, but is undead,
Speaker 2: like where do you find that germ?
Speaker 3: Yeah? One of the problems is that the Slavs of
Speaker 3: Central and East Europeans didn't get writing until Christianization. And
Speaker 3: so you know in nine eighty eight in Kievan Rus,
Speaker 3: we didn't have records before that.
Speaker 2: Did I know what he was talking about? Of course
Speaker 2: I didn't. I've only been studying Eastern European history for
Speaker 2: like the last fifteen minutes. But yes, there was a
Speaker 2: state in Eastern and Northern Europe Kievan Rus up until
Speaker 2: about the twelve hundreds, But in the late nine hundreds,
Speaker 2: Vladimir the Great was like, enough of paganism, I'm over it,
Speaker 2: let's do let's see is on does let us drink,
Speaker 2: Let's do Christianity. And then they started using written language
Speaker 2: for religion. So before that time, a lot of history
Speaker 2: and knowledge was oral history and yes, folklore.
Speaker 3: So we reconstruct a proto vampire, which was a demon
Speaker 3: which sucked water from the clouds, causing drought, causing the
Speaker 3: crops to wither, causing people to not have food and
Speaker 3: causing them to wither through starvation leading to death. Especially
Speaker 3: once we get dualism and this belief in good and
Speaker 3: evil being equal forces which have always existed and exists
Speaker 3: now and will always exist, and one's not going to
Speaker 3: win out over the other, and the soul is good
Speaker 3: and the body is bad. That slowly got to take
Speaker 3: form that formless demon which would have sucked rain from
Speaker 3: the clouds, to a being which then would suck blood
Speaker 3: from human victims, causing withering, leading to death.
Speaker 2: Death by desiccation. Our most primal fears are losing fluids,
Speaker 2: precious bodily of fluids.
Speaker 3: So it's this beautiful analogy that the similarity between those
Speaker 3: two things, and it translates very well into a physical manifestation,
Speaker 3: into an anthropomorphisation of the unexplained phenomena that they were experiencing.
Speaker 3: That's just incarnation of that big g greed personification.
Speaker 2: It speaks to so many human fears. I mean, that's
Speaker 2: kind of what monsters and lore and myth really do, right,
Speaker 2: It's what are we afraid of? And what can we
Speaker 2: learn from it? Is that the function of vampires.
Speaker 3: So I would push back a little bit on that, okay,
Speaker 3: in that we are our modern interpretation, especially as a
Speaker 3: literary vampire or a cinematic vampires, a kind of literary
Speaker 3: vampire where it's by definition false, it's by definition fiction.
Speaker 3: The folkloric vampire had two functions. One and arguably first,
Speaker 3: was a psychological function to explain certain very specific phenomena
Speaker 3: that people were experiencing living in Central and Eastern Europe
Speaker 3: in a pre modern period.
Speaker 2: So vampires weren't just art and entertainment with like a
Speaker 2: buried lesson. Folkloric vampires were the explanation.
Speaker 3: We get types of death, so it's not any death,
Speaker 3: it's wasting diseases, so things which will cause people to
Speaker 3: slowly get weaker and weaker and eventually die. Tuberculosis is
Speaker 3: a really good one there, with a withering disease where
Speaker 3: a strong person can suddenly get weaker and weaker and
Speaker 3: pass away. There are internal cancers that are like that
Speaker 3: as well. Now we have HIV AIDS which maps on
Speaker 3: beautifully to that in the modern period, COPD and rheumatoid
Speaker 3: arthritis and multiple sclerosis and a lot of these diseases
Speaker 3: which cause physical wasting, coeliac disease. Where you have this,
Speaker 3: you know, the death certificate says, you know, failure to thrive.
Speaker 3: And then we have a whole set of birth anomalies
Speaker 3: that occur that are specifically tied to vampires and also
Speaker 3: to wear wolves and sorcerers and things that live in
Speaker 3: this very similar cluster of supernatural beings in Central and
Speaker 3: Eastern Europe. And then we have why people are mean,
Speaker 3: why people do bad things? Why do people have impulses
Speaker 3: that are uncontrolled, uncontrollable that cause trouble in our society,
Speaker 3: in our tight knit social organization, which could mean the
Speaker 3: death for everybody. And then we have a whole set
Speaker 3: of phenomena ways of death, types of death, manner of
Speaker 3: death that we have that are prohibited, that are bad
Speaker 3: things you shouldn't be doing. And then there are all
Speaker 3: of the traits of signs after death. These are post
Speaker 3: mortem if you find a body or if you dig
Speaker 3: up a body and you see the body that's exhibiting
Speaker 3: these kind of traits. So you have to have people
Speaker 3: wasting away, and it's like, I think we've got a
Speaker 3: vampire here. You know, who recently died? When did this start?
Speaker 3: Who recently died? What were they like? Did they have
Speaker 3: this kind of taking more than their fair share impulse
Speaker 3: in them? Maybe? How did they die, what were their
Speaker 3: parents like, and what were they like in life? Analyzing
Speaker 3: this looking for signs until you said, maybe this might
Speaker 3: be the source for that. So rather than being an
Speaker 3: intentional source of fear, it's a psychological explanation for that.
Speaker 3: And you can just kind of feel that it took
Speaker 3: form over centuries to the point where we have this
Speaker 3: folkloric vampire, which is a reanimated corpse that then feeds
Speaker 3: on the blood of those closest to them and then
Speaker 3: spreads outward. So with our reanimated corpse, you can reanimated
Speaker 3: corpse out of in two ways. Either the soul leaves
Speaker 3: the body at death and then you're dead. What you
Speaker 3: want is for the soul to leave and leave. You
Speaker 3: want to mourn a person's death, but you don't want
Speaker 3: to wail so much that they say, Ah, these people
Speaker 3: can't live without me. I need to come back. You
Speaker 3: need that person to go on. So there are lots
Speaker 3: of traditions about how you keep a person's soul from
Speaker 3: coming back into the body. The body is laid out
Speaker 3: in the house, read prayers over it, and then you
Speaker 3: pull up the threshold on the door and take the
Speaker 3: coffin underneath the threshold, and then put the threshold back
Speaker 3: down so that the soul can't come in the way
Speaker 3: that it came out. So you can have a a
Speaker 3: corpse reanimated by its own soul which has returned. Or
Speaker 3: you can have a corpse where the soul leaves and
Speaker 3: then a demon comes in and then reanimates the corpse.
Speaker 2: Ah, just kind of like a squatter.
Speaker 3: Right, yeah, And then and then you know, and then
Speaker 3: this explains, for instance, either that the person who's hit
Speaker 3: on the head loses consciousness, comes back and is never
Speaker 3: quite the same. It just it explains a whole lot
Speaker 3: of or that you know the soul or a demon
Speaker 3: comes back in the body we put it in the earth,
Speaker 3: and then it by its nature again, this is a
Speaker 3: person takes more than their fair share of alcohol, of
Speaker 3: sexual partners, of food, of things, of life force. In depth,
Speaker 3: the only thing that they're missing is life force. And
Speaker 3: as we learn from movies, the blood did life means
Speaker 3: the rinfield. The blood is seen as being the locusts
Speaker 3: of the life force, and so that would be the
Speaker 3: only thing that a vampire in death or in undeath
Speaker 3: would need, and that's why they come back, and that's
Speaker 3: why they drink blood specifically. And it's really meant to
Speaker 3: be an explanation because then when we have a name
Speaker 3: for it, when we know what it's like, when we
Speaker 3: know how to spot the signs, when we know what
Speaker 3: to do about it to either keep it away from us,
Speaker 3: or if we can't keep it away from us, how
Speaker 3: to destroy it. There's that anxiety reduction that comes with
Speaker 3: having the diagnosis and suggested cures for it.
Speaker 2: Do you think that that is part of that origin
Speaker 2: story though, in the absence of WebMD and Google just
Speaker 2: looking for some kind of medical explanations of why someone wasted.
Speaker 3: Yes, and that entire set of beliefs coalesces around the vampire.
Speaker 3: But this explanation of how someone who's healthy suddenly keeps
Speaker 3: getting weaker and weaker and there's no sign, there's no
Speaker 3: physical manifestation of why they should be getting sicker. Definitely,
Speaker 3: that medical explanation, that pre modern medicine interpretation of that,
Speaker 3: it's really genius. It accounts for a lot of phenomena
Speaker 3: that they were afraid of, hurt by, their communal social
Speaker 3: order was disturbed by. It definitely fits into that. So
Speaker 3: we talk about psychological functions of the folkloric vampire, and
Speaker 3: there's a second set of functions, and those are the
Speaker 3: sociological functions. There's the psychological explanation for unexplained phenomena surrounding
Speaker 3: people's nature and death. And then there are the prohibitions
Speaker 3: against all of the things which cause disorder when you're
Speaker 3: living in an extended family and you are trying to
Speaker 3: survive from year to year, and we can kind of
Speaker 3: feel that get hijacked into what we call social control.
Speaker 3: So people then say, well, if you do these things,
Speaker 3: you might become a vampire. And when you become a vampire,
Speaker 3: you're going to feed on your family, the family that
Speaker 3: you might not like them all the time, but you
Speaker 3: love them, you depend upon them, and the worst thing
Speaker 3: for you to do living in a communal society would
Speaker 3: be to feed on the rest of the community. And
Speaker 3: that's part of why it's so difficult to explain all
Speaker 3: of this to modern Western people, because we're so individualistic,
Speaker 3: and you know, all of our movies and everything, it's
Speaker 3: one vampire going after one victim, and we don't see
Speaker 3: that communal threat of the folkloric vampire. It's just so
Speaker 3: hard for us to understand that anyone could have actually
Speaker 3: believed in that folkloric vampire. And that's why we say
Speaker 3: it it was real. The folk ork vampire was real
Speaker 3: in the belief system of the people who held it.
Speaker 2: So folkloreic vampires weren't just about a mysterious adversary, but
Speaker 2: about community survival. And psychologists and evolutionary biology and anthropologists
Speaker 2: know this is part of the human survival instinct, as
Speaker 2: noted in the nineteen ninety five paper the need to
Speaker 2: belong desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation,
Speaker 2: and it says that existing evidence supports the hypothesis that
Speaker 2: the need to belong is a powerful, fundamental and extremely
Speaker 2: pervasive motivation. So yes, vampire folklore helped keep groups safe.
Speaker 2: How does this relate to twilight.
Speaker 3: That allows us to be descriptive about that versus a
Speaker 3: vampire in literature or movies where it's patently by definition
Speaker 3: not true.
Speaker 2: When did it go from that folklore to entertainment and
Speaker 2: literature and pop culture.
Speaker 3: So the industrial revolution killed the folkloric vampire when people
Speaker 3: started moving into the cities, when that urbanization happened, and
Speaker 3: they left their villages and were suddenly in cities with
Speaker 3: other people from other places who had other beliefs, and
Speaker 3: you had structured mandatory education, and you had access to
Speaker 3: hospitals and emerging modern medicine and emerging modern social organizations.
Speaker 3: In the village, the patriarch was in control, had to
Speaker 3: keep order there. What do you do if someone is
Speaker 3: a glutton or an alcoholic, or a troublemaker or a
Speaker 3: thief or a murderer when it's one of your family members,
Speaker 3: the best thing to do is to just keep them
Speaker 3: from doing those kind of things. When people come into
Speaker 3: the cities and do those things, and they're doing them
Speaker 3: to people who they're not related to, We then need
Speaker 3: a modern legal system to say what is right and
Speaker 3: what is wrong. And we have to have a law
Speaker 3: enforcement system that would then arrest those people. And we
Speaker 3: need a judicial system which would try those people, and
Speaker 3: we need a penal system to lock those people up
Speaker 3: and away from society. We need all of these modern
Speaker 3: urban services and beliefs and access to having a church
Speaker 3: on the corner as opposed to one that takes half
Speaker 3: a day to get to where you live, so where
Speaker 3: you might only go to church once a year at
Speaker 3: Easter or something, and here everybody is around, and everybody's
Speaker 3: from somewhere else. And then, especially as generations go or
Speaker 3: as people will take your belief systems and say that
Speaker 3: that's superstition, right. Everybody's religion is somebody else's superstition, and
Speaker 3: vice versa. And this is one of the hard things,
Speaker 3: is to keep people from being judgmental about these kind
Speaker 3: of things.
Speaker 2: Everybody's religion is somebody else's superstition.
Speaker 3: Ah.
Speaker 2: I find that to be a beautiful sentiment. So the
Speaker 2: rural folkloric vampire and the newly industrializing urban environment collide
Speaker 2: around the turn of the eighteenth century, like the spooky
Speaker 2: life eating creep hits a big time. I like to
Speaker 2: imagine him stepping off a bus and taking things in
Speaker 2: like someone who just moved from Iowa.
Speaker 3: Once we move into the cities, once we have access
Speaker 3: to my modern sciences big s, plural, modern biology, modern epidemiology,
Speaker 3: as these are growing, modern psychology, modern criminal justice and
Speaker 3: criminal psychology, abnormal psychology, which explained away all of the
Speaker 3: psychological functions the vampire was explaining away, and then all
Speaker 3: of the modern social organizations which kept people in line.
Speaker 3: The folkloric vampires out of a job at that point
Speaker 3: because they're not needed anymore. They're not needed to explain
Speaker 3: things and the threat of the folkloric vampire isn't needed
Speaker 3: to keep people in line. We can mark the end
Speaker 3: of the folkloric vampire period at the beginning of urbanization
Speaker 3: that comes along with the industrial revolution in Central and
Speaker 3: Eastern Europe. It takes a lot longer in Central and
Speaker 3: Eastern Europe versus Western Europe for those effects to take place.
Speaker 3: We still have big empires Russian Empire, Austro Hungarian Empire
Speaker 3: overseeing people, but they're still very often living in rural places.
Speaker 3: And then as you get into Southern Europe, as the
Speaker 3: mountains get higher, you can have isolate beliefs where that
Speaker 3: modernization isn't reaching. And so there are still people who
Speaker 3: hold these beliefs as part of their belief systems. They're
Speaker 3: numerically probably pretty small, and they probably won't readily admit
Speaker 3: it to you for fear of people saying that, you know,
Speaker 3: they're stupid and uneducated and superstitious.
Speaker 2: Let's talk about the big novel that established vampires. When
Speaker 2: Dracula the novel came out, was the general public, the
Speaker 2: international public? Was this the first kind of like depiction
Speaker 2: of it in written literature as a character as a
Speaker 2: caricature too? No, so we know I was very wrong
Speaker 2: about Dracula being the first vampire novel. I did not
Speaker 2: know what I was talking about. I mean, we're not
Speaker 2: even there yet, We're like one hundred years away. This
Speaker 2: is so exciting.
Speaker 3: No, so right at the point where the folklore vampire
Speaker 3: is running out of a job, starting in the probably
Speaker 3: by the early eighteen hundreds or so late seventeen nineties,
Speaker 3: we also get Romanticism that comes in. So through the
Speaker 3: sixteen seventeen hundreds we have the Enlightenment, which is supposed
Speaker 3: to be pulling us out of the dark ages of
Speaker 3: backward thinking, out of the darkness of ignorance, and showing
Speaker 3: people the light through education, through civilization, through striving for
Speaker 3: greater things. And we strive and strive and strive, and
Speaker 3: we get to the seventeen nineties and at some point
Speaker 3: people are like, this isn't working, and we get this
Speaker 3: beautiful period of Romanticism, not kissy kissy romanticism, but capital
Speaker 3: are Romanticism, which has as part of Gothic literature.
Speaker 2: Romanticism was emerging in Europe in the seventeen nineties, partly
Speaker 2: inspired by the French Revolution, which we happened to discuss
Speaker 2: in the I Go France minnesote and the Catacombs episode
Speaker 2: from last week. But yes, after upheaval of a monarchy
Speaker 2: and a lot of science and the Enlightenment, Romanticism is
Speaker 2: bending things back to art, involving these really extreme emotions
Speaker 2: and drama and horror and the majesty and the power
Speaker 2: of nature. And we will be right back to talk
Speaker 2: about this first ever vampire novel in a quick second,
Speaker 2: But first let's toss some cash at a worthy cause.
Speaker 2: And this week Jeff chose the Red Cross because he
Speaker 2: donates blood as often as he humanly can every fifty
Speaker 2: six days. Bo wait, actually no. A few days after
Speaker 2: the interview, I got an email from Jeff saying he'd
Speaker 2: like to change the donation. He said, I didn't see
Speaker 2: the news that you lost your father to multiple maloma,
Speaker 2: a blood cancer, so recently. I just saw his beautiful
Speaker 2: obituary posted on your Facebook page, and with tears in
Speaker 2: my eyes, and in keeping with the blood theme of
Speaker 2: the episode, I would like to ask if our episode's
Speaker 2: charity could be the Multiple Maloma Research Foundation in his
Speaker 2: honor and memory Augh Jeff, what a gem. So yes,
Speaker 2: a donation will go to my looma dot Org in
Speaker 2: Jeff Holdeman's honor, in memory of my dad, Larry p
Speaker 2: Ward my heart. Okay. That donation was made possible by
Speaker 2: sponsors of the.
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Speaker 2: All right, let's get back to when the first vampire
Speaker 2: novel arose in modern fiction. The Birth of the un
Speaker 2: Dead coming to you.
Speaker 3: Now, and it's this rejection of this striving for enlightenment
Speaker 3: and everything, and it's a return to the fascination with
Speaker 3: the sublime, with the dark powers of nature. This is
Speaker 3: where Lord Byron and Percy Bisch Shelley get into the picture.
Speaker 3: As they're writing romantic dark Gothic literature. We get our
Speaker 3: first short story, originally in English published in eighteen nineteen
Speaker 3: called The Vampire with a Y John Polydori in England,
Speaker 3: and it is written at the same time. The idea
Speaker 3: comes from this fascinating story where John Polydori is hired.
Speaker 3: He was the youngest medical student at his institution. Lord
Speaker 3: Byron hires him as his personal physician to take the
Speaker 3: Grand Tour of Europe and goes with Percy bish Shelley
Speaker 3: and Mary Walstoncraft, who will then later become his wife,
Speaker 3: and her half sister Claire Claremont So.
Speaker 2: A bunch of goth writers, including the poet and heart throb.
Speaker 2: Lord Byron now Percy Bishelley, was also a writer. He
Speaker 2: died tragically at twenty nine in a boating accident, leaving
Speaker 2: a widow, Mary and then Claire Claremont was Mary's stepsister
Speaker 2: and freshly preggers with lord Byron's baby, a daughter that
Speaker 2: they would name Allegra, who turns out as a small child,
Speaker 2: was sent to live in a convent, where she died
Speaker 2: at the age of five. What oh, gosh and yes,
Speaker 2: John Polydori, lord Byron's doctor, is also on vacation with
Speaker 2: this group of emo poets.
Speaker 3: And they are at this villa and this was the
Speaker 3: year without a summer. There was a volcanic eruption and
Speaker 3: it was cold all summer long. And they were in
Speaker 3: this villa and it's dark and cold and rainy, and
Speaker 3: they're inside and they say, how about if we write
Speaker 3: ghosts stories? So they had been consuming German ghost stories
Speaker 3: that had been translated into English, and they were like,
Speaker 3: habout if we you know, we got some some people
Speaker 3: with literary talent here. How about if we have a
Speaker 3: ghost story writing competition, right right, scary stories for each other.
Speaker 3: This is when Mary Walstoncraft creates Frankenstein.
Speaker 2: Oh wow.
Speaker 3: And then this is then when Lord Byron comes up
Speaker 3: with the idea for a vampire. So that's this fragment
Speaker 3: of a novel. He has an idea, doesn't like it,
Speaker 3: puts it away. Percy Bushelley is like, I just published
Speaker 3: some stuff. I don't really want to play with this,
Speaker 3: and clear Claremont was there on the side. And then
Speaker 3: John PAULADORI this young upstart. He was a self made man.
Speaker 3: And here's Lord Byron, you know, mad, bad and dangerous
Speaker 3: to know Lothario.
Speaker 2: Lord Byron had quite a love life. Let's just say.
Speaker 2: Rumor had it he fathered a daughter with his half
Speaker 2: who at the time was married to her first cousin.
Speaker 2: But yes, Lord Byron had also recently gotten Claire impregnated,
Speaker 2: even though he blew her off and barely liked her
Speaker 2: according to letters, So he was kind of a proto
Speaker 2: fuck boy. But I guess in this case he was
Speaker 2: a lord. He was a fuck lord. I'll due respect.
Speaker 3: And John Polydor, you can just feel this frustration. He's like,
Speaker 3: self made man, works really hard, gets educated, and here
Speaker 3: is this guy who has all of this access to
Speaker 3: money and access to education, access to intelligence and power
Speaker 3: and has literature as a way of reaching the people.
Speaker 3: And he still goes and does these mean things, less
Speaker 3: than enlightened things, and John Polydori writes this story about
Speaker 3: a skull headed lady and they all laugh at him.
Speaker 3: He almost gets into a duel and he gets sent
Speaker 3: home and he goes back to England and he's like,
Speaker 3: you know, I'm gonna write this story. I'll show you,
Speaker 3: and he writes The Vampire about Lord Riven and it's
Speaker 3: this characterization of Lord Byron as a vampire, and it
Speaker 3: gets published, gets misattributed as by Lord Byron, and Lord
Speaker 3: Byron writes back like I wouldn't write this crap, you know,
Speaker 3: retract this. But we get our we get our first
Speaker 3: short story, originally in England, written at this at this time,
Speaker 3: about a vampire. So that's that's our birth of vampire literature.
Speaker 2: Can you imagine if you publish a snarky piece of
Speaker 2: literature about someone you low key hate and it gets
Speaker 2: popular and then people think your hater wrote it, and
Speaker 2: then your hater just hates on it more. But anyway,
Speaker 2: thus a monster was born, the first vampire in modern
Speaker 2: literary history, which started as a little fuck you.
Speaker 3: And that's so think about that. That's two hundred plus
Speaker 3: three years ago, so we have two hundred years of
Speaker 3: vampire literature. In eighteen forty five to eighteen forty seven,
Speaker 3: James Malcolm Rhymer gives us Varney the Vampire. This is
Speaker 3: true pulp fiction. I don't know if you've ever read this,
Speaker 3: no it sounds fake. It's called the first novel. It
Speaker 3: was done in installments. And you know, lest you poo poo,
Speaker 3: that Dostayevski published like that too, so but he sort
Speaker 3: of eight pages or so of this story, and it
Speaker 3: really reads like a soap opera, and the beginning is
Speaker 3: very over the top.
Speaker 2: So yes, James Malcolm Rhymer's Varney the Vampire was published
Speaker 2: in these installments called Penny Dreadfuls, which were horror and
Speaker 2: pulp books put out in these slim volumes on cheap
Speaker 2: paper and sold for a penny apiece. And I found
Speaker 2: a link to the whole damn book, and I'll put
Speaker 2: it up on my website. But the full title is
Speaker 2: Varney the Vampire, The Feast of Blood, and it opens
Speaker 2: the solemn tones of an old cathedral clock. Once midnight.
Speaker 2: The air is thick and heavy, a strange deathlike stillness
Speaker 2: pervades all nature, and then a storm erupts. Anyway, the
Speaker 2: cover I looked it up, is kind of a crude
Speaker 2: sketch of like a skeleton coming out of a grave,
Speaker 2: and it looks so much like a punk scene from
Speaker 2: the early nineties. I would wear this on a shirt.
Speaker 2: And the novel bills itself as a romance of exciting interest.
Speaker 2: And also the cover poses the question art thou a
Speaker 2: spirit of health or a goblin damned? Which is really
Speaker 2: the best question I've ever heard, because sometimes I'm jogging,
Speaker 2: I'm eating vegetables, breakfast is a smoothie. I am a
Speaker 2: spirit of health. Last night, no lie, I ate Cheetos
Speaker 2: for dinner, and I fell asleep in jean shorts, and
Speaker 2: I'm a goblin damned. I've never appreciated a dichotomy more.
Speaker 2: I might have to make much of this.
Speaker 3: Romanticism is jumped the shark by this point, and it's
Speaker 3: just really flowery and over the top and military and everything.
Speaker 3: And it also has one of the greatest endings to
Speaker 3: a novel. But because the other four hundred and fifty
Speaker 3: pages are almost interminable, most people have not read that work.
Speaker 3: I think there were some threats of making shows out
Speaker 3: of it, and I still haven't seen any of those.
Speaker 2: So that was Varney the Vampire, The Feast of Blood,
Speaker 2: You Goblins Damned.
Speaker 3: And then in eighteen seventy two we get Shardan Lefaneu
Speaker 3: with Carmilla, and this is our first female vampire. So
Speaker 3: he writes this novella about a female vampire. My students
Speaker 3: don't connect with the vampire. My students don't connect with Varney.
Speaker 3: They connect with Carmilla, and they will say, this is
Speaker 3: genuinely scary, this is genuinely disturbing, and the language and
Speaker 3: the style and everything are so much more approachable. But
Speaker 3: that's still one hundred and fifty years old. Carmela is
Speaker 3: still one hundred and fifty years old.
Speaker 2: Camilla spooked people so much because, first off, it was
Speaker 2: homo erotic, which made people feel all kinds of feelings
Speaker 2: that scared them because of a repressive time, and because
Speaker 2: it was more psychological about manipulation and reincarnation and trust
Speaker 2: and betrayal. Also in terms of ladies with ladies, must
Speaker 2: the narrative be so cursed? Sadly, the popular culture at
Speaker 2: the time didn't allow for just a more lighthearted LGBTQ
Speaker 2: plus romcom without the plague of the Undead, which was
Speaker 2: a bummer. So that was in eighteen seventy two, and
Speaker 2: finally twenty five years after Camilla onto the main vampire event.
Speaker 3: And then we jump ahead to eighteen ninety seven and
Speaker 3: that's when we get Dracula. So we had Lefenew and
Speaker 3: Stoker knew each other. They're both irishmen who moved to
Speaker 3: England to London. They knew each other. Stoker used to
Speaker 3: write theater reviews and things like that, and LeFanu was
Speaker 3: a publisher and so there was a mutual admiration society there.
Speaker 3: And Stoker takes all of those elements. Carmilla is, you know,
Speaker 3: Dracula's mother. There's so many of the vampire literary conventions
Speaker 3: that get used that Stoker takes, and he takes things
Speaker 3: from Polydori and from Rhymer as well.
Speaker 2: So those were the guys who wrote The Vampire. Loosely
Speaker 2: about Lord Byron and Varney the vampire. The Penny Dreadful
Speaker 2: series is okay, there's a lot of names, a lot
Speaker 2: of vampires up on this and.
Speaker 3: Then also goes back into the folklore and studies up
Speaker 3: on this, and we know the sources that Stoker is
Speaker 3: accessing to create Dracula, and he's he's going to call
Speaker 3: him Count Vampire.
Speaker 2: Ooh, that's original.
Speaker 3: And then he stumbles on this character from Romanian history
Speaker 3: with the name Dracula, and that's just so perfect. It
Speaker 3: just sounds so so ominous. Are our word Raku in
Speaker 3: Romanian means the devil. It's also the dragon that Saint
Speaker 3: George slays.
Speaker 2: So Saint George was a figure who slayed this village
Speaker 2: beast and saved a princess. And thus vampires kind of
Speaker 2: became the new dragons. Dragons are over. They're chugi Chugi
Speaker 2: is cringe, cringe is crnch Either way, vampires are dragons.
Speaker 2: Does that also have a direct connection to Vlad the
Speaker 2: Impaler as well?
Speaker 3: Historically, so this is the time when the Turks are
Speaker 3: invading Southeastern Europe and the Christians. This is orthodoxyes, Central
Speaker 3: and Eastern Europe, So this is Eastern Orthodoxy and they're
Speaker 3: fighting against the Muslim Turks. And so Vlod's father belongs
Speaker 3: to the Order of the Dragon. Vlod's father would have
Speaker 3: been Drakul of the Order of the Dragon. And Vlad
Speaker 3: is the son of the person who belongs to the
Speaker 3: Order of the Dragon. Very often you'll see that Order
Speaker 3: of the Devil or something like trying to tie him
Speaker 3: into demonic kind of stuff. This is the defenders of Christianity,
Speaker 3: this is the evil slayer.
Speaker 2: And Vlad the Impaler did not have an easy life.
Speaker 2: His father and brother were both killed by an invader.
Speaker 2: People betrayed him left and right so much that he
Speaker 2: cleaned house and impaled a bunch of his enemies, and
Speaker 2: it was just known as a Romanian hero and a
Speaker 2: real person to not fuck with. And Bram Stoker's extensive
Speaker 2: research and notes are one hundred pages long, and nowhere
Speaker 2: in there does he mention flat even though Vlad the
Speaker 2: Impaler straight up signed his name Dracula, but with a K,
Speaker 2: which is cute. So historians are divided there. Did he
Speaker 2: have anything historically that did correlate to what we think
Speaker 2: of notions with vampires now or was it just really
Speaker 2: like he was a pretty badass dude, pretty scary, impaled
Speaker 2: some people, kind of a good nod, right.
Speaker 3: That's what makes Romanians so mad is that they took
Speaker 3: this national hero and made him a vampire. These were
Speaker 3: coral times that you know, he was he was defending Christianity,
Speaker 3: he was defending the church and his beliefs, for his
Speaker 3: for his state. And then at that point, the ends
Speaker 3: of the stakes justify the means. You know, if you're
Speaker 3: going to impale somebody, if you're going to show them
Speaker 3: that you shouldn't come around here, that's a pretty graphic
Speaker 3: way of doing that. There are some reports of, you know,
Speaker 3: maybe he was doing something that farious like dipping his
Speaker 3: bread in the blood of the people he had been
Speaker 3: paled and everything, and then other people will say, oh,
Speaker 3: that's that's Hungarian propaganda, trying to deface the name of
Speaker 3: this person who was otherwise defending Christianity as well. Neighbors
Speaker 3: never like each other, so they're always going to talk
Speaker 3: crap about each other. That's true.
Speaker 2: And what about when it just took off in Hollywood
Speaker 2: cinema in what the early twenties did it just hit
Speaker 2: a new boom when it came to this new medium.
Speaker 3: Bram Stoker worked for Sir Henry Irving in his theater company.
Speaker 2: Sir Henry Irving was a stage actor. Side note sounds
Speaker 2: like kind of.
Speaker 3: A dick in Stoker's writing on the side as well.
Speaker 3: He's got multiple novels published. I have not read any
Speaker 3: of them other than Dracula. And I've read Dracula a
Speaker 3: whole bunch of times too, because it's compelling literature. But
Speaker 3: it is very theatrical. It's very pre cinematic. And the
Speaker 3: first thing that Stoker does being in the theater, he
Speaker 3: writes this novel and then he has a reading of
Speaker 3: the entire novel on a stage, which then establishes copyright
Speaker 3: for the stage. Oh smart. And then later somebody comes
Speaker 3: along and Sir Henry Irving is like, this is garbage,
Speaker 3: and you know, humor him for now, and he's not
Speaker 3: going to say bad things to bram Stoker because bram
Speaker 3: Stoker is organizing his tours of the United States and
Speaker 3: all over. And somebody says, actually, this would make pretty
Speaker 3: good theater, and you know, other than like, I mean,
Speaker 3: how do you do a ghost on stage? Or how
Speaker 3: do you make somebody turn into a werewolf on stage?
Speaker 3: But a vampire on stage isn't too terribly hard to do.
Speaker 3: So we get our first theatrical treatments of Dracula as
Speaker 3: a stage play, and actually Belle Lagosi is on the
Speaker 3: stage and the theater performances of this, so he gets
Speaker 3: part of his start there in the theater, and twenty.
Speaker 2: Five years later, vampires just jazz handered their way onto
Speaker 2: the silver screen.
Speaker 3: In nineteen twenty two, the movie nos Ferratu comes out
Speaker 3: by more Now German movie, German expressionism. Everybody who's ever
Speaker 3: taken a film class has or should have watched nos Ferratu.
Speaker 2: Stlift Girl.
Speaker 3: Laid there again. That's one hundred years old this year,
Speaker 3: nineteen twenty two, and that was after World War One.
Speaker 3: Germany starts this mess and then loses the war and
Speaker 3: then has its military taken away from it, and then
Speaker 3: also has to pay reparations under the Treaty of Versailles,
Speaker 3: and more Now feels this connection between, you know, having
Speaker 3: the life force drained out of Germany by the conditions
Speaker 3: of the Treaty of Versailles, just like a vampire.
Speaker 2: Germany just throwing a huge ass pity party for its
Speaker 2: all after World War One. Germany, come on, don't do
Speaker 2: this again.
Speaker 3: So you get this novel that comes out in eighteen
Speaker 3: ninety seven. But they're in Germany, in post war Germany,
Speaker 3: and they don't have money to pay the copyright and
Speaker 3: so they make changes and turn Count draculind account or lock,
Speaker 3: and they conflate some characters and change the time and
Speaker 3: change the place and change the setting. Hope, hopefully this
Speaker 3: will be enough to not violate copyright. Bram Stoker has
Speaker 3: died by then, but his wife is still alive, and
Speaker 3: she is not a wealthy woman, and so she sues
Speaker 3: to have the movie destroyed, and the court say, you know, yes,
Speaker 3: this is copyright violation, and all of the copies were
Speaker 3: destroyed of the movie.
Speaker 2: Oh my gosh, I don't know that. Wait, what how
Speaker 2: I've seen this film with the tall, gaunt ashen ghoul
Speaker 2: with no hair but really long nails and those sharpened
Speaker 2: beaver teeth. How did I see it?
Speaker 3: Except for a couple that were in some film archives.
Speaker 3: And so the the nos Ferratu that you have seen now,
Speaker 3: and hopefully you've seen the Keno International restored copy, which
Speaker 3: is beautiful Frankenstein stitched together from existing copies. Quino International
Speaker 3: is rehand tinted to show daylight and sunlight and night time,
Speaker 3: and it's it's really truly beautiful. And I hope that
Speaker 3: it's one hundredth anniversary is going to lead to a
Speaker 3: lot of showings this this fall as well, but that
Speaker 3: you know again, it's like you can imagine how celluloid burns,
Speaker 3: and so they're like, burn the vampire and destroy all
Speaker 3: these destroy all these copies of the movie. But vampires
Speaker 3: always have a way of coming back. So just like
Speaker 3: just like our folklore vampire, which could have you know,
Speaker 3: died and disappeared, it shape shifts into a into a
Speaker 3: a literary device, into a metaphor and gets picked up
Speaker 3: in the literature and then gets picked up into cinema.
Speaker 3: And because right at that time we also have the
Speaker 3: special effects of having stop animation and slow crank and
Speaker 3: the tinting and intertitles and everything else, it makes really
Speaker 3: compelling film, except it gets destroyed and so a lot
Speaker 3: of people then never get to see this movie.
Speaker 2: By now, of course, Nosfatu is immortal, and these recent
Speaker 2: restorations are apparently just powerfully stunning. They're much more crisp,
Speaker 2: more detailed, although to be fair, some people prefer the
Speaker 2: grainy versions because they have kind of more of a
Speaker 2: ghosty feel and they're fuzzier and more amorphous. And the
Speaker 2: lead actor Max Shrek inhabits the role so fully in
Speaker 2: the older versions and the new versions, but in the
Speaker 2: older ones partly because you can't make out details that
Speaker 2: could ruin the vibe, like the edges of his bald
Speaker 2: cap that you can see in the restored versions. So
Speaker 2: sometimes the devil is in the details. Sometimes less is more.
Speaker 3: Yeah, people who take a shortcut and go to YouTube
Speaker 3: are going to find the unrestored copies, because that's of
Speaker 3: course no longer under copyright. But the restored copies, and
Speaker 3: they're very easy to find, are truly beautiful, and they
Speaker 3: have music to them in English translation, intertitles and everything.
Speaker 3: It's really truly wonderful to get to see. And of course,
Speaker 3: you know, as we're watching it in class, I'm like, oh,
Speaker 3: that's an image that you'll see in any film textbook.
Speaker 3: Oh and that one too, Oh, and that one too, Oh,
Speaker 3: and that one. And they're probably fifteen or twenty stills
Speaker 3: from that movie that will be in just about any
Speaker 3: film history book or film studies book or film storytelling
Speaker 3: book as well.
Speaker 2: So this print is playing all over the UK through
Speaker 2: October and November. Dances Are Your town, no matter where
Speaker 2: you live, has a small cluster of cinema dorks watching
Speaker 2: No Sparatu around Halloween, and if not, the full movie
Speaker 2: is on YouTube, so you can gather your own nerd
Speaker 2: brigade to watch this once banned Dracula knockoff. So why
Speaker 2: so many Dracula adaptations now? So in around nineteen sixty
Speaker 2: the copyright for Bram Stoker's novel expired all over the
Speaker 2: world and it was fair game for night feeding blood creeps.
Speaker 3: Our next big Dracula triumph then is nineteen thirty one
Speaker 3: with bel Lagosi Universal Films. Again, this is two years
Speaker 3: after the stock market crash and the Great Depression and everything,
Speaker 3: and they just build all these huge studios with these amazing,
Speaker 3: soaring sound stages and everything, and the theater play is okay,
Speaker 3: but you've got to do it over and over. And
Speaker 3: they're like, well, we've got these studios collecting cobwebs and everything,
Speaker 3: Like hey, what's better than that than make a vampire movie?
Speaker 3: And so they make Dracula in nineteen thirty one, and
Speaker 3: there you've got bell Legosi in this tuxedo and he's
Speaker 3: got his accent because it's we have sound by now,
Speaker 3: and he really plays this East European count.
Speaker 2: My blood now flows through ir veins.
Speaker 3: And think about this, this is nineteen thirty one. We
Speaker 3: had a lot of nobility who came to the United
Speaker 3: States fleeing, especially after the Russian Revolution.
Speaker 2: Just a quick side note for all of us who
Speaker 2: don't have the dates for the Russian Revolution just etched
Speaker 2: in our memories. We're talking nineteen seventeen to nineteen twenty three.
Speaker 2: That's more than a century after the French Revolution, which
Speaker 2: we touched on in the field trip minnesot I go
Speaker 2: France a few weeks ago. There's just so many revolutions,
Speaker 2: there's so little time, and so.
Speaker 3: We have these East Europeans that are both working in
Speaker 3: factories and building skyscrapers and things like that, but also
Speaker 3: these educated people, wealthy people who are from the dark East,
Speaker 3: and they're still scary, and they still practice religions that
Speaker 3: we don't know, and we put a lot of our
Speaker 3: fears into these possibly powerful people who are wealthy and
Speaker 3: educated and come from this area of the world and
Speaker 3: practice those religions. That's very different from nos Ferratu. He
Speaker 3: looks like a rat. He's got these long, pointy ears
Speaker 3: and a beaky nose. And there are lots of analyzes
Speaker 3: about how this is very anti Semitic.
Speaker 2: So you do not have to dig deep underground to
Speaker 2: find scholarly papers about literary and cinematic vampires and how
Speaker 2: they've been used and sometimes co opted by anti Semites.
Speaker 2: Many film and literature scholars draw parallels between vamporism and
Speaker 2: something called blood libel, which is old and hateful slander
Speaker 2: about Jewish people needing human blood for passover, and lies
Speaker 2: like these have fueled genocide. And though this screenwriter for
Speaker 2: Nosaratu was himself Jewish, as were many of the actors
Speaker 2: in the director F. W. Murnaut, was Queer. The film's
Speaker 2: premiere in nineteen twenty two was attended by none other
Speaker 2: than the head of propaganda for what would become the
Speaker 2: Nazi Party, which adopted and co opted some of the
Speaker 2: imagery and messaging of vampires in further anti Semitic hate, which,
Speaker 2: given the hatred and the awful messaging from Kanye West
Speaker 2: this week, it just feels like this horrifying resurrection of
Speaker 2: history itself now. In the twenty twenty two essay Bloodsuckers, Vampires,
Speaker 2: Anti Semitism and nos Feratu at one hundred, writer Nora
Speaker 2: Berlatsky also notes that the cinematic vampires tend to share
Speaker 2: the trait of wealth, and writes quote, A narrative that
Speaker 2: is inherent to the story of nos Faratu and other
Speaker 2: expressionist films of the time is the threat of authoritarian
Speaker 2: and aristocratic figures seeking to take control. And Noah continues,
Speaker 2: Nosaratu is not a movie that welcomes me in, but
Speaker 2: count orlock in the best traditions of the diaspora. Refused
Speaker 2: to stay in the box the Gentiles built for him.
Speaker 3: So it's like they're these conditions, were living under their
Speaker 3: awful and this nos Ferratu style vampire, so that's our
Speaker 3: first stylized, visually stylized vampire. He's tall and skinny. He
Speaker 3: looks like death. He looks like the anthropomorphisation of death.
Speaker 3: The French call him a philambulist, a walking fallus.
Speaker 2: How do you do?
Speaker 3: He's very irorect and he has these long nails which
Speaker 3: which grow. Throughout the movie. He'll be framed in the
Speaker 3: doorway and it looks like he's in a coffin. He's
Speaker 3: got these darkened eyes and the prosthetic nose and these gaunt,
Speaker 3: gaunt features as opposed to Belle Lagosi, who's you know, chubby,
Speaker 3: and you never see him run or uh lift heavy
Speaker 3: boxes or anything. At most, he's carrying off the Mina
Speaker 3: Harker character, and that's about it. He's not physically threatening.
Speaker 3: We have to make him threatening by shining a light
Speaker 3: on his eyes, and you know, are implying that he's
Speaker 3: hypnotizing people as well. We have this first nos Ferratu
Speaker 3: type vampire, and then we have the bel Lagosi type vampire,
Speaker 3: except the nos Feratu doesn't survive in people's mental image
Speaker 3: or in the you know, equivalent of the video stores
Speaker 3: of the time, and so the bell Lagosi style Dracula
Speaker 3: becomes our standard image of the vampire, the cinematic vampire
Speaker 3: for a while until up until the end of World
Speaker 3: War two. And World War two ends with a nuclear bomb,
Speaker 3: the you know, man's triumph over nature and technology and
Speaker 3: everything out that is, like the cars all of a
Speaker 3: sudden look like rocket ships, and you know, everything's space,
Speaker 3: aliens and mutants, and the supernatural vampire doesn't have a
Speaker 3: place in that world, and true to its nature, the
Speaker 3: vampire just goes underground and waits everybody out. And then
Speaker 3: it isn't until nineteen fifty eight when we get the
Speaker 3: horror of Dracula with Christopher Lee, who reinvents the Dracula character.
Speaker 2: So Christopher Lee was like a career villain, so good
Speaker 2: at it and so good at his haunting portrayal of
Speaker 2: Dracula that he played him nine times. Because if the
Speaker 2: cap fits, wear it and eats someone, he.
Speaker 3: Has an impeccable British accent, no more of this thick
Speaker 3: Hungarian accent from bel Lagosi. And he's lean and fit,
Speaker 3: and they shoot him up, and he's tall, and he
Speaker 3: runs up the stairs two by two and he turns
Speaker 3: into this snow narling beast. They have destroyed my servant.
Speaker 3: They will be destroyed. Belle Lugosi didn't have fangs. Christopher
Speaker 3: Lee does, and he's got these red eyes. And this
Speaker 3: is this is our first technicolor vampire movie. So it
Speaker 3: starts out with his heavy Gothic Germanic sounding, you know,
Speaker 3: Nazi salute music pounding, and you've got this grave of
Speaker 3: Dracula and then this bright red blood dripping onto it,
Speaker 3: and it's the kind of the Wizard of Oz effect.
Speaker 3: This like we're not in Kansas anymore, and like this
Speaker 3: is really red blood on this, on this grave. And
Speaker 3: then Christopher Lee just reinvents the the Dracula genre. But
Speaker 3: that's a huge shift that we get this powerful, English speaking,
Speaker 3: really compelling, scary person and who's living in our basement.
Speaker 2: But you said he had fangs, when other vampires previous
Speaker 2: to him didn't.
Speaker 3: Bella Lugosi did not have fangs. He had his cape.
Speaker 3: Never realized that he was buried in his cape, but
Speaker 3: no fangs. And when you see the image, just google
Speaker 3: image Christopher Lee Vampire Transformation, and you'll see him with
Speaker 3: these blood red I don't even know what they did
Speaker 3: to his eyes to make them so red, but these
Speaker 3: mouth of teeth and his swept back hair, and he
Speaker 3: really looks scary. He really looks snarling. He turns from
Speaker 3: this debonair English speaking noble into this snarling beast.
Speaker 2: Ps. I looked up his makeup regimen for this, and
Speaker 2: oh how I wish that Christopher Lee had done like
Speaker 2: a Get Ready with Me Undead Corpse Edition video series.
Speaker 2: But instead all I found was that he had to
Speaker 2: wear contact lenses that covered even the whites of his
Speaker 2: eyes to make them bloody red, which kind of sounds
Speaker 2: like some kind of torture that a monster would inflict.
Speaker 3: It's really really amazing. But the pace of the music
Speaker 3: and the videography. The shots that they have are really
Speaker 3: amazing because again, this is not just color but technic color,
Speaker 3: and it was really transformational.
Speaker 2: Is that kind of an added cinematic touch that they
Speaker 2: decided like, let's take some artistic liberty, since we've got color,
Speaker 2: and since we've got you know, really great optics here,
Speaker 2: Like let's add some eyes, let's add some fangs, Let's
Speaker 2: put someone in a tuxedo because it just looks nice.
Speaker 2: I know bel Agosi was in kind of a tuxedo.
Speaker 2: But at some point did they decide like, let's just
Speaker 2: up its game a little bit.
Speaker 3: Yeah, we always talk about arms escalation in vampires. Bell
Speaker 3: Agosi is not really very threatening. Again, he's got that
Speaker 3: hypnosis thing, and that's that's scary to not have control
Speaker 3: over your body, to have somebody else controlling you. That
Speaker 3: is very much in the novel Dracula, Right, So Dracula
Speaker 3: has mind control over the women he's turning into vampires.
Speaker 3: That's the emergence of modern psychology and that fear of
Speaker 3: being mesmerized, being hypnotized, brainwashing and all these kinds of
Speaker 3: things that we can hack other people's heads. And that's
Speaker 3: just scary, and then you know he's then stronger and
Speaker 3: he runs, you know, Christopher Lee runs faster, and he's
Speaker 3: physically stronger. He can throw people around like Dracula, like
Speaker 3: bell Legosi never could for me. And our vampires just
Speaker 3: keep getting stronger and stronger and stronger through time to
Speaker 3: the point where it has now gotten pretty ridiculous as
Speaker 3: to what vampires can do.
Speaker 2: But we are.
Speaker 3: Our theme for the course is every age creates the
Speaker 3: vampire that it needs. It's a quote by Nina Auerbach.
Speaker 2: Just a quick aside. Nina Auerbach is the late University
Speaker 2: of Pennsylvania professor who taught courses on Victorian literature and
Speaker 2: horror and film and culture history, and wrote the nineteen
Speaker 2: ninety five classic Our Vampires Ourselves.
Speaker 3: Every age creates the vampire that it needs. That time period,
Speaker 3: those people in that place, under these conditions, with this
Speaker 3: background in belief systems or religions or living conditions and things,
Speaker 3: creates the vampire. And these are all the features that
Speaker 3: the vampire has, from its name, to its origin story,
Speaker 3: to its attributes, to its activity patterns, the things that
Speaker 3: it does, to how you can keep it away from you,
Speaker 3: and then how you can destroy it if you need to.
Speaker 3: And all of those things develop and intensify over time,
Speaker 3: and then finally, every age creates the vampire that it needs,
Speaker 3: and that's that function that we talked about with the
Speaker 3: folkloric vampire. The folkloric vampire has a psychological function of
Speaker 3: explaining unexplainable biological natural things and has the sociological functions
Speaker 3: of social control of keeping people from doing things which
Speaker 3: harm our social order, and all of that stuff is
Speaker 3: still needed. We're still wondering why people, you know, people
Speaker 3: do bad things, why people kill, and why people steal,
Speaker 3: and why people have drinking problems, and why people are
Speaker 3: greedy and gluttonous and all the other deadly sins that
Speaker 3: we have out there. We're still, you know, trying to
Speaker 3: understand genetically why people are the way they are, and
Speaker 3: then we're still looking for ways to keep people under
Speaker 3: control from doing bad things. And in looking at our vampires,
Speaker 3: it will tell us about the time that created that vampire,
Speaker 3: and that word needs is that function of the vampire.
Speaker 3: And so when you have a a vampire type that's
Speaker 3: very popular, that then tells you about that age, about
Speaker 3: those people who need that vampire, who find it compelling.
Speaker 3: No longer do we need it to explain things that
Speaker 3: we don't have modern scientific explanations for. But now we
Speaker 3: have explanations that still are unresolved, and having a way
Speaker 3: of showing that that there are people out there that
Speaker 3: are like this, and that they're ways of destroying them
Speaker 3: or keeping them at bay, or things that we maybe
Speaker 3: could do to protect ourselves from them. And if we
Speaker 3: can't protect ourselves from them, because remember, they're getting stronger
Speaker 3: and stronger, then maybe at least we can spot the
Speaker 3: signs to be able to stay away from them.
Speaker 2: Unless they're hot and drink vegan blood. I don't know.
Speaker 2: We'll discuss it next week. Can I ask you some
Speaker 2: listener questions?
Speaker 3: Oh?
Speaker 2: Absolutely, they had great ones. So yes, we all have
Speaker 2: a new favorite vampire expert. Jeff is the best. He
Speaker 2: will be back next week with all of your questions.
Speaker 2: We will discuss so many modern vampires, vampires of late,
Speaker 2: how vampires have changed their backstories, so much else. Questions
Speaker 2: about Garlic come back next week and you'll get that. Meanwhile,
Speaker 2: you can follow him. We'll put links to find him
Speaker 2: in the show notes along with links to myloma dot org.
Speaker 2: You can find us at ali ward dot com slash
Speaker 2: Ologies slash Vampirology. There'll be more about this episode there.
Speaker 2: We are at ologies on Twitter and Instagram. I'm at
Speaker 2: ali Ward with one L on both. You can support
Speaker 2: the show and you can submit questions for the next
Speaker 2: guests at patreon dot com slash ologies for as little
Speaker 2: as twenty five cents an episode. You can get merch
Speaker 2: at ologies merch dot com. Thank you so much Susan
Speaker 2: Hale for managing all of that and doing so much else.
Speaker 2: Noel Dilworth handles all of our scheduling. Aaron Talbert admin's
Speaker 2: Theologies podcast Facebook group with assists from Bonnie Dutch and
Speaker 2: Sham and Feltis, Emily White of the word remakes our
Speaker 2: professional transcripts, and Caleb Patton bleeps them. We have Smologies episodes.
Speaker 2: We just released a new one about entomology bugs this week,
Speaker 2: and those are kid friendly and short versions their classroom safe,
Speaker 2: bare bones. They're there for you in the feed. You
Speaker 2: can also find them at alleyboard dot com slash smologies.
Speaker 2: Thank you Mercedes Maitland and Zeke Rodriguez Thomas of mind
Speaker 2: Jam Media for putting those together. Our website gets updated
Speaker 2: by Kellyardwire, she can make you a website. Nick Thorburn
Speaker 2: made the theme music and lead editor and Forever Crush
Speaker 2: Jarrett Sleeper of Mind Jam Media edits the's and puts
Speaker 2: them all together. And at the very end of the episode,
Speaker 2: I tell you a secret. And right now my secret
Speaker 2: is very, very practical. I was shooting for Innovation Nation
Speaker 2: for CBS Today in Dearborn and I'm catching a nine
Speaker 2: to fifteen flight out of Detroit and it is eight fifteen.
Speaker 2: I'm in a parking lot at the airport.
Speaker 3: I have to be so.
Speaker 2: And I've got to go return this rental car and
Speaker 2: then I have to catch this flight and I am sweating.
Speaker 2: In case you're wondering, but this episode is so good.
Speaker 2: I'm really excited for next week too. Oh so good. Okay,
Speaker 2: hot miss. Will my life ever be normal? Will I
Speaker 2: ever be normal? Probably not? But stay tuned. Okay, bye bye.
Speaker 2: These people are our food, not our allies.