Season 3 Finale: Vampire Legends & Lore with Rissa Miller – From Dracula to the Silver Screen

For our Season 3 Finale, Generation X Paranormal sinks its fangs into the shadowy world of vampire mythology with special guest Rissa Miller. From the original Gothic terror of Bram Stoker’s Dracula to the seductive immortals of Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, we explore how vampire legends have evolved across centuries. This blood-chilling episode unpacks vampire symbolism, real-world folklore, and iconic portrayals from Nosferatu to modern pop culture. Join us for a deep dive into what keeps vampires eternally fascinating—and frightening.

Whether you’re Team Lestat, obsessed with Vlad the Impaler, or just love a good midnight story, this finale will leave you thirsting for more.

Transcript

Speaker 3 (00:04)
There are always mysteries in life. I want you to believe. To believe in things you cannot. Van Helsing. Dracula. Bram Stoker.

Well, everybody, welcome back. Hey, everyone. I'm Logan. And I'm Nicole. And this is Generation X Paranormal. So we had an interesting day today as far as weather's concerned. I'm not sure, but at the time of recording, I know when this will come out, but at the time of recording, had what I would imagine probably going to be an F3 tornado come through our area. So it was a bit of a harrowing day. Yes, it was. It's been.

It's been one of those days. up to tornado siren. Yeah. I had already been up and we had taken the dogs out or I had anyway. And then, you know, the tornado siren goes off and I'm like, well, guess I got to wake Nicole up. So I was already awake. Yep. That was our morning. So hopefully your morning was better, but I know what is better and that's going to be this episode. Yes. And we get to talk about, honestly, one of our favorites and we've, don't know why we've officially not done one up to this point, but I'm glad we waited. Yes. Because we have.

Rissa Miller on with us. And as a Generation X paranormal resident historian, you know, she brings it. She does every time. But yeah, what can you tell us about what Rissa is going to be talking about? So this episode will be coming out the Wednesday before May 26th, which is World Dracula Day. Yes. Which Dracula, of course, represents vampires. But specifically Dracula is from a novel.

That's right. From Bram Stoker. That's right. Yeah. So we're going to kind of get, she's going to get into the vampire lore, but we're also going to kind of focus on Bram Stoker and his novel and how that led to how we see vampires today and see Dracula today. Sounds good. Well, let's- I'm excited to get into it. Yeah, let's get in. Speaking of, show our, copy of Bram Stoker There it is, in all its glory. And if you're listening- a pretty good one.

Yeah, if you're listening on the podcast, is a very cool. It's got the castle in it. And then of course it's got the gold binding. It is very nice. Yes it is. Well, well, anyway, we're excited to talk to Rissa. So yeah, let's bring her on. Yeah. Hey Rissa, how you doing?

Speaker 2 (03:24)
I'm great. How are you Logan, Nicole? I'm doing good.

Speaker 3 (03:27)
Doing

really good. Glad to have our resident historian back in. ⁓ You know, as we've said many times, you're definitely a crowd favorite. think most people, most people generally gravitate to everything that you talk about. So we're pretty excited to have you back on.

Speaker 2 (03:43)
Well, I'm super excited to be back and I'm super excited for what we're talking about tonight. As I mentioned, we were getting ready. This is this topic I've been waiting for years to talk about.

Speaker 3 (03:56)
Yeah, and we're pretty big fans, of course. And I'm sure we'll dive into it more, but being a Generation X kid and being, you know, from that era, we had some amazing, amazing movies and different, you know, different things that we got to enjoy as kids. And I guess I just don't see as many of them nowadays, but they've definitely changed. And of course, we're talking about vampires. ⁓ You know, my vampire is...

kind of somewhere sandwiched in between the Lestat and a little bit of, I mean, everybody got a no loss voice. mean, that's kind of, ⁓ you know, I'm somewhere stuck between that and I'm looking for David and Lestat. And of course, every five seconds, someone going, Michael. But no, this is exciting. I can't wait to talk about it. ⁓ So yeah, let's, I know you got a lot to talk about, so let's kind of.

Speaker 2 (04:35)
Yes, yes.

I do. And you know, I'm going to make a confession. When I finished my first set of notes for this talk and I practiced reading them, they were two and a half hours long. No, I did cut it. I did cut it. would not subject you to that. But ⁓ this is a really, really, really rich topic. And just to be clear, there's literally no way in one podcast that we're going to cover all of vampire lore. honestly, this could be a whole semester's worth of a class at a college level. ⁓

I might be able to cover some of the creatures history and then get into our main theme, which is Dracula tonight. World Dracula Day is May 26th. It celebrates the publication of Brom Stoker's Dracula, which happened in 1897. And whether or not you realize it, every vampire you recognize as a vampire, you recognize that vampire because of Dracula. And Stoker really changed ⁓

vampire lore forever with this book. So that said, mean, he was not the first vampire by a long shot. Dracula had a lot of forerunners, some very, very ancient, some that were just right beforehand. So we'll talk about them all, but we'll talk about many of them. But if you have listeners who are out there like, I have this favorite vampire story from, you know, this part of history. Hopefully I hit it and not realize.

Speaker 3 (06:01)
Right.

Speaker 2 (06:21)
that my original version of this was more than twice this length and that still didn't cover everything. ⁓ All of that said, I really tried to pick the highlights and the things that were most relevant to the Dracula story in specific.

Speaker 3 (06:35)
Perfect. And that is the Dracula that I heard the vampire that I know the best, guess. Definitely. I think all of us do. All right. Let's kick it off.

Speaker 2 (06:46)
All right, so vampires before Dracula. This is a lovely mythical and bloody timeline. ⁓ Let's go to Greece first. The Lamia was a child devouring demoness who would seduce young men and drink their blood. Allegedly after she had a little, you know, love affair with Zeus, Hera cursed her and she kind of became a sort of a catch-all figure for dangerous seductive women.

And you're going to see that theme running throughout our conversation tonight. Dangerous, seductive women. Still a problem, I guess. Problem now.

Speaker 3 (07:21)
Interesting.

way

Yep. Yes, I'm Stussy Universal.

Speaker 2 (07:29)
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. You just got to be careful for those dangerous seductive women. So still in Greece, we're going to talk next very briefly about the Empusa. They are shapeshifting spirits. And again, the shapeshifting story is part of Dracula too. And they can drink blood or consume flesh and were used to frighten children and warn against promiscuity.

Speaker 1 (07:53)
3

Speaker 2 (07:54)
Let's head to Rome for the Strix. These were owl-like nocturnal creatures that would typically only feed on the blood of infants. And they weren't like technically vampires, but kind of. They were vampiric. Kind of like a chupacabras, vampiric.

Speaker 3 (08:11)
Yeah, sure. Love the hype stuff. Right.

Speaker 2 (08:14)
And so the word Strix eventually becomes ⁓ the forerunner of the Romanian folklore Strigoli word. And you know what? There's a lot of words that you two are going to hear me stagger over tonight. I'm going to do my best. I am trying to pronounce some of these words. And if I get them wrong, if you know the correct way, correct me. And if not, ⁓ dear listeners from Gen X Paranormal, please know I'm doing my best.

Speaker 3 (08:29)
Hmm, okay.

They know. They know.

Speaker 2 (08:46)
So then in Norse mythology, we have the Barrowites, also called the Dragoor. Dragoor, Dragoor, yeah. There were undead warriors who guarded tombs and would sometimes physically attack the living. ⁓ Now they had some different magical properties. ⁓ Besides the lingering stench of death, they could also appear in your dreams, control the weather and grow to enormous sizes. So they're sort of like a different kind of monster.

Yeah. But, you know.

Speaker 3 (09:16)
Yeah, yeah.

It's like a big tall stinky weather, man.

Speaker 1 (09:20)
Reh? Just like that.

Speaker 3 (09:23)
Yeah, you know.

Speaker 2 (09:24)
And of course we have to mention the incubus and succubus. these were male and female demons who are seductive and drain humans during sleep. So they were most popular in early medieval lore, but their roots reach all the way back to ancient Mesopotamia. And they are believed to steal your vitality to cause nightmares. There's that dream aspect again. And they could even produce offspring. They are

They're deeply sexual and they're definitely part of the vampire story. They give this idea that they are a nocturnal seducer who feeds on both blood and life force. Now later, because ⁓ incubus and succubus are sort of like experiences that people believe they've had. Science has told us that this is linked to sleep paralysis. That when you experience sleep paralysis, there's often a sleep paralysis demon.

Speaker 1 (10:15)
Thanks.

Speaker 3 (10:16)
Okay.

Speaker 2 (10:22)
that will sit on your body and cause you to believe they are real. And this is all an effect of the mind, this sort of hallucination. feels very vivid. It's never happened to me. I've never had ⁓ sleep paralysis or experienced a sleep paralysis demon, but there is actually a lot of scientific data about that phenomenon.

Speaker 3 (10:42)
Yeah, I've heard that before. mean, there's something definitely that happens when you're paralyzed like that. I've known people as a medic when I was in the army that would come in saying they had sleep paralysis and they would often talk about these crazy like hallucinations and different things that would happen. So yeah, I've definitely run across that before.

Speaker 2 (11:03)
Well, know, another common figure in the sleep paralysis like Pantheon is the cat. So, ⁓ that people imagine there's a cat on them and perhaps even stealing their breath, which kind of lends itself to yet another trope. So the whole, the cat stealing your breath thing, which they don't, they don't really do.

Speaker 3 (11:21)
But

no. we found a few and if they had, I'm pretty sure we'd be goners right now.

Speaker 1 (11:27)
Ha ha!

Speaker 2 (11:28)
So those are the really ancient ⁓ vampires I decided to include. Now we're going to get into the pre 18th century European vampires. This is a very specific niche and they are not sexy. They are not romantic. They are not elegant. They are mostly going to be reanimated corpses that are ugly, bloated and bloodstained. And they have returned specifically to spread death disease and misfortune, not to be seductive or charming.

So the common traits of these early European folklore vampires are a bloated body. ⁓ This is from decomposition gases. if you've ever seen, this is a horrible mental picture. If you've ever seen like a roadkill that's all puffed up and bloated, that's what I'm talking about. But people thought that they were, they didn't know about decomposition gases back then. And they thought that they were full of blood, that that was from like this like really gluttonous blood consumption. They were like,

just goofed up like that, full of poop.

Speaker 3 (12:30)
Okay,

and that logic checks out.

Speaker 2 (12:33)
So yeah, there's a method to the madness here. next they would have purple or dark skin. They wouldn't be pale, but people believe they were just engorged with blood. There would often be blood at their mouth. And this was considered proof of nocturnal feeding on other creatures. The groaning noises from the grave. Now we know now that was probably trapped gases escaping from decomposing bodies.

Speaker 3 (13:00)
Right. Right. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (13:03)
allegedly rise from the grave at night. Sometimes they walked and sometimes they would fly. This is a lot based on local legends. And then the ⁓ chewing of their shrouds. Apparently they would gnaw at their own clothing or even their own fingers or limbs. And of course, that night they would go out and cause death among the living. This could be by spreading disease, causing nightmares. I mean, just what I've described could already cause a nightmare for you.

Speaker 3 (13:32)
Yes,

just slightly.

Speaker 2 (13:33)
Yeah. Or just literally by like draining the life force kind of in the same way that, you know, the Incubus and Succubus would do. Now, there are lots of ways that you might become one of these vampires and they sort of fall into the idea of a good or a bad death. And that's a huge rabbit hole I'm not going to plunge into. ⁓ a bad death could be suicide, murder.

an unbaptized person or even an unbaptized baby that is considered a bad death, an unclean death, meaning that you died without last rites being administered. And of course, if you were a witch or a sorcerer, you were going to have a bad death. Absolutely. ⁓ Sometimes people were born with deformities or even especially bad teeth and they would assume that they were somehow cursed and that could be a person who was going to have a bad death.

And of course, the seventh son of a seventh son. ⁓ Now that plays back into werewolf lore a little bit as well. into this idea of a bad death. So ⁓ if anybody died in any of these highly suspect ways, villagers are probably going to check it out and like maybe dig them back up, you know, make sure you're a vampire. Now there is specific ways they would deal with these ⁓ miscreant vampires.

Speaker 3 (14:52)
Huh.

Speaker 2 (14:58)
⁓ Beheading, very effective. You remove the head and it takes away the power of the vampire to rise. Burning the body, like total destruction, burned to ashes. This was a little different. You could stuff the vampire's mouth with stones, bricks, coins, or straw, or any combination thereof. This prevents them from biting other people and passing their vampire infection on.

Speaker 3 (15:26)
Interesting. Never heard that. I haven't heard that one. No. So they would be buried with coins in their mouth. Anyway. Oh, OK. I follow you now. Gotcha. Full of straw. Yeah. Weird. That's a one. Just think about having to be the person to do that task. You me to do what now? This is my job. Yes. This is what I do. If I fill out a W-2, shove straw in dead corpses.

Speaker 2 (15:33)
or they can zoom them and then do it.

I had talked to

You know, there might be worse jobs out there, but I can't think of.

Especially because you've got to put into perspective that, mean, embalming goes all the way back to the Egyptians, but it wasn't common. These were not embalmed bodies. These were just bodies that were rotting away. ⁓ And ⁓ yeah, I'm sure that the aroma was noticeable.

Speaker 3 (16:19)
Mm-hmm. no doubt.

Speaker 2 (16:21)
Other things they could do, ⁓ the body would be placed face down in the ground so that when they woke up and started digging to get out, they would dig further into the ground and they wouldn't be able to get out. This was something also done to witches and I think we talked about that before. You could place, now this is kind of Once you've noticed someone was going to have a vampire tendency, you could leave a whole bunch of knots or netting.

or a whole bunch of random seeds in their grave. Because for whatever reason, the lore is that the vampire would compulsively want to untangle or count things. And it would absolutely befuddle them and it would delay their return. And now if you think back to when we talked about Christmas monsters, the Kelly Cantanos could be confused. were vampiric. ⁓ They could be confused by a colander and by counting all the holes on the colander.

Speaker 3 (17:18)
Interesting. Right. I gotta admit though, when you said that I kept thinking of the count on, uh, uh, what was it? Yeah. I wonder if that's why.

Speaker 2 (17:28)
That's a question. I don't know the answer to that question, but that's a good observation because he was into math, right?

Speaker 3 (17:35)
He sure was, he would count everything. ⁓

Speaker 2 (17:37)
Interesting.

He was in the math. So ⁓ the other thing, of course, and you know this one, would be to drive a wooden stake through the body. Now they historically used ⁓ wood from a hawthorn or an ash tree. And the idea wasn't so much as to pierce the heart as it was to pin the body to the ground initially. Another thing you, this is other lore, and we're going to talk about this subject later, but you could bury the body at a crossroads.

Speaker 3 (17:56)
Hmm, okay.

Speaker 2 (18:05)
And so if you put a body at a crossroads, it was at a liminal space. And even if they got out, they would be confused as to where they were. They wouldn't be able to find their way in theory. So these customs show up throughout Europe and into the Mediterranean. And some of them, as you know, continue to influence vampire stories today.

Speaker 3 (18:16)
Interesting.

Absolutely.

Speaker 2 (18:31)
And I was really curious as I was reading some of this. like, why did all of these legends arrive? Because they're so, some of those seem so random. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (18:40)
What's interesting is the steak. If for some reason I never put that together, the term of it, nobody says stab them in the heart with a wooden, a piece of wood. They actually call it a steak and it will steak stick something to the ground. I don't know why I never put that together.

Speaker 2 (18:59)
So, you know, I think the biggest reason a lot of these, these legends happen is because they didn't really understand the science of decomposition yet. ⁓ before we, we hit the age is, know, the age of enlightenment and we had the scientific method. ⁓ society just simply didn't understand that there would be bloating and like flood seepage and your hair and nails do continue to grow. If you're not bombed, that's like a totally normal natural thing. ⁓ but they,

were very suspect and honestly a little creepy to folks back then. And they just didn't understand this was all part of the normal process. Right. So then the, reason is disease and plague. They did not understand that viruses and bacteria, they spread, you know, their airborne or their, you know, through touch or whatever. So when these different diseases would strike villages or even larger towns, seemed logical that the dead might be infecting the living.

Speaker 3 (19:57)
Hmm. Yep. That would make great sense. Yeah, it would.

Speaker 2 (20:01)
Right. And then of course there are dreams and sleep paralysis. We've already talked about that a little bit, but a lot of people interpret these kinds of dreams as vampire attacks. going way back in time again, sleep paralysis is real. It's a scientific thing. And we've always had it as humans. So people just didn't understand that that's what it was yet. Interesting. So the other interesting thing is that as Christianity starts to spread across Europe,

folklore mix, mix, mix, mix with these new ideas. And then there's also this idea about sin and damnation and the resurrections are people who've gone terribly wrong in the eyes of the Christian church.

And there's a lot of words too, they came before vampire. Of course, I would say revenant is probably the coolest, The revenants, meaning those who return. Our revenants are interesting because they can be ⁓ like physical beings or spirits, but either way they've come to like drain you of your life force. And there are somebody returned from the dead. But revenant is also a type of ghost, historically speaking.

Speaker 3 (20:54)
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (21:15)
And then we have, and now some of these I might say wrong. I'm just gonna say it right now. I'm gonna try.

Speaker 3 (21:20)
Yeah, we understand. Do your best.

Speaker 2 (21:22)
Yep. This, the Strigoi, the Romanian, they can also be living witches that leave their body to drink blood or actual vampires who return from the dead. The Nosferatu. Now this is not to be confused with the 1922 film, but this is a Romanian word for plague bearer or insufferable. And it has Slavic roots. I'm going to try to say this Greek word and forgive me, I'm going to get it wrong.

Speaker 3 (21:48)
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (21:53)
⁓ Rycol la Colascs. That is the walking dead who roamed the night and will actually knock on your door. Very polite. really very polite. ⁓ now you only get attacked by them if you answer.

Speaker 3 (22:09)
That's crazy. ⁓

Speaker 2 (22:13)
Yeah. So, know, I mean, honestly, I hate answering the door anyway, but now I really don't want to.

Speaker 3 (22:20)
Basically, like they have to invite them in. I've heard that before. They're legends. Now you have to be invited in. You'd almost have to have a ring camera for your-

Speaker 2 (22:25)
There you go.

Speaker 1 (22:29)
camera.

Speaker 2 (22:31)
Gosh, is there some undead person at the door?

Speaker 3 (22:34)
Exactly

Speaker 2 (22:36)
Just

UPS. Just UPS. them go away.

So then, ⁓ again, from the Slavic comes upere or vampir. And we know this one. ⁓ these are the vampires that rise from the grave and attack entire villages. And then finally from Western Europe, get the, Hmm. I'm going to say this wrong to you. I'm going to give it a shot. This is a chewing corpse that likes to devour bodies, like a corpse that comes back to eat and chew.

on bodies. Logan, your face is priceless right now.

Speaker 3 (23:15)
I just I'm thinking about you know, it's bad enough. You got to worry about them sucking your blood now. They're just gonna masticate all over you and it just Yeah, that's pretty gross

Speaker 2 (23:22)
Yes, yes.

That's the thing that you had to be concerned about, historically speaking, the undead masticating.

Speaker 3 (23:31)
Give me

Speaker 1 (23:35)
you

Speaker 3 (23:36)
a ring doorbell and we'll be fine

Speaker 2 (23:40)
So ⁓ some big takeaways here is that these were monstrous creatures. Every single one of them were actually monsters. ⁓ They were beasts. They were frightening. They were literal threats to the living. And they were often tied to disease and plague. So there's nothing sexy, charming, sparkling, or any otherwise to do with these vampires. All right. Yeah. The magic is all dark.

Let's be clear. is truly the stuff of nightmares. And when I went looking for ⁓ old paintings, I didn't come up with much. It seems that nobody really wanted to paint these things. I don't know why.

Speaker 1 (24:21)
Thanks

Speaker 3 (24:26)
big loaded thing walking down, mean...

Speaker 2 (24:29)
Loaded

dead corpse walking around eating people. No, I didn't find it. Doesn't it sound a little bit like the zombie story?

Speaker 3 (24:37)
Well, I thinking about that, you and especially you said the walking dead. Now, of course, everybody knows what that is. Right. But it's interesting that it almost has that ⁓ the same parallel as zombies kind of in the beginning. Yes. You know, if you took out just the just the bloodless part of it, like if you were to somehow eliminate that part of it, it's really not necessarily vampiric. We're really just talking about a zombie. Yeah. Right. So, yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (25:06)
Well, now we're going to arrive in the 1700s. And the first thing I'd like to do is dip into two actual cases of vampire attack. Cool. First, I'm going to say this man's name wrong. I'm going to try. The first case is Peter Balgocevec. ⁓ This is one of the earliest and most famous documented vampire incidents. It happened in a village in what is now Serbia.

during the Habsburg Austrian Empire in 1725. And this sort of helped create what would become a vampire hysteria that swept through Europe. So Peter dies at 62, which is a good old age at that point. And then nine people in the village die within the next eight days. They all suddenly fall ill and they all report that Peter visited them in the night.

and strangled them in their sleep. So of course a panic sweeps through the village and the authorities get involved. And people are like, I'm not going to live here unless you do something about this. So a military surgeon, a priest and some officials reluctantly exhume Peter's body. And what they find is that he is perfectly preserved despite being dead for over a week. There's fresh blood around his mouth. His nails have grown.

Speaker 3 (26:05)
Hmm.

Speaker 2 (26:32)
He has rosy skin, his eyes are open and the villages are like, yep, we're 100 % sure that Peter is a vampire. so we know actually all of this can happen with a natural burial. Nice has taught us that all of this can happen with a natural burial. And also there's the reality that, this was part of the research I cut away, that a lot of people were buried alive.

Speaker 3 (26:41)
Interesting.

interesting actually.

Right. ⁓

Speaker 2 (27:00)
That was a regular occurrence historically.

Speaker 3 (27:04)
It's

a whole birth of graveyard shift, know, mean,

Speaker 2 (27:09)
Yep,

the bells, so much there. We could talk about that for another whole SEPHIRES episode. But, you know, they have a local custom in this part of Serbia to drive the steak through the heart. And they say that when they ran the steak through his heart, he literally screamed and blood like poured from his body. So the villagers still didn't feel safe. So they exhumed him, burned him into ash, and then threw him back in his grave.

Speaker 3 (27:14)
for sure.

That'll do it.

Speaker 2 (27:38)
At that point, he's definitely dead. He's he's like double guy, right? He's double dead now.

Speaker 3 (27:43)
Double. Double.

Speaker 2 (27:46)
So this case was officially recorded by the Austrian military and they filed a detailed report. Now what that means is that this can be published in newspapers all across Europe. And basically there's a surge of vampire fears and people are starting to desecrate graves across the continent.

Speaker 3 (28:01)
boy.

Why wouldn't they? Sounds like a good time.

Speaker 2 (28:14)
Right?

This is known as the first publicized case involving state-sanctioned vampire hunting.

Speaker 3 (28:24)
Wow.

Speaker 2 (28:24)
Bear Bear Hunters are actually a whole different subject too. I did cut a bunch of that from this, but it's very interesting stuff.

Yeah, we're going to talk about Van Helsing. Yes, Indique, you cannot skip Van Helsing on this.

Speaker 3 (28:36)
I imagine we would.

I

don't think that's too important. Not at all.

Speaker 2 (28:42)
So we don't actually know what really happened to Peter in his death, but it could have been a premature burial. It could have just been natural decomposition. But basically what we do know is that his story helped launch ⁓ an obsession with vampires. And then right after him came the case of Arnold Paoli. And now he was in a village ⁓ in Belgrade or near Belgrade.

And he was a former soldier. He had allegedly served in the Ottoman Wars. returns to his village. He's like, you know, leading a normal life. ⁓ But he walks around telling everyone that he was attacked by a vampire during his military service in Greece. Yeah. So to protect himself, Arnold says that he ate earth from the vampire's grave and smeared himself with the vampire's blood, which I'm not sure how he acquired that.

but allegedly this was a Greek folk remedy against vampirism. ⁓ Unfortunately, Arnold dies suddenly around 1726 when he falls off of a cart. I mean, nowadays we don't, if we fall off a cart, like whatever, we get back up. But back then, that would have been a lethal blow, you know?

Speaker 3 (29:55)
Jeez, man, you thought enough to worry about vampires are gonna fall off a cart, right? ⁓

Speaker 2 (30:02)
So the first thing that we hear about with Arnold is that people see his ghost wandering at night. This is a revenant, right? And then locals have start to suspect that he's becoming a vampire, that he's going to return in like full physical form to start prey on the living. So they dig him up and what do they find? They find that he's not decomposing. There's blood around his mouth. His hair and nails are growing. And then, you know, they go in, they stake him in the heart.

and they say that he groaned audibly. So course, they rip him out of the ground and burn him to ashes as well. ⁓ But interestingly enough, despite all these measures, deaths continue in his village near Belgrade over the next several months. And the story goes that he had already infected lots of people with the vampire curse before he was exhumed and taken care of. So of course there's another whole round of bodies being exhumed.

And even executions that follow his death. It's a lot. It's a lot. All the corpses are also found with like fresh blood, flexible limbs, minimal decay and staking decapitation and burning were all used in this case. So this episode has what they call official documentation. Now that came later in 1732 and it is called the Visum e Repertum, Seen and Discovered.

Speaker 3 (31:02)
Wow, right

Speaker 2 (31:29)
This was a formal report written by a military surgeon named Johann Fluckinger. And he personally examined several of the bodies. He records findings. And then this is published and circulated across Europe. Yes, this provides scientific validation. Scientific validation that vampires are real. And it was taken.

Speaker 3 (31:44)
That's gotta scare the crap out of people.

Speaker 2 (31:55)
very seriously by military, by governments, by the church. Like everybody takes this scientific report like to heart.

Speaker 3 (32:04)
I mean, at this point, why wouldn't they? I mean, that's kind of where they've built their entire civilization on, you know, the advice of people like that. if they're saying, vampire. Exactly. Yeah. If you get one of the talking heads goes on TV right now and I'll tread lightly there. And they say there's vampires out. People can tend to believe that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (32:13)
Are serious?

Yeah, absolutely. So in addition to Peter and Arnold, many different regions start documenting vampire exhumation and rituals. And these are often written down by priests and government officials, people that everyone would have respected at that time. And it's definitely known that Bram Stoker studied these vampire cases when he was researching Dracula.

Speaker 3 (32:46)
I'm

sure. mean, a lot of that stuff rings true in the story. Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (32:52)
Absolutely.

So from here, we have a huge vampire hysteria going on throughout Europe. Did you want me to pause because there's a siren behind?

Speaker 3 (33:01)
No, honestly, that is the greatest timing. That is totally staying in because he said, like, there was this craze and then all of sudden he saw

Speaker 2 (33:10)
Zygmunt's go off all around me.

Speaker 3 (33:13)
That is serendipity at its finest. Please, yes, continue.

Speaker 2 (33:18)
So in the 17th century, it's not just about fearing death, it's about fearing that the grave can't hold people. And both the Catholic and Eastern Orthodox churches become deeply involved in this phenomenon. They issue formal guidance on how to handle vampires. There are exorcisms, they teach people proper Christian burials, and then in extreme cases, they even participate in decapitations and body burning.

than the Eastern Orthodox Church, places like Serbia, Bulgaria, Greece. ⁓ The clergy will work with villagers to deal with vampires. They will bless graves. They perform rituals to lay the dead to rest. They even authorize destruction of vampires. And the Orthodox tradition has even deeper fears about these creatures. And they're more accepting of the idea that the undead are dangerous and real.

Speaker 3 (34:11)
Hmm.

Speaker 2 (34:13)
Right around this time, also have the Age of Enlightenment starting. This is a headbutt against...

Speaker 3 (34:19)
Yeah,

I would think so, sure.

Speaker 2 (34:21)
The age of enlightenment is beginning of science. It's when the scientific method is born and people really start embracing science over superstition. And in the vampire story, that's a big deal. So there are lot of intellectuals in enlightenment times that weigh in on vampires as well as witches and werewolves. So Voltaire, who everybody's heard of, wrote about vampires in 1764 in his

Philosophical dictionary. He writes, I'm going to just read it. Okay. basically he's making fun of vampires. He believes they are a thing of human ignorance and that these people really just need to be more scientific.

and stop being so ridiculous.

Speaker 3 (35:20)
Right. He's, he's, he's definitely got the pinky up as he's drinking his tea. Absolutely ridiculous. How dare they. ⁓

Speaker 1 (35:29)
yeah.

Speaker 2 (35:30)
It sounds a bit condescending.

Speaker 3 (35:33)
It

is, yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, of course you're in the age of enlightenment, so you're going to have those intellectual types at that point that are... They can lean that way.

Speaker 2 (35:39)
yes. ⁓

So another enlightenment thinker was Dom Augustin Calmet. He was a French Benedictine monk and he wrote the Treatise on Apparitions of Spirits and Vampires or Revenants. And this was a serious analysis of vampire reports. He did not deny that vampires existed, but he suggested there could be natural causes such as a disease that causes vampirism. So.

Speaker 3 (35:56)
See you.

Speaker 2 (36:10)
He didn't really make fun of vampires, but he just said we should look for a reason this could happen.

Speaker 3 (36:18)
That makes sense because at this point we've had some historical references that this kind of thing was taking place So yeah, you can't just overlook that so that possible right there's probably an explanation right what what medical or what? Environmental thing is causing ⁓

Speaker 2 (36:37)
Right. ⁓ So why was there so much vampire hysteria at this time in the 1700s? There were real events and they were fueled by disease, loss of death. ⁓ They were spread through newspapers, very official reports, the church, right? Right, yeah. And then ⁓ the enlightenment thinkers making fun of them actually gives it more fuel.

You know, because even if you're giving something negative attention, it's still attention. Yeah, and we go from these local superstitions to like an entire continent and sort of embracing the idea of the vampire phenomenon. And it sort of lays the groundwork for the entry into the Gothic, which is right around the corner. So here we are now, we're in Gothic times. are starting what, well, the Victorian era is starting a little later.

Speaker 3 (37:26)
So cool.

Speaker 2 (37:34)
but more like Edwardian times. And Western Europeans are reading these gruesome reports and then they begin to romanticize the vampire. They begin to kind of turn it into an anti-hero. And the original vampire was a monster of a village, to be clear. And it was not a creature you found in your parlor. But this begins to change.

So the very first one that I could find that was sort of notable was The Bride of Corneth. It was a gothic poem from 1797 by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and is about a young man who meets a ghostly bride and she turns out to be undead. It doesn't work out.

It doesn't work out. Spoiler alert, doesn't work out. ⁓ But she speaks very mournfully about being forced into a convent against her will. And ⁓ the poem sort of ties love into a tragic fate. And there's a lot of sexual repression in it. And they talk a lot about death, obviously. But this is one of those early female vampiric figures that we're going to see more of.

Speaker 3 (38:26)
Go figure.

Speaker 2 (38:51)
So the next really big piece of Gothic vampire lore is by John Polidori. It's from 1819 and it is The Vampire. This is the first fully realized vampire story in English literature. And it's like a novella and the character is Lord Ruthven. He is aristocratic. He is calculating and cold-hearted.

And he preys on young women in high society. He is a very sophisticated upper-class predator. And he is a huge departure from these like bloated, like zombie type monsters that we've seen before. This story was wildly popular. People went crazy for it. And it introduced the idea of the seductive upper-class vampire.

Speaker 3 (39:43)
Okay. Yeah. I mean, there's all the tropes right there. It's like the early twilight.

Speaker 2 (39:47)
Yes!

Speaker 3 (39:49)
The early twilight.

Speaker 2 (39:50)
It's like

Edward Cullen, but in the 1890s. So our next... It is. It is.

Speaker 3 (39:53)
Yep. Exactly.

That guy was washing with too much Sparkle Suds.

Speaker 1 (40:01)
You

Speaker 2 (40:03)
So ⁓ our next important vampire is Varney the vampire, which sounds ridiculous, but Varney is the name. Yes, indeed. ⁓ He was a penny dreadful. And this is not to be confused with the Showtime series that had vampires and it was gothic and very excellent. ⁓ Varney the vampire was from an actual penny dreadful, which was like ⁓ a serialized book form that were super cheap and everybody could get them, right? So he becomes ⁓

Speaker 3 (40:30)
Okay, yeah.

Speaker 2 (40:33)
important because his story is long and everybody has access to it because everybody can afford a penny dreadful.

Speaker 3 (40:40)
That like a comic book kind of thing? Kind of like that.

Speaker 2 (40:42)
Kind of like that, yeah.

So it was first, it was published 1845 to 1847 as a serial form. This is 50 years before Dracula. Now we don't know if it was written by James Malcolm Reimer or Thomas Peckett Prest or both. Scholars have no idea if one or both of them wrote it or if that was, you know, a non-diplom, like nobody knows, it's kind of lost to time. But their entire story ran for over 200 chapters.

and more than 667,000 words. To put that, that's lot. To put that in the contrast.

Speaker 3 (41:22)
Pro. I was gonna say that's a thing we prolific for even now.

Speaker 2 (41:26)
Oh, we would never look at that now. Dracula by Bram Stoker was 160,000 words-ish and a modern horror novel is usually 70 to 100,000 words and a modern reader will not look at anything longer. A lot of publishers think that the novella is coming back into style because people have less time and shorter attention spans. So yeah, that is very long. Varnie's story was long.

Speaker 3 (41:53)
No kidding.

Speaker 2 (41:54)
So Sir Francis Varney was an aristocratic vampire with a mansion, impeccable manners, and a macabre melancholy about him. He was tall, pale, he had sharp teeth, and long fingernails. He is one of the first vampires that we know of with fangs.

Speaker 3 (42:10)
There we go.

Okay.

Speaker 2 (42:18)
And he often feels remorse for what his condition makes him do, like I drank blood. ⁓ He's kind of a villain, but he's also one of the most important early anti-heroes. Now, when I say that I'm not talking about Taylor Swift, ⁓ I just want to be clear. She did not invent the anti-hero. ⁓ The anti-hero is not a villain. ⁓ It's someone who has some negative traits or they could be villainous.

Speaker 1 (42:33)
you

Speaker 2 (42:45)
but they're ultimately a sympathetic character on the side of good, even if they have more questionable means to their ends. Villains on the other hand are just bad. They're just bad to the bone. Whew, it's windy here. That door just slammed.

Speaker 1 (43:03)
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:05)
Do you

Speaker 2 (43:07)
I don't, but I do know that this house has a few hauntings. Usually the cat's the only one anybody ever sees. I'm cool with that. Yeah.

Speaker 3 (43:15)
Okay.

Speaker 1 (43:20)
stuff.

Speaker 2 (43:21)
Yeah, I'm good with that. Maybe they're interested in the vampire story.

Speaker 3 (43:26)
mean, it's really riveting. mean, there's a lot of great stuff in there.

Speaker 2 (43:30)
Right. So, the plot for Varney, by the way, when I was practicing this, I chatted with a friend and she's like, you know, it's good that you mentioned Taylor Swift because I think she's a vampire and that's the secret to her longevity and not aging and perhaps being able to compel people to continue to love her music through their whole lives. And I was like, maybe. I mean, it's theory. could go with it.

Speaker 3 (43:51)
I mean, you never know. I mean,

popular for a very long time. sure. Paul Rudd's another one.

Speaker 2 (43:58)
Absolutely. Yeah.

Yeah, right? Maybe they're also vampires. never age us.

Speaker 3 (44:05)
Hey, he really doesn't. He doesn't.

Speaker 1 (44:08)
So I was.

Speaker 2 (44:09)
tried

to figure out a way to distill the plot from Varnie the Vampire. So the story begins when Varnie attacks a young woman named Flora Bannerworth in her sleep and he leaves the two marks on her neck. This is the first time for that, by the way. So her family tries to figure out the mystery and Varnie's like all over the place and sometimes he's helping them, sometimes he's threatening them. There are mob chases and sea voyages and crypts and duels and...

escapes and disguises and he fakes his death multiple times. ⁓ Eventually, he dies by throwing himself into Mount Vesuvius.

Speaker 3 (44:45)
Wow. That'll get the job done.

Speaker 2 (44:48)
Yeah. I can't think of a more dramatic closure.

Speaker 3 (44:52)
I'm

like, I'm going to end it all.

Speaker 2 (44:56)
Just

like that. ⁓ He was the first major vampire character in the English language with interior emotions. Varney talks about his feelings, his regret, and he is full of existential suffering, which is a thing we see with vampires again and again. ⁓ The things that we still associate with vampires that came from Varney, the bites on the neck, the hypnotic influence to compel victims, ⁓ regeneration,

like being able to regenerate himself. And the Gothic settings. This is the beginning of the true Gothic vampire setting. We have mansions and like foggy nights and like dark passageways. ⁓ without Varney, Dracula would have probably been a very different story. I think it's sad that Varney's not popular anymore. Like nobody knows this, you know, nobody knows this story.

Speaker 3 (45:40)
Yeah.

And the gothic part of the whole, I mean, between Rom Stoker and I mean, any lore that you know of, especially now the gothic, not only just architecture, but everything behind it, it is so synonymous with vampiric. Right. The cape. then like, if you ever go, I was an art major for awhile, so I had to learn this stuff, but yeah, look at some of the gothic period. You look at these.

really interesting sweeping structures with like beasts and hands and faces and stuff that, know, that's very demonstrative and very, I mean, you can really tell. Gargoyles. Yeah, like gargoyles. Gargoyles and stuff. you're right. It's sad because that is really the iconography behind, you know, this whole story for me anyway.

Speaker 2 (46:39)
Absolutely, absolutely. ⁓ know, some of the experts who I read about who said that Varney's not popular anymore because it was a serial, because it was a series and it was really long. And if you put it all in one book, it's like this big and that modern audiences simply won't sit and read something that long. That's a shame. You know, it's true. We don't, unless we're forced to for school or something.

And then there's the fact that there are contradicting origin stories for Varney. ⁓ It begins with him being an ordinary man. And during the English Civil War, he betrays his son to save himself. And then he's of course, racked with guilt because his son dies. And so he commits suicide. And this is considered such a grave sin that he is condemned to becoming a vampire, to being undead. ⁓

He didn't choose it, right? It's like the vampire's curse. But then there's the other story that gets published in the serial. guess they forgot and they're like, shit, we're going to do something different now. ⁓ Yeah, right. ⁓ It goes into like the scientific experiment gone wrong kind of thing. And they say that Varney was subjected in his depression after his son's death. didn't commit suicide.

Speaker 3 (47:45)
It's a multiverse thing.

Speaker 2 (47:58)
He was subjected to alchemical experiments meant to cure his negative emotions. And the experiments backfired and he accidentally became a vampire instead of getting over his depression.

Speaker 3 (48:10)
Blame it on alchemy.

Speaker 2 (48:12)
Yeah, right. And that's a real medical backfire right there.

Speaker 3 (48:16)
Yeah, no kidding. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (48:18)
Like, I meant to cure your depression, but instead you became a vampire.

Speaker 1 (48:21)
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (48:22)
I created an as fraught to patient zero. Peace.

Speaker 2 (48:26)
I'm

Speaker 1 (48:29)
⁓ man.

Speaker 2 (48:30)
So, but it is interesting that this whole science as villain is part of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein too. It's it's not unknown in the monster category. My favorite quote that I read in the little snippets I read of Varney was this one. The curse, the curse, ⁓ misery, thou art indeed my portion. So it's just seems so melodramatic and like deeply feeling. I really liked that.

Speaker 3 (48:59)
That is really good. That is cool. I'm a Shakespearean in a way. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (49:04)
So our next vampire is a woman from 1872. The, she predates Dracula by more than two decades. Her name is Carmilla. The author is Sheridan Lafannieu. And this female vampire is elegant and very influential and sensual and tragic, of course. She is, how do I say? Well, it's more of that fear of a powerful feminine care.

Gotcha. So, I put the reading part at the beginning on this one. ⁓

I could not resist it nor deny the strange fascination she inspired in me. So you might've already caught on that this is a story about two women. It is narrated by Laura, who is a lovely young woman living in a remote Austrian castle with her widowed father. A mysterious carriage accident near their home brings Carmilla into their care. Carmilla and Laura form a very intense friendship.

And it even crosses into Laura's dreams. It's emotional and it definitely bends those romantic boundaries, which at that time in history would have been a lot.

Speaker 3 (50:42)
sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (50:44)
So in the meantime, of course, a mysterious illness is spreading through the countryside and local girls are found dead. They're just like dropping like flies, right? ⁓ Laura herself begins wasting away and she is just having these more and more terrifying dreams. And of course we slowly get the idea reading it of who Carmilla is and what she is. Her affection for Laura becomes more overtly romantic.

and not just friendly and Victorian readers would have ⁓ recognized the taboo of this lesbian love affair. It would have been considered deviant at the time. Now, modern readers often see Carmilla as sort of like a queer foundational work in the pantheon of ⁓ writing and not just Gothic, not just vampire, but also in that category too. And it acknowledges that there are

Speaker 3 (51:20)
Right.

Speaker 2 (51:41)
you know, ⁓ ways of feeling attraction outside of the heterosexual norm. And of course, this is something the Victorians would have thought was very dangerous. Carmilla's character resists control, doesn't listen to men. She moves where she wants and she chooses her prey freely. Laura by contrast is a good Victorian daughter. She is obedient, passive and sort of like sweet and dreamy. This reflects the culture

cultural anxiety they had about women who would not fit into a traditional role.

Speaker 3 (52:17)
Hmm.

Speaker 2 (52:19)
And during the attacks by Carmilla on Laura, Laura doesn't know if she's awake or dreaming. And she starts to take on these like fever dreams thinking that it's not really happening. Maybe it's really happening, but Carmilla bites over the heart, not on the neck.

Speaker 3 (52:35)
Hmm.

Speaker 2 (52:36)
So Carmilla is very pale, she's beautiful, she sleeps in a tomb and avoids daylight. And these are all things that we see later.

Speaker 3 (52:45)
Yep. And there's a lot of Anne Rice tones in that.

Speaker 2 (52:49)
Yeah. absolutely. I'm Anne Rice was familiar with that story.

Speaker 3 (52:51)
Yeah, you a lot of that.

because obviously, and I know we'll probably get to the whole of Stott, and that relationship obviously had a lot of homosexual overtones and different things of that nature. Influence. Right, influence. Every time he says something like this, it totally sounds like Amherst.

Speaker 2 (53:12)
Yes, yes, but many, many hundreds of years before. So actually maybe only, let me think, only a hundred years before actually. was the year on that? Hang on. me double check. 1872. then yeah, Lestat was the 1970s. So yeah, only a hundred years before, but wildly different time.

Speaker 3 (53:16)
Right, yeah, no kidding.

Time. 1872.

Yeah, for sure.

Speaker 2 (53:37)
So when we get into Dracula, we're gonna say for sure that ⁓ Stoker took all of these earlier ideas and sort of made them one. He was the first person to like sort of structure his narrative very tightly and modernize this myth. And he added technology, something that we did not see in any of these previous ones and urban settings, making it more today. Dracula himself,

Speaker 3 (54:01)
Yes.

Speaker 2 (54:03)
combines the folklore monster with the aristocrat into like a fully realized beast. And so with no further ado, let's talk about Brom Stoker, the man behind the count. So he was born on November 8th in 1847. And I'm going to say this wrong. Kalntarf is a suburb of Dublin. So he was a Scorpio, which makes sense because he's, you he wrote Dracula. ⁓

Speaker 3 (54:15)
You're

Speaker 2 (54:33)
His full name was Abraham Stoker. So he went by Brahm. And until around the age of seven, he was really weak and sickly and mostly confined to his bed with some unspecified illness. He was very fragile during his childhood and the medical condition is unknown. It might've been rickets, which is a vitamin D deficiency. It could have been some kind of thing like bronchitis or asthma. It could have been something neurological. The truth is we'll never know.

A lot of people speculate, but whatever reason, he was a sick kid, spent most of his childhood in bed, couldn't play. yeah, yeah. For sure. But his early life was defined by this physical weakness and these long periods of isolation. And it gave him a lot of time to think. And a lot of experts credit this time with him being able to create these like fantastic worlds in his mind.

Speaker 3 (55:30)
Yeah, you see that a lot with, um, with some of these really long, uh, books and, different things like, uh, Tolkien and stuff like that. I think even he had medical issues so that he had all that time to kind of develop in and really just kind of architect this incredibly huge planet. know, mind has to occupy itself for sure.

Speaker 2 (55:54)
So he has some of the themes in his life that you see in Dracula. Blood is a symbol of life, that liminal space between life and death, and illness and wasting away. Now he does become a robust adult and ⁓ he eventually gets to Trinity College in Dublin. He excels in athletics. He becomes a rower and a weightlifter. This is like a huge transformation, right? And ⁓ he later becomes a civil servant in Dublin Castle. He works as a clerk.

And then he gets into theater. He starts writing theater reviews for the Dublin newspaper and then moves to London in 1878. This is a transformative year because that's when he starts working at the ⁓ Lyceum Theater. I think that's right. Theater. He becomes the business manager for the renowned actor, Henry Irving, and he gets married that year.

He works as the manager for the theater for 27 years. And many scholars believe that Dracula is based on Henry Irving. Henry Irving and Stoker are really close. Many scholars also believe their relationship was not just friendly, that it could have possibly been romantic, but we have no actual evidence or writing to say that that is true.

So Stoker had some amazing contemporaries, ⁓ Osterweil, Mark Twain, Tennyson. ⁓ He becomes very well connected. He exchanges letters with Walt Whitman. Yeah. And then he also hires a woman named Pamela Coleman Smith to do black and white drawings for his book, The Layer of the White Worm. You should know that from Tarot. She illustrates the Rider-Waite Tarot deck. So all of these people are people in his life, right?

Speaker 3 (57:50)
Man, talk about being in the right place. I know, right? Yeah.

Speaker 2 (57:53)
Seriously.

Later in his life, he becomes a lecturer, essayist and newspaper critic. He talks about arts, literature and being Irish. He has written several non-fiction works as well. Now he marries in 1878, a woman named Florence Balcombe. ⁓ She was a noted beauty and was previously courted by Oscar Wilde, but that didn't work out. mean, anyway, their marriage is described

Brom and ⁓ Florence's marriage is described as distant, ⁓ especially as time goes by. They have one son, his name is Irving. He's named after Henry Irving, of course. ⁓ He becomes a doctor and spends his later years preserving his father's literary legacy. So though Dracula is his most important work, Stoker wrote 12 other novels, tons of short stories. ⁓

Sadly, after Irving's death, Henry Irving, the actor, in 1905, Stoker's whole life kind of takes a dive. He financially isn't doing as well. That was his, you know, his whole deal, right? ⁓ And then his health declines and he passes in 1912. At that point, Dracula is no longer popular. It has not yet become the cultural phenomenon that we think of today.

Speaker 3 (59:17)
Interesting.

Speaker 2 (59:18)
He dies in London. He was only 64 years old. The official cause is listed as exhaustion. I'm like, yikes, that's scary because I get pretty tired.

Speaker 3 (59:31)
I'm thinking to myself, I'm like, we just went on a very, long ⁓ paranormal investigation and I felt pretty tired.

Speaker 2 (59:37)
Yeah, you watch out for that exhaustion. So experts think that he probably died from multiple strokes and or syphilis. Nobody knows for sure. Remember, syphilis was a problem back then. He is buried in London. So it took him seven years to read, I'm sorry, to write and research Dracula. It is his master lifetime work. And he had a lot of

Speaker 3 (59:47)
EW

Sure, yeah.

Speaker 2 (1:00:07)
really interesting inspirations for this book. We already talked about like Varney and Carmilla and the Eastern European remnant stories, but also of course, Vlad the Impaler. This was a real 15th century Prince and he was famous for his very brutal methods of punishments, impalements especially, and his fierce defense against the Ottoman invasion. ⁓ His nickname of course was Dracula, meaning son of the dragon or devil. And

There we have Count Dracula's name. The original title of the book was The Undead, Dracula's, and they changed, he changed it to Dracula, which is way better, of course. Absolutely. Way better.

Speaker 3 (1:00:47)
yeah.

And I'm thinking about, and I know this is me Hollywoodizing it, but even in the Gary Oldman version. Right, the very beginning, you see just how violent, you know, his depiction of Vlad the Impaler was, you know, you kind of see, granted it's obviously taken a ton of Hollywood license, but you see just how brutal this guy yeah, if you ever read stories about it, it's horrifying.

Speaker 2 (1:00:57)
That's a good one.

yes, there are lots of documentaries out there about Vlad the Impaler. And yeah, I did watch one in preparation for this and I was just like, whoa.

Speaker 3 (1:01:23)
Yeah, it's hard to, it's hard to see her. ⁓

Speaker 2 (1:01:26)
⁓

Yes. So there was also a ⁓ writer named Emily Gerard who wrote The Land Beyond the Forest. And this was a nonfiction travel memoir about Transylvania. ⁓ Sounds like a super obscure book even then. It talks about Transylvanian culture, folklore, and superstition and is written by a Scottish woman. At that time.

Speaker 3 (1:01:50)
Hey!

Speaker 2 (1:01:52)
It was the only English language source offering insight into Transylvania. Yep. It has full beliefs about the dead returning from the grave, improper burials, staking, burning, using garlic to deter vampires and restless spirits sound like a good inspiration.

Speaker 3 (1:01:57)
Hmm, interesting.

Yeah, absolutely. Is that the first like of using garlic?

Speaker 2 (1:02:19)
Was that That I could find, Yep.

Speaker 3 (1:02:21)
Yeah.

mean, wasn't Van Helsing supposedly... I thought it was Scottish, wasn't it? No, no. Oh, that's Dutch, right. Okay. He's Dutch. I was thinking of something else here.

Speaker 2 (1:02:26)
No, no, he's Dutch.

Dutch

people are super practical. the perfect ⁓ nationality for the character.

Speaker 3 (1:02:36)
Yeah,

you're right. And you would think, Van, I mean, come on. I always wondered how the garlic came in. So that's interesting.

Speaker 2 (1:02:42)
Now you know garlic is delicious by the way

Speaker 3 (1:02:45)
It is. Yes, it is. Yeah, I wish that my stomach liked it a little bit more. well, you know how it goes. eat too much of stuff and anyway, I tend to get a little bit lodged right in this general vicinity. So, you know, it is what it is.

Speaker 2 (1:02:50)
no!

Well, Dracula was rooted in real belief systems. It was not all made up by Bram Stoker. I think that that makes it, you anytime there's like these like pieces of truth in a fiction, makes it more believable. Yeah. And the other super interesting thing is that the Dracula book is called epistolary style writing. It's structured as a series of journal entries, letters, and newspaper clippings. It's kind of like before we had found footage horror, that's what it would be.

Right? In a novel form.

Speaker 3 (1:03:37)
The, the, ⁓ gosh, his name escapes me, but it's when he gets sent to, his home. Parker. Thank you. It's when he gets sent to his home and he goes through all that. So you're right. It's all from his perspective in letters going back. That's right. Okay. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (1:03:54)
So the other thing that's really interesting about Dracula is that, know, timing, timing, timing, it came out in the midst of the tuberculosis crisis. And it was also called consumption where people would sort of fade away. They would be coughing up blood and it just sort of felt like they were drained of life. And this is a big part of the success of Dracula in its own time. ⁓ Consumption was pulmonary tuberculosis and it was a real disease and it was not understood in this time period.

⁓ it, people felt that the illness sort of consumed someone from the inside out. It included extreme weight loss. Victims would be gaunt, skeletal, almost ghost-like, ⁓ pale skin, ⁓ persistent coughing, often coughing up blood, sunken eyes, pink cheeks and red lips, as well as progressive weakness and fatigue, including a sensitivity to light.

So people with tuberculosis looked almost ethereal and faded and like they were like a living ghost.

Speaker 3 (1:04:55)
Right?

Speaker 2 (1:04:57)
It would happen to whole groups of families. ⁓ from there, people assumed that it was somehow linked to vampires.

Speaker 3 (1:05:07)
Yeah, I mean that logic checks out. Yeah, I didn't know about the sensitivity to light and no I didn't either. That's a new yeah I wonder if that's just due to the fact that You know you feel miserable. You don't like bright lights

Speaker 2 (1:05:21)
I have a headache. don't want light either.

Speaker 3 (1:05:23)
Exactly.

I forgot what that neurological pathway is, but I think that tuberculosis obviously has some impact to that. Yeah, I knew about the others, but that's the first time I've heard that, about the sensitivity to light.

Speaker 2 (1:05:35)
Um, so I do have a historic case for this from Rhode Island in 1892. And it is said that this was studied by, um, Brom Stoker as well. Mercy Brown was a 19 year old girl who died of tuberculosis in Exeter, Rhode Island. Um, her mother and sister had already died and her brother, Edwin was sick, but they believed that mercy was to blame and that she was rising from the grave each night to drain Edwin's blood and life force. So you know what they did, right?

Speaker 3 (1:06:04)
Of course.

Speaker 2 (1:06:05)
They exhumed her body. found it unnaturally well preserved. Now remember, it was also very cold at the time she died.

Speaker 3 (1:06:12)
That's right. Frozen ground.

Speaker 2 (1:06:14)
Right?

Her heart still contained liquid blood and this was proof to them that she was undead. So they burned her heart and her liver and they mixed the ashes with water and they gave it to her brother Edwin as a cure for his illness.

Speaker 3 (1:06:31)
Mmm.

Speaker 2 (1:06:32)
Edwin does pass away. Edwin does die. Yeah. ⁓

Speaker 3 (1:06:39)
Why

the liver though? mean the heart. Okay, I get it. But why the liver? I don't

Speaker 2 (1:06:44)
I don't,

I'm not sure why anybody would have thought that was a good cure, but I corpse medicine was a real thing.

Speaker 3 (1:06:50)
Yeah. yeah. Anyway.

Speaker 2 (1:06:55)
So yes, the whole tuberculosis thing sort of became romanticized during the Victorian era, especially women with tuberculosis were seen as tragically beautiful. They would be thin and pale and delicate and doomed. And that's just, ⁓ so Gothic and wondrous to those folks. ⁓ Consumptive women were kind of portrayed as angelic and sensual. ⁓ don't know. I mean, that's not my thing, but ⁓

Speaker 3 (1:07:24)
They

didn't feel that way. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (1:07:26)
I'm sure they were literally wasting away and it was sexy, but it kind of becomes like a beauty standard.

Speaker 3 (1:07:34)
Right. And it's even seen kind of traditionally now with some of the stereotypical goth people of being very gone. even the models and the runway models, I mean, they've got to basically not eat. yes.

Speaker 2 (1:07:49)
Now there have been some improvements in runway fashion, I mean, sometimes they're picking more athletic looking women now, which is great.

Speaker 3 (1:07:56)
Right.

Thank you. Thank you Lee for so long.

Speaker 2 (1:07:59)
Yeah.

So long, were very skinny, very unhealthy.

Speaker 3 (1:08:04)
Yes, unhealthy.

Speaker 2 (1:08:06)
So yeah, so you have to remember too, like we didn't really have germ theory yet at that time. So it just seemed logical that it would be vampires causing consumption or tuberculosis. So it's, yeah, it doesn't necessarily make sense. ⁓ So I want to touch also on another very real part of Dracula. And that is that it is a huge exploration of sexuality and gender.

And the people have questioned over time if Stoker himself was bisexual, which would not have been socially acceptable in his lifetime, but there are definitely innuendos within the book about both Jonathan Harker and Renfield. And then we have the two women. And you know, I love talking about women in history. So let's talk briefly about Lucy and Mina. So in the book, Lucy is the very sexually open woman. She's proposed to by three men and says, I want to marry them all.

Speaker 3 (1:08:56)
Fuck it.

Speaker 2 (1:09:05)
and I was like, you know, you don't, but, no, you don't really want that. ⁓ but you know, you see in the story that she becomes the one who's punished. Whereas Mina is the ideal Victorian woman. is smart, but chaste and moral. And she always stays true to Jonathan Harker. So, ⁓ they're very different ideals of womanhood. And Lucy is kind of considered the modern woman. Whereas Mina is, you know, ⁓

Van Helsing actually describes her as having a woman's heart and a man's brain. And this is considered a more desirable Victorian woman. Let's see, Lucy's very flirtatious. ⁓ And then as soon as she becomes a vampire, she becomes even more erotic. Like she is described as growing more voluptuous. And Mina on the other hand, never actually becomes a vampire and is cured.

Speaker 3 (1:09:42)
Right.

Speaker 2 (1:10:03)
So it's this kind of like a moral victory in the story.

Speaker 3 (1:10:06)
Right. Punishment versus. Yeah. And I thought they captured it really, really well in the Gary Holman. They did. That Lucy, that was amazing. Yeah. And of course, again, I hate Hollywoodizing it, but Johnny Depp's daughter did a fantastic job as Mina too. I thought that was. ⁓ and the Nosferatu. Yeah. I'm sure maybe we'll talk about it, but I thought, I thought her depiction of it was a little bit more, I don't know, kind of tragic.

Speaker 2 (1:10:15)
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (1:10:35)
than the wine on a rider part, but anyway, I really did enjoy that.

Speaker 2 (1:10:40)
So the other major theme to mention in Dracula is science versus superstition, which I did already talk about. So there's technology in this novel, which we don't see in any previous novel, typewriters, phonographs, trains, telegrams, is kind of like Dracula is the monster of the past and he's sort of hell bent on stopping progress, right? Technology is part of what Van Helsing uses to defeat him. So ⁓ Professor Van Helsing is Dutch, he's Dutch.

Speaker 1 (1:10:56)
you

Speaker 2 (1:11:09)
And he's not just a vampire hunter. Like I said, I feel like the vampire hunter is a whole different story, but Van Helsing is sort of like the science versus faith, reason versus folklore kind of character here. And he's ridiculously educated in this book. He's a doctor of medicine, a philosopher, a metaphysician, and a lawyer. I don't know how he had time to do anything in his life, but study.

Speaker 3 (1:11:37)
Yeah, I know. Great.

Speaker 2 (1:11:40)
It's a lot, it's a lot. But he's the first one who diagnoses Lucy as a vampire and he accepts that this is a supernatural cause to her illness. ⁓ He believes that true science must be open to mystery and to the unseen and what's not understood. And he's the one who eventually stakes Lucy's body, right? ⁓ He kind of organizes the pursuit of Dracula.

Speaker 3 (1:12:04)
Yeah.

Speaker 2 (1:12:09)
and he protects Mina in the end. So it's important because he legitimizes the supernatural to the skeptical male characters that kind of become his like vampire hunting posse. ⁓

Speaker 3 (1:12:22)
Right. And

I think he grounds a lot of stuff in this story. does, yeah.

Speaker 2 (1:12:26)
He does. You know, ⁓ there's a lot of great Van Helsing, ⁓ like fan fictions as well. And you know, the whole, like I said, the whole vampire hunter ⁓ category becomes huge because of Van Helsing. I mean, who doesn't love Hugh Jackman as Van Helsing?

Speaker 3 (1:12:44)
Yeah, I I know some family members of yours that are quite fond of them. Love. Love, C Jackman.

Speaker 2 (1:12:52)
My mother. Van Helsing is like, know, stuff of dreams, ⁓ excellent. Yep. That's, that's very good. ⁓ kudos, mom.

Speaker 3 (1:12:56)
Yes. Her mom. My mother.

Speaker 2 (1:13:06)
The legacy of Dracula, the most important part of this whole thing. Dracula did not create the vampire, obviously, but this character gave the vampire immortality in print, on screen, in culture. He revolutionized the vampire myth in profound ways and kind of reshaped the folklore into a template that still sticks even today. ⁓ It was like a reimagined vampire for the modern times. He went from being a peasant monster

to an aristocratic predator. And we still do that today. We have the vampires, the metaphor for sex and power. Before he was like a metaphor for disease and plague. Yeah. Quite. Yeah, yes, quite enough, Grace. And now he's like the alluring, dangerous, intimate monster and not the one that's like a bloated zombie. has a narrative blueprint.

Speaker 3 (1:13:59)
and corpse.

Speaker 2 (1:14:05)
⁓ before these were like oral traditions and all over the place or like the serial fiction, the story doesn't even say the same. Now there's a blueprint. This is the vampire story. Check. He creates basically the same vampire rule book that we still use. They drink human blood. They have to sleep in their native earth. Remember the Demeter, the ship, like the boxes of dirt. He could shape shift. He could turn into a bat or a mist.

Speaker 3 (1:14:15)
Right?

Speaker 2 (1:14:33)
Superhuman strength and speed, think Edward Cullen. He can hypnotize you. has mesmeric powers to sort of like control people. Garlic. Garlic. Repelled by crucifixes and holy items. ⁓ Must be invited into the house. Here we are at the Lost Boys again. You're the man of the house and I'm coming in until you invite me.

The fear of sunlight. Now in the actual Dracula book, he's only weakened and injured by sunlight. He doesn't killed by it. Right. The stake through the heart becomes like a permanent piece of this lore beheading as well. The creation of more vampires by biting and ⁓ the further he gets from home, the less powerful he is. He also starts the no reflection in the mirrors. This is because at that time in history, mirrors were made of who knows?

Speaker 1 (1:15:21)
Thanks.

Speaker 2 (1:15:34)
Now pure silver.

Speaker 3 (1:15:37)
we talked about that recently with the werewolf.

Speaker 2 (1:15:39)
silver. Silver was a metal that could be used to fight the supernatural at that time.

Speaker 3 (1:15:46)
I feel like I just got an F.

Speaker 2 (1:15:51)
Nowadays mirrors are made of plastic. So I guess vampires should open them. yes. And also the control over animals is the final piece of this new template. So, you know, how bats and wolves and things will obey Dracula. That's all from Bram Stoker. So all of this is thanks to this one book. Like I said, consolidates everything together.

Speaker 3 (1:16:14)
amazing.

Right. now it's the gold standard by which everything. Yeah, everything.

Speaker 2 (1:16:23)
Absolutely. So ⁓ I wanted to also, because it's always important to me to ⁓ explore other parts of the world. ⁓ Vampires are global. They did not just come from Europe. have, there are vampiric stories and creatures everywhere on earth. Literally every continent that's had people has vampire or vampiric stories. So I'll just hit a few because this could also be another like whole episode on its own.

So in China, there is the hopping vampire. This is a stiff, reanimated corpse that hops towards a victim to absorb its chi or life force. Interesting. Yes, they are created by improper burial. have greenish skin, very long fingernails, and they're very rigid. That's why they have to hop. They can't like just run. They're in rigor mortis, I guess. Yeah, no kidding. You can repel them with Taoist talismans, bells, mirrors, or sticky rice.

Speaker 3 (1:17:21)
Thanks.

Was that lined them up because they cough it? If you get stuck to it, right? It's like it's like a Spider-Man web.

I'm stupid, please continue.

Speaker 2 (1:17:36)
So in India, they have the Vatala, which is a sort of like ghoulish spirit that will go into a corpse and inhabit it and then will hang bat-like upside down from a tree in the cemetery. it feeds on people's fear and confusion. I think there are some of those in America right now. I'm kidding. They're often linked to sorcery. Apparently that's how you get them. And they also like riddles.

Speaker 3 (1:17:57)
Just a couple.

Speaker 2 (1:18:06)
They will punish you if you get their riddle wrong.

Speaker 3 (1:18:08)
Hmm. Go like trolls. Under the bridge.

Speaker 2 (1:18:11)
Kind of troll it.

It's interesting that they're mostly in cemeteries. Yeah. I would go other places because there's lots of places people are confused. Like hang out at a university or something.

Speaker 3 (1:18:26)
On a Thursday night or yeah Yeah, your toxicology in the blood though might be a little high, but that's okay

Speaker 2 (1:18:35)
Good, I mean, it's a supernatural creature.

Speaker 3 (1:18:37)
He's not gonna die from it, you know? Talk about contact. The corpse hanging upside, that's... Yeah. That is kind of wild, though.

Speaker 2 (1:18:45)
Right?

So in the Philippines, they have this especially terrifying thing called, I might say this wrong. So forgive me, get in advance. The man and Algal. I'm like I said, maybe wrong, but this is a female creature who separates her upper and lower body at night and sprouts bat wings to fly and hunt for her favorite food, which is the blood of fetuses or pregnant women.

Speaker 1 (1:19:11)
Ugh.

Speaker 3 (1:19:13)
Wow. Right? Um, it separates her body?

Speaker 2 (1:19:16)
⁓

yes, she, she takes her upper and lower bodies apart and leaves her legs so that she can fly around and hunt for fetuses and pregnant women to feed on their blood.

Speaker 3 (1:19:29)
Congratulations,

Speaker 1 (1:19:31)
Stop!

Speaker 2 (1:19:34)
I didn't come up with this.

Speaker 1 (1:19:36)
So

Speaker 2 (1:19:36)
There was a similar creature in Malaysian Indonesia called the Layak and her head detaches from her body but her intestines stay attached to the head. Yes, and she then flies through the night and also feeds on pregnant women and newborns.

Speaker 3 (1:19:48)
to her head?

What are they smoking over there? Mine.

Speaker 1 (1:20:01)
I

know

Speaker 2 (1:20:02)
But these stories go back really far in history. Like they're pre Islam. Like they're really old.

Speaker 3 (1:20:08)
Yeah. I mean, I know I'm making light of it, but I'm sure this was a very big thing in during that, the evolution of the stories and all these different things and what they've seen, but holy crap. Yeah. Detaching, first of all, just the detaching and flying with the top half of your body. But I can just imagine a head rolling around with like a large intestine hanging off the side of it. Yeah, that's creepy. That's like the worst fricking spider or octopus I could ever think of.

Speaker 2 (1:20:35)
It

is legitimately terrifying. I'm laughing, but it is awful sounding. ⁓ I did not send you any art of that. You're welcome.

Speaker 3 (1:20:40)
That's nice.

I appreciate that. We don't want that. And I will not try to find artwork on it. So, yeah, we'll just move right along.

Speaker 2 (1:20:51)
Yep. So next we're going to move to the Andes Mountains in South America where we have the pish taco. ⁓ This is a white ghoulish figure who feeds on body fat. ⁓

Speaker 3 (1:21:04)
That one can get it and have his number by any chance.

Speaker 1 (1:21:07)
⁓ I can use that.

Speaker 3 (1:21:11)
It's funny that his name's close to taco because I think that's where I've got most of this from.

Speaker 2 (1:21:17)
⁓ So they believe that this creature originated around the time that colonists arrived and they kind of symbolize fear of this other new type of person coming into the area and ⁓ Yeah, they they somehow feed on body fat from the indigenous

Yeah. In Brazil, we have the Chupador, not to be confused with the Chupacabra. This is a werewolf that is a blood sucker. Okay. So yeah. And then also there were a few other small tales I found throughout the Amazon basin of bat demons that could also drink the blood of villagers too.

So yeah, so in an Africa, I did find a creature called I might say this wrong. And again, I apologize from Ghana called the

Azaan bossam. This is a forest-dwelling creature that has iron teeth and hooks on its feet that hangs from trees and attacks at night sucking blood from people who are asleep.

Speaker 3 (1:22:24)
That's very bat like. is. Yeah, it is.

Speaker 2 (1:22:28)
It is. all across the world is, and of course there is Chupacabra from Puerto Rico. But that's a new story. That's from like the 1990s. But it is a vampiric goat sucker.

Speaker 3 (1:22:38)
Yeah, absolutely.

Speaker 2 (1:22:40)
So as you can see, the vampire story is from everywhere. Everybody has something vampiric in their culture, in their folklore, in their background. It's not just Dracula, but flying heads and bats and yeah.

Speaker 3 (1:22:58)
Nice callback. Yeah. No, what's crazy about it is we're talking about over a long period of time different cultures all over the place But yet so much of the same things kind of ring true throughout the entire yeah Well, something started started. Sure. Yeah. Yeah, of It it does make you think about You know, obviously you look at the factuals, you know with the science and everything and then you look at the lore But to think somewhere in the middle there is the reality of it

So we, there had to have been people that displayed these things, which is why, you know, all these different lures come about. But yeah, that's just wild to think that somewhere in the middle of there is a reality. I mean, there are certain mental illnesses there where people kind of go out of their head and they will attack people and try to eat them. So it's true. It's probably where it came, it came true.

Speaker 2 (1:23:54)
It's interesting though, because we don't really slot vampires in with cannibals. We just don't, you know?

Speaker 3 (1:24:02)
from

the masticating crazy man. The only thing they're really trying to get from us, I guess, is blood. So whereas otherwise, ⁓ a cannibal is actually eating the flesh and consuming the flesh, not just the blood. Right. I don't know which part scares me more, that fact or the fact that I actually know the difference between the two.

Speaker 2 (1:24:28)
Well, there's that.

Speaker 3 (1:24:31)
Yeah, there's that. Very interesting history, though.

Speaker 2 (1:24:35)
So I only have a few more things to hit and we'll cruise right through these. Cause I think that you're going to think some of this ending stuff is really extra fun. Cool. I wanted to make a list of the most notable vampires in literature. But I had to include film because in addition to Dracula and Carmilla and Varney that we've already discussed, Bela Lugosi gave an iconic performance as Dracula in 1931.

I thought it was definitely noteworthy. But right before that, of course, was Count Orlach and Nosferatu in 1922. He was not as sexy as Dracula by a long shot. He was kind of like ghoulish and had the long fingers. He was more like the plague carrying vampire that we saw from the older stories. And I think at this point, the vampires really become more cinematic.

Speaker 3 (1:25:25)
Sure. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (1:25:31)
than literary. There's definitely still books, but even when I was researching this, hadn't read them. had not even heard of them, but I had heard of the film vampires. Right. Yeah. So it became that they were the monster that dominated movies. And were more accessible than books to many people because they were cheaper and you didn't have to know how to read. And of course, many people know how to read now, but historically that wasn't true.

So ⁓ our next name is ⁓ Hammer Films, which is a British film company, and they create monster movies. Those are a little later than the Universal monster movies. They're in the 1950s and 70s, and they recreate Dracula with Christopher Lee, and they it bloodier, more violent, and sexier. So they recreate also Frankenstein and the Mummy, a couple of others too. They're kind of gritty and...

Speaker 3 (1:26:21)
more

Speaker 2 (1:26:29)
Audiences were a little shocked when they came out.

Speaker 3 (1:26:32)
Yeah, I remember the Chris Ferley one. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (1:26:35)
But yeah, it's a little more visceral than the movies we've seen before that.

Speaker 3 (1:26:39)
It is a bit more bloody and a bit more gratuitous for sure. I'm just trying to remember all the, I haven't seen that ages. Me too. In fact, I hadn't even thought about it until you said it. I'm like, that's right, you did play that. And then I'm like, yeah.

Speaker 2 (1:26:47)
Yeah, it's been a minute.

Yeah. So then in 1975, have Salem's Lot by Stephen King. Yes. And King kind of- Yeah, it's a good one. He kind of returns us to like the classic vampire theme where an ancient evil infects like a small main town. His vampires are feral. They are a plague and they're kind of a fresh take for people who don't know those older stories. The following year we get Interview with a Vampire.

Speaker 3 (1:27:00)
The Quapus

Right.

Speaker 2 (1:27:24)
by Anne Price. is the beginning of the Vampire Chronicles. And we have Lestat de L'Encourt and Louis Pontellac, two very different characters that become classic vampires. One is deeply emotional and the other is flamboyant and charming and, you know, a bit narcissistic maybe. But they are definitely iconic in the vampire pantheon.

So next I chose, I did skip The Lost Boys, though I probably shouldn't have. It's one of my favorite movies too. But I did pick Drusilla and Spike from Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997. This has actually been transferred into a novel, believe it or not, that was started as TV show. But they kind of bring like a punk feeling into vampire lore. And I liked that they sort of reshaped the vampires tragic.

Speaker 3 (1:28:00)
That's okay.

Speaker 2 (1:28:24)
and they still bring it into a new generation.

Speaking of tragic, I also chose Eli from Let the Right One In. This book was written in 2004. It also became a movie. It was written by John Lindquist and ⁓ Eli is a child vampire. A child vampire alone, not like the one in Enrae's book, but Eli kind of like makes it by theirself and their story is really sad and they are lonely and they really

brave connection.

Speaker 3 (1:29:02)
That is very, that's a really sad tale too.

Speaker 2 (1:29:05)
Very sad. If you, if you watch the film or read the book, it is heart wrenching, this rendition of the vampire. So I chose Celine from Underworld to 20, 2003 next. This has also been adapted into novels, but she's this vampire warrior. And she sort of represents that female autonomy that we talked about earlier. why I like.

Speaker 3 (1:29:30)
Kate Beck and Selma made her a straight badass. That whole thing is amazing. I have to agree. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (1:29:37)
Absolutely. I did of course have to pick the Collins from the Twilight books. kind of brought vampires into the light and the goodness of the world. They were the romantic Gothic vampires, of course. They said they were vegetarians even though they ate animals. They just didn't eat people. And there's this whole romance and danger to them. A lot of people critique these books as not well written. They weren't meant for adults. They were originally

They were young adult novels. were not meant for adults. then all these adult people are like, these aren't serious books. Well, they weren't for you.

Speaker 3 (1:30:08)
Yeah.

Right.

Speaker 2 (1:30:17)
Do your thing.

And I also really liked, don't know if you have seen City of Bones or read the Mortal Instruments by Cassandra Clare, but Simon Lewis, a very reluctant vampire who kind of retains a human moral code and really embodies like the chosen family kind of narrative. ⁓ It is also young adults, but it's ⁓ very modern and

dark at the same time, which I really liked. And so I added Simon to my list. ⁓ If you haven't seen City of Bones, you should definitely check it out.

Speaker 3 (1:30:53)
Okay. Yeah, we have it. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (1:30:56)
And so what about vampires in America? Could there be real vampires here? ⁓ scientists saying no, that vampires can't exist. But, ⁓ at this point, I want to stop and mention, this is a fantastic book. I looked at a lot of books during this research. ⁓ National Geographic put this book out. It's called Vampire Forensics. And, ⁓ it's written by Mark Collins Jenkins. I am not trying to sell this cause I get money.

I legitimately am recommending it as a great nonfiction read about the history of vampires and how it all fits together. That's cool. I only cover a fraction of this tonight. This doesn't cover everything, but it's so good. highly recommend it. You can find it on thrift books too. Yeah. The answer is, are there real vampires in America? Yes, there are.

Speaker 3 (1:31:41)
perfect.

Speaker 2 (1:31:48)
Folks that live in vampire subculture in America today. There are three main varieties. The sanguinarians, they claim to require small amounts of human blood for their health and energy. Psychic vampires, like energy vampires who absorb people's energy or influence or emotions. And I feel like everybody's experienced someone like that. you like check.

Speaker 1 (1:32:12)
Yeah, this-

Yes.

Speaker 2 (1:32:17)
And of course there are the lifestyle vampires, people who adopt the fashion and the aesthetic, but they don't want your blood or energy.

Speaker 3 (1:32:26)
Okay.

Speaker 2 (1:32:27)
So there are vampire communities that I read about in New Orleans, of course, New York, of course, Atlanta, Los Angeles, Austin, Denver, Philadelphia is an up and coming place as well as Buffalo. And apparently in New Orleans, are vampire social hierarchies. is the New Orleans Vampire Association and Atlanta also has the Atlanta Vampire Alliance. So yeah, those are real things.

Speaker 3 (1:32:56)
I mean, it's a social construct, so of course there's going to be hierarchy. just, you always see that for all kinds of other things. So why not, you know, society with vampires? It's just interesting to put that together.

Speaker 2 (1:33:11)
So I wanted to be clear that these people don't believe themselves to be undead, but they are humans with vampire traits or needs. was a real vampire murder back in 1996. A teenager from Kentucky believed, you remember this story? from Kentucky named Rod Ferrell believed that he was a 500 year old vampire named Visago. And he led a group of goth teens.

Speaker 3 (1:33:28)
Yes, I remember.

Speaker 2 (1:33:39)
in what became known as the Vampire Clan. And then in 1996, ⁓ he murders the parents of one of his friends in Florida with a crowbar. ⁓ He claimed it was part of a vampire ritual and they had to drink the blood as well as each other. ⁓ He was, of course, sentenced to ⁓ life without parole.

Speaker 3 (1:34:00)
Go ahead. say, when you see ⁓ kind of the old footage of him when he's getting in between like courts and stuff, you look at him, you're just like, there is something behind those eyes. It is a very, well, of course, everybody's easy to say it's very disturbed person there, but it's it's amazing when you look at him and he has got that aura of him.

Speaker 2 (1:34:02)
So on those, I'm sorry.

Speaker 3 (1:34:30)
that, well, you just have to see it and our listeners will probably for sure look it up. there was definitely something with that guy.

Speaker 2 (1:34:36)
Yeah, yeah, was, you can find art on that, but yes.

Speaker 3 (1:34:42)
Yes.

Yeah, I don't know what I'll put it in the episode because I don't want to. I definitely don't want to highlight somebody that's a known felon like that. Yeah.

Speaker 2 (1:34:50)
But yeah, it's out there.

Speaker 3 (1:34:52)
Yeah, that's out there. Yeah. Do your own looking on that one with the Google search engines. Come back on you for that one.

Speaker 2 (1:35:00)
So on the lighter side of all of that, there are people who do vampire role playing and there are ⁓ nightclubs with vampire themes in New York and San Francisco. And then of course there are the vampire balls. So ⁓ these are huge gallas and ⁓ the most famous one of course is the endless night vampire ball in New Orleans. It happens at the House of Blues, which sounds like great fun. This year's is on November 1st.

and it's in the French Quarter, course, but it's been described as Venetian Masquerade meets the Vampire Court. So I was like, that sounds like fun. mean, yeah.

Speaker 3 (1:35:41)
Yeah. I do get to wear one of those like, you know, the masquerade masks like that, but they're all like... ⁓

Speaker 2 (1:35:48)
change

their theme every year.

Speaker 3 (1:35:50)
Really? I just got this image of like putting one of those masquerade things on. I'm sure they do.

Speaker 2 (1:35:56)
Sure, it's New Orleans. Yeah,

absolutely. But of course, you can find vampire balls everywhere. ⁓ Of course, Salem, Massachusetts has them. And there's one I found in Rochester, New York that's happening in June. So they're out there. And if anybody listening wants to dress up like a vampire and do some vampire role playing, Evembrite. Evembrite has tons, you can just go into Evembrite and look for a vampire ball and you'll find one.

Probably within driving distance of you.

Speaker 3 (1:36:27)
Yeah. That's pretty cool actually. That's really cool. I don't know what I'm like trying that once. Just be like, hey, I want to do vampire ball.

Speaker 2 (1:36:33)
It would be fun. It would be fun to dress up as a vampire and, and, know, put on a mask and go dancing and, you know, to see all the other costumes. think that would probably be one of the best parts of the entire.

Speaker 3 (1:36:44)
⁓ yeah, absolutely. Sure. yeah. I mean, we go to balls for other stupid things. Why couldn't we go for something cool like that? Right. yeah. Give me a cape and I'll totally play up the, you know, the tragic. I don't know how we're going to make you pale though. look, there's paint out there and other things like that. I'm sure there had to be like a Latin X or, you know, a dark skin. Well, we just noticed there's all kinds of stuff all over the world.

Speaker 2 (1:37:10)
Absolutely, he can be an international vampire.

Speaker 3 (1:37:13)
That's right. I mean, look, it is what it is. Just deal with it.

Speaker 1 (1:37:17)
Yeah.

Speaker 3 (1:37:20)
That's so crazy.

Speaker 2 (1:37:21)
So my final things to share. Dracula has never gone out of print since it was published. has never been out of print. His ⁓ notes and early drafts were recently discovered and they kind of revealed all the information I shared tonight about how he crafted the vampire myth that we still hold onto today. The vampire story does keep changing to be sure. It reflects our fears.

our fascinations and our desires of the moment, but thanks to Bram Stoker, the vampire is immortal.

Speaker 3 (1:37:57)
And I'm just thinking about what you said where it's never been out of print. And to think about how long, my goodness, that is a long fricking How popular it is.

Speaker 2 (1:38:01)
been out of print.

Yeah, it's a classic story for a reason.

Speaker 3 (1:38:13)
That's wild. Orissa, once again, mind blown. Yeah. Just first of all, amazing research. Thank you so much for taking all that.

Speaker 2 (1:38:24)
My

pleasure. Like I said, it was more than twice this length originally. So I, this is a rich, rich topic.

Speaker 3 (1:38:31)
Yeah, well, and it needs to be because there is a lot of, ⁓ you know, information in the whole pantheos of the existence of Dracula and all these different things. And I mean, you can't really just cover something like that lightly. So, ⁓ but it's amazing. And again, geez, great job. Thank you. We appreciate all that hard work. Yes, we do. ⁓ You know, we would expect nothing less of the Generation X paranormal resident historian. I she is.

⁓ Rissa, know you're, you're always really busy. know that, but, ⁓ what do you, what do you got going on? What can our, listeners and our reviewers kind of see where you're at and what's going on?

Speaker 2 (1:39:14)
Well, I don't have a ton of stuff online right now, but ⁓ I am excited to tell you that I was inspired by the werewolf ⁓ program I did with you. I've developed it into a whole program and it's going to premiere ⁓ this May in Hanover, Pennsylvania at the Serpent's Key. So that's exciting. And I'm also presenting another new program in May on the Ouija board.

It's a Maryland, ⁓ has a Maryland origin story. so a museum in Maryland is sponsoring it and we're putting it out there from beginning to end. So ⁓ that's been a lot of fun to work on as well.

Speaker 3 (1:39:58)
Very cool. ⁓ Yeah, I mean if you're if you're in the area guys check it out I mean first of all you guys see how she is in the show in person I guarantee you I'm gonna sell you up. I mean she's gonna be definitely as good so No, that's great. But yeah, thanks again. Thank you again for hitting it out of the park. It was a blast ⁓ I knew when we'd cover vampires at some point it would be

a good show and I'm so glad that it was Rissa that brought it. Yeah, absolutely. Because I think if it had been me doing the research, it just would have been all about Lost Boys or something like that. It would have been. Which is- mean, there's just- ⁓

Speaker 2 (1:40:37)
It's good. It's a good, gritty vampire movie. And, you know, I probably know it by heart.

Speaker 3 (1:40:43)
I know. Did you ever see near dark? That's a pretty good one. It's an 80s one. It's got a little packs in it. But yeah, you should check that one out. It's definitely different. But and vamp too, by the way. well, we're so again, thank you so much for coming on. ⁓ Again, we love having you and can't wait to see you come back.

Speaker 2 (1:40:46)
No, I haven't seen that one.

look

forward to it. Thanks for having me.

Speaker 3 (1:41:05)
Thank you. Thank you. Thanks, Rosa. Yeah, thank you so much. And now I get to have nightmares about a head with intestines running out behind it. Yeah, those are pretty creepy. I, you know, some of these others, you obviously, you know, diseases and stuff like that, not understanding what happens after death led to most of these things. For sure. That one, like, there's a few, I'm like, where would this come from? I don't know. But now it's just weird. Like,

I don't know that I could ever unthink it. Or people just created stories to scare other people and that's how it, guaranteed that's how it happened. I'm sure there was definitely a part of that for sure. But no, was a great episode and you know, I knew there was a lot of history behind it. Obviously it's been, it's been covered and covered and covered in so many different genres and all kinds of different venues, but.

I guess I'd never really gotten that deep into it, knowing the history prior to Rom Stoker. You always hear about that, because as Rissa said, now this is the gold standard. It is, yeah. So it makes sense. It's interesting. I never quite thought about it so much where it went so far back. Yeah, I'm interested in going back and reading some of those older versions. Yeah, yeah.

and see how they compare. just to me, it's very reminiscent of a vampire, which makes sense. Not vampire of zombies. It was because the whole show is about vampire. Yeah. You know, there was one thing I picked up on when she's talking about the one that that they ate the dirt, right? Yeah. And covered themselves and like, and I thought back to like The Walking Dead. I remember like the show. Yeah. And to blend in with them to get through like big groups of them.

What would they do? They would cover themselves. The blood and this stuff. So they smelled like them and they didn't notice. And I was like, ooh, that like... Interesting tie-in. So yeah, I guarantee there's crossover there. I guarantee it. Yeah, it's interesting. But I don't know.

The vampire is very interesting. I like the newer version where they're not so terrible. It's just because I don't like gross stuff. I don't like horror movies per se. I like scary movies, but I don't like horror movies because usually that entails all this nastiness, like gross decapitation and yeah. Like the vampire movies are fine, but.

Like, you know, all the like, Freddie and... Oh, the slasher film. Slasher. I don't like that type of stuff. when they're like really gross, I'm not into that stuff. Sure. But not every one of them are slasher vampire Well, no, they're not. They're out there, believe me. I prefer the vampire that's torn about being a bad thing and trying to do the good thing. I like the architecture and the...

You know, that type of stuff. I'm not really into the nasty. You like Brad Pitt's version. ⁓ yeah. Who's not going to like Brad Pitt's version. Yeah, I know. Well, honestly guys, for us, I mean, for me for sure, it's always going to be like, you know, Lost Boys or, you know, one of those. But I do like the new, the new version of the TV show that we started watching. ⁓

the set in New Orleans. It's like the new interview with the vampire. Well, it is. Technically it's an Anne Rice. So it is an with vampire. Yeah, that's like the newer version. I actually really enjoyed that one. Yeah, that one has been very unexpectedly great. Because they can go more in depth when it's a TV show, think. Yeah, well, it's episodic so they can build on things, sure. Guys, tell us what you Yeah, what do you think? What is your favorite type of vampire? Who's your vampire? ⁓

But no, it was a great episode and I'm super happy to have her on. you know, look up your local vampire balls and enjoy going to one of It fun though. It would be fun. Just to dress in the clothes and see what everybody comes up with. Listen, you don't need to tell me twice. You just tell me when we're going. I'll go. It sounds like fun. It does sound like fun. But ⁓ guys, go find your vampire balls and we'll see you next week. I apologize. ⁓

Speaker 1 (1:45:41)
You

Speaker 3 (1:45:42)
Talk to you next week.