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0:00:00
Bed Radford: Welcome to Squaring the Strange, the podcast that examines all manner of the mysterious and the mundane through a critical lens. So let’s square the strange.

0:00:10
Pascual Romero: Welcome back to Squaring the Strange. This is Episode 185. And with me as always is…

0:00:29
Celestia Ward: Celestia Ward! Just Celestia Ward. Ben’s not here for the opener, but he will be with us to interview our guest.

PR: Yeah, and this is an episode that will not help the conspiracy theory that Ben and I are the same person because I will disappear during the main segment while Ben steps in.

CW: A shapeshifter.

0:01:05
PR: Yes, in theme with the episode a little bit.

0:01:09
CW: We are interviewing Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Virginia and an expert on vampire lore and Slavic demonology, among other cool stuff. His name is Dr. Stan Stepanic at the Disco. We’re not actually interviewing him at the Disco, but we will be talking to him about vampires of old and how they weren’t really sparkly or sexy. They were more like related to disease and kind of gross and they also tie in with witches and werewolves and all those streams kind of cross in the Middle Ages in interesting folkloric sort of ways.

0:01:45
PR: But before we get started, do you have any housekeeping?

0:01:49
CW: Yes, we have got in Las Vegas here coming up October 20th through the 23rd, CsiCon, CSI Con is happening at the Flamingo Hotel. They’ve got some cool speakers among a bevy of skeptics that you will want to hear from. There’s also Neil deGrasse Tyson and Penn and Teller. And just sending out some positive vibes for Teller. He’s actually currently recovering from open heart surgery. He has been a workhorse. He and Penn have just been headlining the strip for, I believe they hold the record for headliners at the same hotel in terms of how many shows they’ve done and how long they’ve been at the Rio. So once Teller is back on his feet, he will be resuming shows and I’m sure he’s got plenty of time to heal up before October 20th.

PR: Awesome. I would send my thoughts and prayers and good vibes, but I know that would be lost on him.

CW: Just put a three of clubs in an envelope and you’re good.

PR: There we go. You know, when I lived in LA, I did that trick when I bought that cemetery plot in the Hollywood cemetery there at Forest Lawn.

CW: That’s right. You can lead your friend over there and say, is this your card?

PR: Yep. I actually, Ashley, my wife, I did that trick on her on one of our early dates.

CW: Oh, what a cute thing!

0:03:16
PR: Yeah for those don’t know what we’re talking about Look up the pen and teller three of clubs trick and and you’ll probably see a clip from their their TV show Bullshit which details how to do the trick and where to go in the cemetery to show a grave that says is this your card?

0:03:33
CW: Clever stuff and long-lasting. I mean, it’s literally carved in stone. That’s fantastic. So hope to see you at CsiCon. If anybody out there listening is coming, send me a, you know, hit me to that. Let me know on the Facebook discussion page because I will of course be there. I might not be there for every single hour of every single day. I do have to work and I have a life and I’m not just flying out and taking a vacation because I live here. So I will try to hook up with people and buy people beers or have beers bought for me. I’m open to that too. And we’ll see.

0:04:06
PR: Even better.

0:04:08
CW: Okay, well, is there anything you’re skeptical about this week, Pascual?

(MUSIC)

PR: So this week I heard Lizzo played a flute.

CW: Oh my god.

PR: Yeah scandal.

CW: I know listeners, I’m sure you’re sick and tired of hearing about this because Lizzo playing a flute That once belongs to James Madison is all over the interwebs right now, but bear with us here we all know she’s a classically trained flautist and There was actually this really kind of elevated that aspect of her career. And I read some of these tweets and viral stuff that’s just praising her musicality and how it mentions one of them mentioned how instruments have changed over the years. And it said, let me just read this real quick. I don’t even know who originally sent this, but it said that the flute she played was tapered with a different bore. The keynote was played with six fingers instead of five fingers or seven fingers or something. And keys were different. Like there were all these characteristics that made it a very different instrument from a flute today. And they’re not interchangeable. And it said, imagine, for instance, handing a 16th century vihuela to a modern guitar player. Pascual, you happen to be a modern guitar player. Have you ever played a vihuela?

PR: So as a matter of fact, I have. And this this this comparison is a little interesting to me because, so I grew up playing Spanish music. I grew up performing with my father’s band, which is a folklórico band, which is sort of the folk music of old Mexico and new Spain.

0:05:58
And in our culture, we call it a guitarron.

CW: Oh, I like that word.

PR: It’s a great word.

CW: Guitarron.

PR: And it’s essentially the same instrument, a little bit bigger and lower tuned, but it’s got the same tuning, relative tuning, and it’s played in a similar manner. I found it kind of interesting because when you play string instruments, especially guitar type instruments, it’s not real hard to intuit how to play different ones as long as they’re fretted in the same way, which means you have the same increments of tuning between frets. Yes, it does take some technique to get really good at one versus another, but it’s actually not super difficult to pick up a different stringed guitar-shaped instrument and figure out how it’s tuned and then figure out how to shape your fingers to play notes and chords and scales. So I actually get the sense that it’s a little tougher with flute, so I just want to give that person a little credit because you have to use more fingers and you have to play it completely different. With a stringed neck instrument like a guitar or a guitarron or a vijuela, it’s a little easier to intuit it so I think I want to give even a little more credit to someone who can play two different types of flute because guitars aren’t quite as varied.

0:07:21
CW: Yeah. Well kudos to you and for Lizzo for being very versatile musicians and The the elephant in the room here the giant crystal 200 year old elephant in the room Is that how did we at squaring the strange miss the existence of a crystal flute?

PR: Yeah, we went into Ben Franklin’s glass harmonica. And how it caused people the vapors. And we talked we talked about crystal skulls in another episode. But somehow we completely missed that James Madison owned a crystal flute, which apparently were a craze at the time. And I mean, what did Madison use it for? Was he a musician at all? Not that I know of. Every biography of him fails to mention anything about being a musician, which is part of what surprised me about this, because I would think that a president owning a musical instrument, especially of that kind of variety, crystal, you know, being something that I at least I have never seen a crystal flute until now. This is really beautiful.

CW: So, yeah, I mean, maybe, maybe he just used it to like lead the rats away from the city and then come kidnap all the children.

PR: And that’s how we won the Revolutionary War.

CW: Yeah. So, yeah, I’m very disappointed in Ripley’s Believe It or Not for not hipping us to the existence of this decades ago.

PR: Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

CW: Or if they did, I missed that episode. And and we maybe we need another sound effect besides a ding like not not for oh we should talk about this someday, but dang I can’t believe we’ve never talked about this before. We we didn’t know about it. So of course I did a little bit of a dive on this mysterious crystal flute and the Library of Congress actually has a blog from 2018 titled The Mystery of James Madison’s Crystal Flute. So there is a mystery there.

0:09:19
PR: Oh, okay.

0:09:20
CW: The blogger for the Library of Congress specifically wonders whether or not Madison’s Crystal Flute was one of the items packed hastily by Dolly Madison as she fled the First Lady when she took off and she saved, you know, in fact Lizzo mentioned this when she got up on stage with it. She said, It’s one of two items saved by Dolly Madison as the British troops set fire to Washington DC. Maybe not, maybe or maybe not. We don’t have actual verification but it was rumored to be one of the things that Dolly Madison grabbed when people were sacking the capital. Can you imagine people breaking in and sacking the capital? What a different time that was.

0:10:02
PR: I’m glad we’ve moved so far away from that.

0:10:04
CW: Yeah, yeah. Anyway, the crystal flute, although it really seems like it must be one of a kind, it’s not exactly one of a kind. The library has 19 other crystal flutes, or rather glass flutes, a total of 20 glass flutes made by Claude Laurent of Paris. Now today, worldwide, only 185 of these survive. Laurent, Claude Laurent, I hope I’m saying his name right, but he’s dead, he won’t care. He patented this flute on crystal in 1806, and he won a silver medal for the invention at the Paris Industrial Exposition. Now, they are functional, as Lizzo showed millions of people last week, they became sort of a sensation at the time when they came out and they were presented to lots of world leaders. So that kind of tells you how Madison came by one without really being known for being a flautist. Apparently, emperors and kings and world leaders had them given to them as gifts by the French government all over the place. So Madison’s was a custom job, at least as much as the scholars at the Library of Congress and the Smithsonian have looked into it. It was made specifically to honor his second inauguration. And yes, his is real crystal. I called them glass flutes a moment ago, and most of them were, although for years people thought all of the Laurent flutes were crystal. Then about 10 years ago, staff at the Library of Congress studied the flutes using non-invasive X-ray fluorescence. And lo and behold, 18 of the 20 were just plain old glass. So, interesting. Only Madison’s and one other flute were high leaded glass or otherwise known as crystal.

0:11:51
PR: So, you know, with all the action that took place like the incident at the Capitol, how did this flute find its way to the Library of Congress after all?

0:12:02
CW: Well, it’s got an interesting provenance after James Madison died. The flute was inherited by John Payne Todd, who was Dolly Madison’s son by her previous marriage. I’m assuming her first husband died, I don’t know, but generally they didn’t have a whole lot of divorce going on back then. So this kid was a piece of work. This John Payne Todd gambled, womanized, he drank too much, and he ended up in jail a few times. When he finally died in 1852, he owed a ton of money to a doctor named Cornelius Boyle. What a great name.

0:12:43
PR: Fantastic. It’s very of its age.

0:12:45
CW: Yes, I’m Dr. Cornelius Boyle. I’m here to treat you. Dr. Boyle ended up with the flute, possibly as payment for the debt that he was owed. Boyle’s heirs arranged for the flute to be displayed in the Smithsonian later and then eventually they sold it to an Ohio physicist and flute fan named Dayton C. Miller, but they made him agree that it would be displayed in an important museum. So it was and when Miller died, he donated his whole flute and caboodle to the Library of Congress and it was over 1700 instruments. This is in 1941. So they’ve got they’re just bursting with flutes, I guess. So fast forward to today, and we have the flute explosion that Lizzo has created. One name that I have not heard in any of the wider media coverage, which really should be given a huge shout out, is Dr. Carla Hayden. She is the Librarian of Congress, and she had the really brilliant idea to invite Lizzo via tweet, because I guess that’s how you do it these days, to come try out the collection of flutes at the Library of Congress. And so Dr. Hayden is not just the first female to hold the post of Librarian of Congress, but she’s also the first African-American to hold that title.

PR: That’s awesome.

CW: Yeah, absolutely And Lizzo played the flute in two videos that you probably saw in the news that were released by the Library of Congress Now it looked kind of like a very, you know genteel scene with the you know the high marble ceiling and everything and it was kind of just like a Spontaneous record of her visiting the library and trying out the flutes and she wasn’t dressed in concert garb. You know, there was no twerking. She just played and took a bow and was kind of giddy. Really. It was really cute. The next day, however, she played it for a few moments at one of her concerts in D.C. at the Capital One Arena. And she twerked with it and pearls were allegedly clutched.

PR: To be fair, it was it was it was a very mild twerk. It was more of a shuffle.

CW: A little bit of a jiggle there. Yeah. And, and, and, you know, that shows, you know, she’s not gonna like do something crazy where she might drop it, I’m assuming. But I immediately got a little skeptical of how many pearls were clutched by whom. I mean, I saw absolutely nothing on my feed. But people getting angry at the people who were supposedly clutching their perals. Granted, my feet is a little curated to be seen, but you said you did see some some some anger at this, right?

0:15:20
PR: Yeah. I try to approch this as skeptically as possible because usually it’s one person who is a professional contrarian, you know, says something kind of bombastic about it, I assume just to get attention. And then that’s where you see the sort of cluster of people making their, you know, hot takes. And so I did see some of that on Twitter. Nobody that I follow, very few people that even I saw reacting to those posts, but I did see a few and most of them seemed to have an issue with just that very small clip of the live concert that she was doing because she didn’t really play anything in particular. She just kind of tooted it a couple of times and then handed it back, presumably because, you know, that’s a priceless instrument. And she doesn’t want to be swinging it around by a mic stand.

0:16:22
CW: Yeah, yeah, yeah. The only the only actual like patient zero I saw with the outrage was Ben Shapiro. And it’s not hard to enrage him.

PR: I mean, like he does.

CW: Yeah. So all the other press, including some conservative press that I have seen is just lauding her for, for, you know, bringing history to life and everything that the Wall Street Journal, not known for being a liberal rag or anything. It published an opinion piece by Christopher Scalia. Yes, he is one of those Scalia’s, Antonin Scalia’s son. And he writes for the Wall Street Journal and the Federalist. And his piece is titled, Two Cheers for Lizzo and James Madison’s Crystal Flute. He said that, yes, her performance was vulgar, but she showed a real reverence for American history. And certainly the Library of Congress has no problem with her. And she was just, in fact, today, I think we’re recording this Tuesday, she was invited to Montpelier, James Madison’s house in Virginia. And it’s now a memorial and a museum. The staff there is hoping she might perform, but they said she is welcome there anytime for any reason, which is pretty cool. Of course, this also brought twerking up again as a national thing people are talking about. And Lizzo, in her, she did a TED Talk on twerking. Have you seen it?

PR: I have not seen it, but I kind of saw a synopsis of it.

CW: Yeah, I did a quick watch of it, and I recommend it. It’s a nice little, like, 12-minute TED Talk. She goes into the roots of twerking while she’s holding a piece of history, she’s just bringing two pieces of history together. It was on purpose. It was conscious. It was well played, very well played. In more ways than one.

0:18:30
PR: Yeah, absolutely. And and I think it really is important to consider, you know that You know the founding fathers for all the good they did, you know in establishing the country also were largely slave owners and not necessarily the most woke people as we say these days.

0:18:50
CW: That was not lost on anybody that she played a slaveholders flute.

0:18:52
PR: Yeah. And James Madison died a slave owner and, you know, did not even will their freedom in his will. So, you know, that, of course, you know, that’s a long time ago and there’s a whole other episode we could do about that. But I think it does have a symbolic importance because of that. And I don’t want that to be missed.

0:19:14
CW: Yeah, yeah. These days, history isn’t so much encapsulated in large tomes of history books that people write. It’s in TikToks and 30-second videos, and man, did she do an amazing one that will go down in history.

0:19:30
PR: Yeah, absolutely.

0:19:31
CW: Anyway, we’ve talked at length about crystal flutes and Lizzo’s glorious ass. But we’re going to move on to talk about vampires. Just in time for Halloween.

(MUSIC)

0:19:43
BR: We have a super cool guest. He is Dr. Stanley Stepanic, Assistant Professor of Slavic Languages at the University of Virginia and author of several books including Dracula or The Timeless Path of the Vampire. So based on nothing other than what I’ve already told you, you already know what the show is going to be about which is vampires.

0:20:19
CW: I love that title.

0:20:22
BR: Are you there?

0:20:23
SS: I’m here.

0:20:25
BR: Very good. So I first saw your talk for ISCLR, the International Society for Contemporary Legend Research, a conference, and I loved how you elegantly connected the social and cultural early vampires to modern ones. So talk us through it, if you would.

0:20:41
SS: Oh, so, I mean, there’s a lot I could say there.

0:20:44
CW: Well, the elevator pitch for somebody who’s wondering, have vampires always been what we’re seeing in Twilight and whatnot?

0:20:54
SS: Okay, that’s a good start. That’s actually something I often start with when I give a quick speech to an audience, just a general idea about what vampires are. So, no, the original vampire was not like Edward Cullen in Twilight. It wasn’t really much like Dracula either, by the way, although Dracula, in terms of the novel, not the various incarnations in film and so forth, is closer, but the original vampire is a few centuries old. We actually don’t know how old it is exactly. The earliest data we have, I should say, really the earliest reference we have to the vampire comes from an old Russian text from 1047 AD. And even in that case, the appearance of the word in that particular source is debated about what its actual meaning was and the origins of that term and so on and so forth because the word was actually upiad. At any rate, so the short of it is the original vampire is primarily a symbol of disease. That’s really what it was used for because we’re talking about a time when people didn’t understand what a virus, viruses were, they didn’t know what bacteria was because it’s, you know, in the human mind those things didn’t exist yet because they hadn’t been discovered essentially so sure that’s what his primary function was originally and it had been in Slavic culture and Eastern Europe including Hungary and Romania Which are not Slavic countries, for for quite a while so what really happened was in the 18th century it was called the vampire epidemic or probably better to call it the Great Vampire Epidemic because it wasn’t the first time it happened. Vampire hysteria started to spread through Eastern Europe, starting in Serbia, and people were unearthing various graves to find signs of vampirism and then doing things to the corpses that they determined were vampires. This led to a lot of media attention in Western Europe, starting in German-language newspapers that eventually started to spread into the rest of Europe and got into England by 1734. So that sort of hysteria about vampires led people to discuss it because the idea was really not well known at all in Western Europe. And as far as we know, the word vampire doesn’t even appear in Western European languages until 1726 at the earliest. But anyway, so it gets in there, it’s debunked as being something true, because that was a big discussion in academia at the time was, because when I went to basically the ancient the Enlightenment period, people wanted to know like, is this epidemia at the time was because when I went to basically the Enlightenment period, people wanted to know like, is this legit?

0:23:24
BR: Like can the dead really come back and attack people? Really be worried about this?

SS: Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

CW: So that’s interesting that you said you said it’s possible they’re up to a thousand years old because you have that one scholarly notation of a word. But and I know in UFO sightings, they call them flaps when a whole bunch of sightings happen. That’s interesting.

0:23:42
SS: Well, not just sightings, lots of details there. So I guess I’ve kind of gone off the rails here. I was going to give you a short intro.

0:23:51
BR: No, no, no, no. This is cool.

CW: We want to keep our listeners engaged and we’re not sure exactly the level of vampire knowledge the average listener at Squaring the Strange does, though it’s probably above average.

0:24:04
BR: Well, let me ask you this because in my book, Tracking Chupacabra, I do dedicate one of the chapters, because the chupacabra is, of course, inherently a vampire, you know, being its blood sucking. And so I dug a little bit into that. And a bit ago, you mentioned some of the concerns and panics surrounding vampires and what people would do to suspected vampires. Can you talk about that?

0:24:32
SS: Yeah, sure. So, again, it wasn’t necessarily vampire sightings, but what was happening is there were two primary epidemics that were spreading through Eastern Europe. One of those was a disease, very well known of course, called rabies, viral infection. Everybody knows what it is, at least the basics of it. And the other thing was a disease caused by dietary deficiency of vitamin B3 and tryptophan. That disease is called pellagra. It’s not very well known. If someone in medicine maybe has heard of it, but there have been at least two articles I know published about its relationship to vampires because pellagra reached epidemic proportions, especially in Serbia at that time because of overconsumption of corn and not enough of variety in diets. That’s what causes it primarily. There are other things that can cause it. So that was what was causing the actual deaths and again, we’re talking about, you know, the majority of them, we’re talking about a time period here again where people don’t know what any of that is. No one knows what B3 is. Niacin is not isolated, I think, until 1942 or something like that, you know, in the 40s I think. So nobody even knows that such a thing exists as, you know, vitamin B2 or niacin, nobody knows. That’s a thing. Nobody knows a virus is a thing because it’s not been discovered. So these deaths that were occurring because of rabies epidemics which were being spread by dogs, in certain cases rabid wolves, actually it’s kind of scary. And of course, a vampire is supposed to be able to turn into a wolf, so in some cases at least. So you have really the hysteria developing around disease and wondering why is this happening. And the vampire had been part of Slavic culture, Eastern European culture for who knows how long, several hundred years, a few hundred years. The earliest reference we have is 1047 AD. That doesn’t mean that’s the first time the vampire appeared, because you know, it certainly is not. But at any rate, so you have this thing in your local folklore that’s used to really explain disease. And rabies, of course, was not new to the 18th century. It had been around for centuries prior. It’s one of the oldest recognized diseases. I mean, the ancient Greeks talked about it. So, the Romans too. So, the disease was there for a while. So, that’s one of the things people often look at as being potential origin for certain traits of the vampire. But when it comes back, of course, we say, oh, the vampire’s doing that. And a vampire could do any disease, really. So, with these deaths occurring and they’re getting more and more frequent, people start looking for an answer. And the answer was, well, we have this, there’s a saying, you know, that does this, called the vampire. So it wasn’t necessarily sightings, they start to dig up bodies and then what starts to happen is, is the average person doesn’t understand the science of decomposition, doesn’t want to know, even today. So as they’re digging up these bodies, they find these so-called signs of vampirism and they’re gonna, they’re basically gonna find it whenever they dig up a body because they’re misinterpreting basically everything about decomposition. So this is going to cause them to say, oh, here’s this vampire here, here’s a vampire here. And so it just sort of spreads. We don’t actually know how many bodies were unearthed. Realistically, probably several hundred over the course of about 30 to 50 years. But no one kept records of how many bodies. There’s only so many that we have actual records of and documentation.

0:27:35
BR: It makes sense, right? Because when people die, we bury them, we burn them, we dispose of them, we don’t leave them out for the elements. And so it makes sense that the average person would, they wouldn’t, that would be outside of a normal experience. They wouldn’t normally be exposed to what a body looks like under the ground or, you know, in a casket after months or weeks, right?

0:28:01
CW: I just got to butt in here and say I have an appreciation for the fact that the same drivers that led human beings to create science have let us create vampires. We were trying to explain something. And I think that’s a sort of a connection between folklore and science that a lot of people don’t appreciate.

SS: Oh, certainly. In fact, I just gave a lecture to my students about this sort of topic last week. I was talking about a Polish anthropologist named Bronislaw Malinowski from the late 19th century, early 20th century. But yeah, I mean, there’s this human desire, especially when things don’t go our way to want to know why it’s happening. Why are people dying? What is the cause of this? I mean, even simple things sometimes, you know, like why isn’t my car working, for example, we like to know.

0:28:47
CW: Oh, that’s gremlins. That’s fully gremlins.

0:28:51
SS: Is that the ghoulies?

0:28:55
BR: So what are the different types of vampires? I know that one of them is the revenants, which I think is the human bodies that were sort of believed to come back, but there’s other types, right? What are they?

0:29:07
SS: This depends where you’re talking about. My focus is primarily on Slavic vampire. I talk about Hungarian and Romanian examples a little bit. So you have, first off, you have tons of different words for what’s largely the same thing. And along with that, because folklore is so varied sometimes, and sometimes it’s very bizarre. I forget what book it was I was reading. It was, I think, Slayers and Their Vampires by Bruce McLelland, who’s a pretty well-known vampire scholar, at least for that particular work. And one of the things he discussed in there is a vampire folk tale I think he came across where the vampire took the form of a floating decapitated buffalo head.

CW: Oh, okay.

SS: Yeah, there are occasional oddball things like that where you’re like, what the hell is this? But it has a relationship to old animal sacrifice and stuff like that. That’s why that was like that.

BR: Did you see the decapitated floating buffalo head? No, I didn’t, but I saw that vampire.

0:30:02
SS: Yeah.

0:30:03
CW: That sounds like the type of vampire that people get attacked by after they’ve eaten some wild mushrooms.

0:30:08
SS: Yeah, it does. That sounds like it’s probably where that one came from. But yeah, you got lots of variations in names. There’s different names used all throughout Eastern Europe, Slavic and non-Slavic words. And you have different ways the vampire appears. But the primary Slavic vampire, and I should also add vampire-like creatures throughout the world, it tends to be, takes the form of a reanimated corpse that comes back to harm the living. An interesting detail I found not too long ago about the vampire is that evidence actually seems to show that the original Slavic vampire actually really wasn’t biting to drink blood, if it did drink blood at all, it did more of a sort of smashing or pressing of the person’s body to squeeze out the blood, which I thought was really cool. I just came across this in an article.

0:30:59
CW: Like a lemon?

0:31:00
SS: Something like that, but if you think about it, it actually makes a lot of sense because there’s always been this big connection between the phenomenon known as sleep paralysis with various demons and ghouls and ghosts and folklore and myth all over the world. And one of the ways the vampire typically appears in classic folklore is a shadowy figure with glowing eyes that will push on you or sit on you or smash you. So that’s a classic sleep paralysis hallucination. When I was younger, I experienced sleep paralysis for the first time around age 10. And that’s what I experienced too, was a shadowy creature with glowing eyes and it kind of like attacked me and like sat on me and like pressed on me. Kind of like that famous Fuseli painting, the nightmare with that monster.

0:31:43
BR: Oh yeah, yeah.

0:31:44
SS: And that guy probably experienced sleep paralysis.

0:31:48
CW: So they’re like cross between a house cat and a…

0:31:52
SS: Yeah, a very large house cat that you can’t get off of you.

0:31:57
CW: Wow, okay. Yeah, that’s new to me. That’s interesting. I’m learning here. I like learning.

0:32:02
SS: There’s always news that people are digging up. Most of that information is going to come out of like, you know, Serbian archives of stuff from the 18th century and stuff like that. They’re finding these new things. But yeah, in those cases, again, the vampire tended to take the form of a reanimated corpse. So, you know, to say like different types of vampires, there’s so many variations on it that it’s hard to really pin down exactly what you would want out of such a question. I mean, of course, you have things like what’s called Strigoi in Romania or Vrekelakas, you know, from like Greece and stuff like that. Vukunlak is another one. I mean, there’s so many names that really relate to essentially the same thing that Vampyr is, we’ll just stick with that, you know.

0:32:43
CW: Well, do you have a favorite lesser known vampire type that you like to read?

0:32:48
SS: Oh, yes.

0:32:48
CW: What’s your favorite?

0:32:49
SS: There is one I like to talk about. I first came up with – do you happen to remember – there was this – Time Life used to always do these awesome book series and they had this series that came out in the 80s called The Enchanted World. Have you ever heard of it?

0:33:03
CW: No, but –

0:33:04
BR: I have a couple issues, a couple of visions behind me on my wall, yes.

0:33:08
SS: Yes, and then – the short of it is there are a collection of various folk tales and myths and stuff all over the world and each book has a different theme. Like one was like, you know, fairies or something like that. And I think it was called Fairies and Dwarfs. And then there was one called like Night Creatures, which is about vampires and things like that and then ghosts. So it’s an awesome series. I wish it would be like printed again because the artwork in it is worth the purchase itself. The artwork is just so incredible. But in there, in the Night Creatures one, there is, they’re talking about this vampire called the Obor, and there’s this painting this guy did in there, kind of like this sort of Francis Bacon style painting with this horrible looking like humanoid shadow wandering the streets at night with the sort of glowing eyes. I was like, oh, what is that creepy? So eventually I came across the complete folklore behind that thing. So in certain parts of Bulgaria, there was this special type of vampire that was known under different names. It could be called Vampyr, but one of the names I saw it referred to was as was the Platnik, or you could also pronounce that with a different vowel stress as Plotnik, Plotnik, or Platnik. And the the Plotnik is this really interesting vampire that would have three forms it would take, going from like a sort of lesser form to its, you know, ultimate form, you know, like level 9000 Dragon Ball Z, something like that.

0:34:28
CW: Yeah, it sounds like Pokemon-y. Yeah, yeah, Pokemon-y.

SS: Yeah, you catch it and then you upgrade it for the battle. Yeah. So the Obor, I found out whenever I found this stuff later, is the first form this thing would tend to take. And it would usually take the form of a humanoid sort of shadow with glowing eyes. Again, there’s that sleep paralysis connection. With glowing eyes that would wander the streets at night, kind of screaming like a Banshee sometimes. It would sometimes soil people’s houses and make them unclean with poop for some reason. It could also drain blood and stuff. So it’s a shadowy form here, and if you don’t stop it in this form, it then gains power and then it enters its second phase, second form. And then the second form is called the Mzakh in most cases. It’s a good Slavic throat sound there. So the Mzakk is really interesting in that it’s this essentially it’s like this living amoeba like bag of human skin. So if you can basically imagine a human body with the bones removed. Yeah it’s pretty gross I’m thinking man Del Toro should make a movie about this you know like he’s known for doing such interesting horror films. He has something right here that needs tapped into. Del Toro, if you listen to this, you got to take this.

0:35:39
BR: Get on it, man.

0:35:40
SS: So it’s like this creepy amoeba thing, and it gets some more power there. It can hide under your bed, it can slide through keyholes, older style keyholes, it can ooze through there. Pretty creepy. So if you don’t stop it there, then it reaches its final form, which is the platnik, again, there’s different pronunciations, the final phase, where it becomes the actual vampire. And then, this always made me laugh when I finally found this I was like, wait, what? What happens then is it becomes a false human being where it basically looks like one of us. And you can’t tell it any different.

0:36:13
BR: Like a changeling?

0:36:14
SS: It’s like a changeling essentially.

0:36:16
CW: Is that the part where it runs for office?

0:36:19
SS: No joke. Yeah, this is serious. It actually, basically what happens at that point is the vampire kind of like, you know, it feels bad about its past, you know, it’s frat boy days or whatever, and it’s like, you know, I just wanna settle down now, it can get a job and have a family.

0:36:34
BR: Wow.

0:36:36
SS: So it’s actually a pretty classic theme you see in lots of myth and folklore, which I like to refer to as the monster hiding in plain sight theme. You know, it’s like changing, like something that seems normal but isn’t. It’s a pretty classic theme all over the world. So, you know, it’s hard to say how did that originate? And even more hilarious to me were the two ways I discovered just doing some research, how you could figure out if somebody was a platnik and that was by, if they only had one nostril, was one detail. You know, like look around like, hey, wait a minute, that guy right there only has one nostril. That musn’t be a human being. It’s probably some poor soul that had a birth defect centuries ago that was chased out of the village. And then the other detail was if they weren’t interested in sex.

0:37:25
CW: Oh.

0:37:27
SS: Which is like, different from the modern sexy vampire image. It’s like, you go up to someone, how would you ask somebody that, like, hey, you like sex? Like, well, I don’t want to answer that question. Hey, wait a minute. Are you a human being?

0:37:41
CW: So we’re looking for an asexual person with one nostril.

0:37:44
SS: Yes, exactly.

0:37:45
CW: And that’s the former vampire.

0:37:47
BR: Michael Jackson. Hold on. No, I figured this out.

0:37:53
SS: Yeah, it’s really interesting. That was always the one I thought was the most interesting because it was so bizarre and so different from other ones I’ve seen.

0:38:03
BR: Well, let me ask you about this because, you know, as you’re talking about folklore often sort of blurs the distinctions together, right? You look at fairies and elves. In some cases they’re similar, in other cases they’re sort of, they’re called the same things in different times. Can you talk about the crossover between vampires and werewolves, both of them being shapeshifters?

0:38:21
SS: Oh, yeah. So, first off, we’ve got to get shapeshifting and Slavic folklore out of the way, because shape-shifting and Slavic folklore is all over the place. Practically anything malicious or even good can change into something else. I came across a folktale once, I think it was a folktale, yeah, where a witch in a, I think it was a Russian folktale maybe, a witch that would shape-shift into a, get ready, a spool of thread.

CW: A spool of thread?

SS: Yeah, and it sounds really stupid, but if you think about it, it’s like the Purloined Letter. It’s the thing you won’t really notice that’s sitting right there, you know, so that at night, you know, she changes back into a witch and then, you know, curses you or whatever. So, shape-shifting in Slavic culture is everywhere. In fact, they have, in Russia at least, they have a, they had a specific creature slash sort of half-human thing called the Oboroten, which means the shifter, basically skin shifter or skin changer or something like that would be the best way to translate it. They can change into lots of stuff like a sparrow or a lizard and things like that. But the werewolf thing is something that’s been debated for a while. There’s actually been a research of these individuals in the past like 30 years or so, but at any rate, the Slavic pagan priest was called the Volkov, which in Slavic languages means wolf. So, basically that word translates to wolf skin or wolf pelt or sort of if you wanted to, wolf man. And basically, the reason that they were called that is the wolf’s skin and wearing it as the Volkov would do, they were supposed to get more power of nature into themselves to do various things. So you already have this link with the wolf there and pagan belief for magic and stuff like that. So one of the things that happens over time is that as the church tries to fight against pagan belief and in Slavic Europe you have this phenomenon referred to as dual belief or dual faith. It’s not unique to the Slavs but it’s something that was very difficult for the church to combat there where basically they were introduced Christianity and they were like, oh cool, yeah, Jesus, whatever, and they were still worshipping, you know, their old gods like Peru and then Dashbog and stuff like that and so you know Christians are like, wait, why are you still worshipping this stuff? They’re like, what are the… just because it’s cool, you know, and we’ve worshipped it for a long time. Can you stop? And they’re like, well, no, you know, give me a break. Yeah, so they just, you know, they really latched on to lots of their beliefs and they’re very stubborn about them. As any culture really would be about, you know, you don’t just throw away like 2000 years of history because of a new religion. Okay, we’re gonna stop all the old stuff now and we’re gonna just do all the new stuff. So the church in the East, Orthodox Church, in comparison to the Catholic Church, tended to be a little more permissive, and they’re like, okay, let’s see if we can adapt some of this stuff here. So as they were fighting against old pagan belief, the Volkov, of course, was one of their enemies because it was an image of the past. And there was actually at least one instance of like this, it must’ve been an awesome battle between like the Volkovs or Volkovy as a plural and pagan believers and like Christian, like Templars and stuff. This is like a, this is a Game of Thrones episode. So eventually the church realized that using force probably wasn’t a good idea because it’s just going to make them more stubborn. So in the East, they tended to be more permissive and would sort of step back from things. Okay, you want to worship your dead ancestors? We’ll turn that into a holiday. We can do that. You want to unearth the dead and stake them and chop their heads off and stuff? We won’t take that one, but we’re just not going to make you not do it anymore. We’re basically going to step back and hope you just stop doing it eventually and they never did. So now this whole fight against paganism which is really rising in the ninth century, end of the ninth century when Russia’s Christianized for example, 988. So the Volkov’s in this image, it’s attached to the vampire which at the time is being referred to as the Oopieff, not vampire. And so as you’re fighting against paganism and trying to redefine stuff, the image of the Volkhov, which is connected to the wolf, is being, in certain cases, conflated with the vampire, where in certain areas, for some reason, they became this special type of vampire. Like the Vukodlak, for example, is the best example of that. It’s taking that root wolf in the word, the etymological, linguistic tradition, I guess. be a special type of vampire that was covered in hair, it was like a corpse covered in hair and then it could turn into a wolf and that was really all it would turn into. So that vampire there basically was a combination of images of the Volkov with the old Slavic vampire, the Upir, into one entity. And then the theory that some people have is that Western Europeans stole the idea and then the werewolf started to become its own kind of thing in Western European folklore. Right around the 15th century is where you start to see it appear. And then you have these cases of minor cases of werewolf hysteria during the witch craze. You maybe have heard of, for example, Peter Stolman for Stubb Pieter, the werewolf of Bedberg from the late 16th century is one of those, it’s probably the most famous case. So after that, you get this sort of development further of the werewolf image in popular culture and folklore in Western Europe. But based on what I’ve read, I would argue that the werewolf image is most likely borrowed from Slavic folklore vampires turning in the wolves and stuff like that, which originally comes from the Slavic pagan priest Volkov, sorry, the Volkov who would wear wolfskin. So what that means essentially is that werewolf is really just another form of vampire that has gotten its own identity over time in popular culture, but really isn’t something separate. You know, they’re not mortal enemies. They’re basically one of the same, at least in certain parts of Eastern Europe they were. So that’s how I would view that.

0:44:12
CW: You’ve just answered the seminal question. I know that, you know, the number one question is what came first, the chicken or the egg. But right after that question is what came first, the vampire or the werewolf? So definitely the vampire came first.

0:44:26
SS: Well, there’s no way to know, you know, because the idea of human beings shape-shifting into things it really arguably predates recorded history. So no no no dead coming back to you know

0:44:36
CW: This might be sort of a simplified question and I’m just asking for my own lay information here vampires and werewolves both are reputed to create more vampires and werewolves by biting people. Does that go way back into the folklore of the Slavic period, the Slavic folklore you’re talking about, or is that more of a modern twist that we get more vampires and werewolves from getting bitten?

0:45:03
SS: That’s not a modern twist at all because, again, shapeshifting in Slavic folklore, you find lots of examples of it. The Obrotin, the skin shifter, was one of the most well-known in Russian folklore. And in Slavic folklore, there’s this really diverse and… What’s the word I’m looking for here? There’s very varied folklore concerning how to be cursed or how to curse somebody. It’s all over the place. And if you’re touched by something that could shapeshift or somebody that was potentially evil, you could be cursed, you could become a vampire after you died. So the idea that you could be corrupted in Slavic culture referred to as the unclean. In Russian, the word is nichista. It doesn’t mean like literally dirty. It means something is out of the ordinary or something is not right.

BR: Impure.

SS: Yeah, impure. If you touch that thing or get near that thing or that presence, you can be affected by it and then become a vampire too or a werewolf potentially. So not necessarily abiding. It could be just physical touch. It could be just by the fact that you saw one even. It could be almost anything. So the idea that the evil of a werewolf or vampire is transmissible in some way is not a new idea at all. Of course, the focus is on biting now, and there may be some connection to rabies there, because that’s how rabies is primarily spread, is biting.

0:46:18
CW: Yeah, that’s right.

0:46:19
SS: But yeah.

0:46:20
CW: Well, let me jump to a different kind of being cursed. I’m going to talk about an OCD angle here with vampires. And of course, one of the vampires near and dear to my heart, who’s probably definitely Slavic is the Count on Sesame Street. And I know there’s a tradition of numbers related to vampires, like for example, one way to save yourself if you’re being chased. And this is also true, we’ve discussed about zombies and the rolling calf is to throw pebbles or rice grains and whoever or whatever is chasing you has to stop and count every single one. So can you go into that angle of having to count things and where exactly that came from?

0:47:02
SS: Yeah, this is one that’s been, I guess, hotly debated for a very long time now is what is the origin of the counting thing. So you mentioned the Count. I talk about him in lecture, you know, people are like, you actually lecture on Sesame Street at a university. I’m like, well, if you think about it, there’s actually a lot of meaning behind it. You know, it seems silly at first, but if you think about it more than I explained to you, you’d be like, oh, wait, I didn’t even know that. So, okay, first off, let’s consider this. Is the Count Slavic? Well, since technically his characterizations and the way he moves and talks is based on Bela Lugosi, who was Hungarian, which is not Slavic, I would say no.

0:47:39
CW: Oh, okay. All right.

0:47:40
SS: But, you know, but again, that sort of, you know, vampire accent is like a sort of quasi Eastern European accent in general, Hungarian, Serbian, or otherwise. So he could still be Slavic.

0:47:51
CW: Okay. All right.

0:47:52
BR: Fair enough.

0:47:53
SS: Yes. At any rate, students, whenever they learn, so I actually am giving a lecture tomorrow about traits and weaknesses of vampires, and I will mention the counting thing in there. As far as the counting with the folklore, whenever I discuss the Count with students, they often wonder, you know, oh well, the counting thing, which is a trait of the vampire, it’s supposed to have a weakness to counting small countable objects, which usually tends to be poppy seed in the Slavic tradition, or millet maybe, something that’s small and countable, is they think, you know, oh well that must be why the count counts then, because they must have known that. But in actuality, one of the creators of the count, the original voice actor for him His name was Jerry Nelson, and I think he died in 2012. He didn’t know that no The reason the count counts was a total coincidence as far as he said in at least one interview that I read Jim Henson wanted some sort of character for counting on Sesame Street because before that they would have you know the human characters or various Muppets do it, you know, Big Bird might do it, or Gordon might do it, or Maria might do it, or whoever, or Mr. Hooper, remember him?

0:48:55
CW: Mm-hmm, yeah.

0:48:58
SS: Yeah, and so, at any rate, so they wanted something for Counting, so the way this went down is basically they were like, okay, let’s think about this. Count, and you know, Count Dracula was a very well-known character. The Christopher Lee movies were still very popular at that time. I forget, 1972 is when the Counts were introduced. I think they were just on, what was the movie that released at that time? Oh yeah, Dracula AD 1972 comes out that year. So Count Dracula via Christopher Lee is still very well known at that time. Of course, Bela Lugosi was a cultural icon basically by that point. So just the word count, as in counting with math, by coincidence is the same word as count as in Count Dracula. So it was a total coincidence where basically the word matched up and they were like, okay, what do you do in math? You count, oh wait, count, Dracula, we’ll just call him the count and then he’ll count. So it was largely an accident that that even happened.

0:49:51
CW: So this is due to the English language having the word count for count.

0:49:55
SS: Exactly.

0:49:56
CW: Well, now we know. Okay.

0:49:58
BR: Okay. So let’s move ahead a few years or a few decades or a few centuries depending on where we just were. So what are the main inspirations for Bram Stoker’s Dracula? I’ve heard various theories including Vlad Tepes, Vlad the Impaler. So some people have said yes, that’s the origin of the vampire. People said no, he’s a Romanian hero but he had no real connection. What’s the real vampire dirt?

0:50:29
SS: Okay, so let’s start with Vlad III Dracula, Vlad Tepes, the Impaler, which of course he didn’t call himself that. He didn’t sign his name Vlad the Impaler. It was, you know, an enemy’s call to that.

0:50:41
BR: So- That would be his Twitter handle. That would totally be his Twitter handle these days. Vlad the Impaler. Blue checkmark would be awesome.

0:50:50
SS: So Stoker had inspiration from a variety of sources. Dracula is a real conglomeration of lots of things from Stoker’s own life, including influence from his mother and her storytelling. There’s tons of stuff in there. But in terms of the character Dracula, there are a number of things that are coming together. There’s not really a real Dracula, so to speak. There was a real person called Vlad III Dracula, but the character Dracula is a different story. There’s no real person that was the character Dracula. So Stoker’s inspiration with Vlad the Impaler, Vlad Dracula, Vlad III, was very slight. Now, Stoker’s great-grandnephew, Dacre Stoker, you maybe have heard of him. He’s a good friend of mine. I’ve had him come speak at UVA a few times already, and he did the prequel to Dracula came out a few years ago which is actually very good. And at any rate, so one of the things that he discusses is that it appears based on recent research he’s done that Stoker may have come across the name Dracula earlier than we actually think. But regardless, based on the research and the notes I should say and evidence that Stoker left of the work he did on Dracula, which took him roughly seven years by the way, 1870, sorry, 1890 to 1897. It appears he came across the name Dracula and then researched the name really again in one other source. So what that means is that he really wasn’t interested in the real person, he was interested in the name and he was like, wow, this name sounds awesome basically because you probably know that the original name for Count Dracula is actually Count Vampyr. His name was literally Count Vampyr.

0:52:32
BR: That’s right, that’s right.

0:52:33
SS: You know how much it took to actually want to keep that name, it’s hard to say. You know it was it was probably just a working name for a time and then he probably remembered, you know, there was this name that came across, Drac is something, one of this book a long time ago, and then he goes and researches Transylvania and that area and then comes across it again and is like, oh yeah, that’s the name. That is going to be my character’s name because it just has this power to it. It just sounds awesome. There’s just something about the word. So really, the character is based on the real Dracula in terms of primarily his name. The history the character presents of himself in the book is a conglomeration of things that Stoker got from different works, in certain cases he even plagiarized full passages from earlier works about the region. So that when Dracula presents his family history, it’s really just a conglomeration of stuff thrown together. It’s a character. So the real Dracula isn’t really much of an inspiration. It’s really just the name that he was most interested in. But of course, in fact, he originally had in his earliest versions of the book in his notes that Dracula was going to be Hungarian and not Wallachian like the real Vlad III actually was. So he was going to be from a different background because Stoker was also interested in this other famous figure at the time, John Hunyadi, and the Hungarian connection, stuff like that, was really linked to him. So there’s not really one person that this character is based off of. It’s a number of things, but everyone always goes to Vlad III because the name, of course, is from him. So you got that going on. Also for inspiration, Stoker was very clear that he was inspired by Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s novella called Carmilla, which came out 1871-1872. Stoker was working for Sheridan Le Fanu as a freelance drama critic for the newspaper that Sheridan Le Fanu co-owned at the time. And so he knew about Carmilla. He saw it when it was published. He probably talked to Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu about it when he was working on it, and he sees the impact of it, and it really inspired him to do something like that later, although he won’t start writing Dracula for at least like 18 years, as far as we know, that inspired him. So you got that going on there. He did research on Elizabeth Bathory, so Bathory is technically a part of the character as well, so it’s a lot of stuff, and there’s more than that even. the influence of his employer Henry Irving, the famous English actor, was another influence on the character. It’s how much of which thing, it’s just really just like many things in that novel, it’s a bunch of stuff put together in a fictional form, really.

0:55:03
BR: Sure, a conglomeration, not a… No clear…

0:55:09
CW: Well, it’s fascinating to see how the theatrical streams have come together. I was fascinated to learn from you, because it was from one of your recorded talks, that the traditional garb of the Dracula vampire wasn’t what inspired magicians later. Rather, it was the other way around. Because you always see the magicians with their cape and their, you know, very sort of Dracula-looking outfit that they perform a show in, you know, in the golden age of magic. And you think, wow, they’re sort of vampiric, but it was actually influenced the other way. You talked about this with barnstorming and the Broadway shows and how exactly Dracula came to life on the Broadway stage and the connection between that and stage magic and let our audience know how exactly that went.

0:55:56
SS: Yeah, so I guess it is still fair to say that maybe, you know, early magicians had some influence on this sort of vampire look because, I mean, geez, man, you’re probably back in the ancient Greece and stuff, I’m sure like, you know, magicians and oracles and stuff wore, you know, cape-like attire to make themselves more mysterious or whatever. So John Palladori’s novella The Vampire comes out in 1819, the character in there is called Lord Riven, spelled Ruthven, pronounced Riven. So after that was released in 1819, it becomes a play 1820, French first and then an English version, and then this leads to like Lord Riven becoming like a household name like Dracula is today basically. There are tons of plays made with this character and some were comedic, some were horror, some were kind of romance, and in those plays they had a special effect that was referred to as the vampire trap, where for the vampire to disappear they’d had this sort of special cape mechanism they would use so they can make the disappearance mysterious and stuff like that. So the cape was basically used as part of the stage trick and then when you jump into the later era in theater going into the early 20th century and then into the 1920s when Dracula first appears on stage, well I should mention that Stoker did his own stage version but that was just for copyright so we’re not going to worry about that version, but in terms of like actually appearing you know in public for ticket sales and stuff, Dracula finally appears on stage in 1920s. And the original English version of it by Hamilton Dean, who’s the playwright who did it, he basically designed Dracula to look like an evil stage magician because he had worked with stage magicians outside of theater. So he was like, oh, well, the stage magician cape basically is a good thing for disappearing effects and stuff like that. So I’ll basically bring back the vampire trap from old Victorian era theater and prior. And we’ll just make the cape, you know, kind of like a magician’s cape with that big collar that can stick up to hide the person’s head as they disappear. And this is where it came back then. And that becomes sort of like the classic, like, vampire, like aristocratic vampire look was like that. And then it becomes just like the sort of the thing then from there on.

0:57:56
CW: So the costume was built around the trick, essentially.

SS: Yes. Yeah.

CW: That’s that’s an interesting little bit of trivia.

0:58:02
SS: Yeah.

0:58:03
BR: When I was watching your talk, one of several, it was fascinating how you sort of drew the connection between Dracula and Nosferatu and the more modern versions. Can you sort of, I know there’s a lot to pack in, but can you sort of hit the highlights of how we get from, how do we get these modern day sparkling vampires from what was originally nothing like that.

0:58:28
SS: Okay, so I guess we should say that the first Dracula adaptation of the film that we know of was actually a Hungarian film that sadly is still lost as far as we know. We only have some publicity shots and some things in newspapers and stuff to give evidence that it even existed. But that’s the first adaptation of Dracula as a character, but really it was Nosferatu that started this sort of popularity. So the big thing you usually hear about Nosferatu is that because Prana Filmin, F.W. Murnau, who was the director, did not get copyright permission from Florence Stoker, who was Stoker’s wife and then widow at that time, to make this movie, that she sued them. And then the attention around the lawsuit led people to want to know what this book Dracula was about. So this then leads to the stage version, because she was trying to make sure it was still protected and she wanted to make sure nothing like this ever happened again. So, Nosferatu is your first real presentation of the Dracula novel on screen. It’s actually pretty close to the book too, a number of ways. But after that, then you get the stage version to combat that. But the stage version really bears very little similarity to the novel itself. It’s basically what’s called a drawing room mystery because Hamilton Dean condensed it to a very short workable amount of space. And then after that play gets popular, it gets to Broadway, and of course, Bela Lugosi famously plays Dracula on stage there. Universal decides to make a film out of it. They basically film the play version and add some things to it, and that’s released in 1931. Sets off essentially the modern horror film industry. And then they make two sequels to that film at the time, and they get less and less popular over time. And vampires and monsters in general basically start to die off by the time you get to the 1940s and then sci-fi becomes really popular because of the Cold War and stuff like that. And then the big comeback for vampires is in 1958 with Horror of Dracula or just Dracula as it was known in England with Christopher Lee. So he comes back, Dracula’s now this big scary thing again, but still basically the same kind of creepy aristocratic guy that’s been around since the 19th century all the way back to Lord Riven in 1819. So the Dracula image is really the primary vampire image we get until you get to the 1970s, and then you have this big focus on the Carmilla image, the female vampire image, especially this sort of big lesbian angle, so to speak. You see in lots of those films, and there’s a bunch of them, lots of trashy, Euro-trash films coming out at that time, or lots of them, they’re really like hyper-sexualized female vampire films.

1:00:47
CW: Evil lesbian vampires from Hungary, I mean I’m sure that’s like a trope right in and of itself in terms of B-movies.

1:00:57
So after that, then you have a different approach to the vampires. You get like sex and vampires really becoming a big thing in that era. And then by the time you get to the 1980s, a lot of new things happening, but you have lots of blips of new stuff occurring even before that. So 1954 for example, Richard Matheson’s novella I Am Legend, which people often think is like, incorrectly think is some sort of zombie novel today. It’s a vampire novel actually, novella, sorry. And that becomes of course inspiration for Night of the Living Dead, etc. etc. So you have that happening in 1954 which is a different approach. You also have Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire in 1976 is the first time it’s published. And it’s pretty much a classic aristocratic vampire but the focus on the human side was new. And then by the time you get to the 1980s, the vampire slowly becomes morphed into basically a representation of the human race. Films like The Lost Boys, where there’s teenage vampires, or Fright Night, for example, in 1985, where the vampire looks like a regular guy. He doesn’t have an accent. He doesn’t have a cape. He looks like a regular person, until he shifts, of course, and he’s this horrible thing. So that’s really the decade you see lots of shifts happening where the classic images of vampires are still there but now the vampires being used in lots of different contexts that relate to changes in society and politics and religion and stuff like that. It starts to like absorb cultural changes into itself and you know this is why you still see it being so persistent as it can be almost anything. So that the vampires in Twilight to finally get to you know Twilight sadly, really there’s nothing new about them. There’s nothing in Twilight that’s unique or new. It just happened to be a vampire that latched on for that generation at that time. And it’s the most recent really big vampire phenomenon we have, but it won’t be the last. And it’s probably not the most important either, you know, 50, a hundred years from now. But at the time, you know, people thought it was unique, but some people at least, that there’s nothing really unique about it. It’s just, it’s another, another teenage sympathetic vampire, really.

1:02:51
BR: Let me say, one of my all-time favorite vampire films is not well known, it’s Martin.

1:02:57
SS: Oh yes, that’s George Romero, right?

1:02:59
BR: And like the average person, they just think of the big ones, but that was, if you haven’t seen Martin, it is just the…

SS: It’s good, it’s a good one.

BR: Oh, it just blew me away. I’m like, oh my god, I’ve never seen anything like this.

1:03:17
CW: I’ve never even heard of Martin. Give me a real quick summary of what I’m missing here.

1:03:21
SS: I’m sure Ben could do it. It came out, I think, first of 1978 or 77.

1:03:26
BR: Yeah, I want to say 76, 78 or something.

1:03:28
SS: Yeah, something like that, yeah.

1:03:30
BR: Yeah, so basically it’s set in modern day, I think Philadelphia or Boston or something. And it just follows this young kid, he appears to be a teenager, and he either is or thinks he is a vampire. And I won’t go too far into it because it’s just fascinating the way it unfolds, but basically he believes he’s a vampire and he actually calls into one of those late night sort of Art Bell call-in shows and he confesses to being a vampire, no one believes him. I’ll just leave it at that, but just check it out.

1:04:07
CW: So they keep it ambiguous, you’re not sure if he’s got a mental disorder that makes him think he’s a vampire or if he’s actually a vampire?

BR: Yeah!

CW: Okay, well you’re wetting my curiosity here. It’s good. I’ll have to take a look. I wanted to latch on something, Dr. Stan, that you said involving zombies, because we’ve talked about werewolves, zombies are another one to talk about here. You mentioned I Am Legend was actually a vampire movie.

1:04:35
SS: It was a book first, a book, yeah.

1:04:36
CW: The book was a vampire book. Would you say that zombies themselves kind of evolved from the vampire as well? Do they owe their generation from this folklore as well.

1:04:46
SS: I Would say yes now I mean specifically they’re not the original Haitian folkloric zombie. That’s different thing or zombie. That’s different I’m talking about the popular culture zombie. Now you do have the like sort of Haitian version of that lasting until about the late 1940s and then the big zombie comeback is starts with really night of the living dead in 1968 and Romero was very clear when he made that film. He was like, yeah, I basically ripped off I Am Legend and then this old Vincent Price film called Last Man on Earth, which is based on I Am Legend. So basically George Romero’s Night of the Living Dead is an adaptation of I Am Legend, which is a vampire book. The word vampire is used in that book at least 80 times.

1:05:32
CW: So all roads lead back to vampires here with the I Am Legend.

SS: Yeah, I know. You see, everything leads to vampires in some way.

CW: Well, I’ve got I’ve got more questions on the zombie thing I don’t know if you’ve ever seen Max Brooks do his zombie talk. He’s very good. He he’s written many zombie books. He’s very into zombies he does the whole comic-con circuit and he stated that zombies were his favorite because they didn’t see people as people we were just food the way that bacteria feeds on food. That’s the way zombies feed on us. They don’t care about us as individuals. He contrasted this with vampires and the way that they feed on people in popular culture. All the vampire stories, the later Twilight sexy ones, the vampire hunts only certain people. There’s a chase, there’s a seduction, and the vampire feels almost lust, a blood lust for that particular person’s individual qualities. And I mean, you even see this connected to particular blood, like True Blood had that character Sookie in it that was a half fairy or something, she has special blood. But it also the personality, the strength of the character is what draws the vampire to its prey. Now, can you speak to this in terms of vampires being a, almost a, almost a validating mirror held up to some of these female consumers of the genre, like, oh well, you know, if this vampire would like me, he sees me, he sees all my personal qualities, rather than just being a zombie looking at your brains.

1:07:07
SS: Yeah, oh boy, where to take that, let’s think.

1:07:10
CW: Sorry, I laid a lot on you there, a lot of assumptions.

1:07:14
SS: That’s a lot, that’s a lot. So I guess really, to get this to be a pretty straightforward answer in some way, I guess the vampire in that way, sort of like having a focus on hunting down the victims in a seductive way, or not just for food, but as more of a potential mate, or they enjoy the seduction, or the chase, so to speak, as opposed to the just the straight up killing.

CW: Yeah, it’s more personal.

1:07:45
SS: Now, where would I say, yeah, more personal, where would I say that really developed? I mean, geez, back to Lord Riven again in 1819, that’s what he does. So it’s really a pretty old image and Lord Riven is the first popular culture vampire. So it really starts with him.

1:08:00
CW: So about a hundred years, that’s about a hundred years old, that whole idea.

1:08:03
SS: About a hundred years old, yeah.

1:08:04
CW: Okay.

1:08:05
SS: Well, 200 I guess, or 200.

1:08:10
CW: I feel especially old when I make a mistake that large here. But it’s about 200 years since vampires started being very specifically drawn into a particular piece of meat. Not just as a piece of meat, yeah.

1:08:27
SS: Yes.

1:08:27
BR: So where do you see the vampire, I know it’s difficult to predict, but having seen and researched and written about the history of vampires and different incarnations, any idea where the character might go in 100, 200 years?

1:08:46
SS: Whew, impossible to say. I mean, if you look at how much the vampire has done over the past 100 years, for example, it’s pretty amazing. And now it’s become such a dominant image in popular culture, really, pretty much all over the world that it’s impossible to say where it’s gonna go. I mean, you’ve got the Swedish film from, what, 2008, Let the Right One In, which is based on a novel from 1981. We got that Iranian vampire film, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night, from 2014. We got Castlevania Netflix series. We got video games. It gets, oh, and there’s a recent comic book series that came out that was really highly regarded from DC called Vampire, 1970s, American Vampire, 1976. I mean, or the manga series, Happiness. I mean, there’s just, there’s so much that I don’t, it’s, first off, I don’t think it’s ever gonna go away at this point, but also, where’s it gonna go? Well, the pattern tends to be that roughly every 10 to 20 years, there tends to be some sort of Dracula resurgence, and there tends to be some big vampire phenomenon roughly once every 10 or 20 years or so. So what will the next one be, hard to say. Daker Stoker had sold the rights to his prequel to be turned into a film, so that could be the next big vampire thing when it comes out, but really that’s kind of all up to the fickle audience taste, you know. You could have a great vampire film that comes out that is critically acclaimed and is awesome, but the average person just for some reason doesn’t latch on to it. Or you could have absolute trash like Twilight that comes out and everyone’s like, this is great!

BR: This is the best thing ever!

SS: Then it comes the next big thing, you know, so it’s hard to say. It could be in almost any avenue. It could be in literature. It could be a video game. It could be another film. It could be a Netflix series. And what? And wait, so we have, well, that’s a good thing to mention. Interviewed the Vampire is supposed to be a series starting not too long, I think, from now on. Who picked it up? I think there’s a Hulu that’s doing it. I forget.

1:10:37
CW: Huh.

1:10:38
SS: They’re making like a, like a season out of every book, I think.

1:10:43
CW: I was a big fan of those books. I actually waited in line. Anne Rice is the first author I ever got an autographed book from.

1:10:49
SS: Oh, that’s cool.

1:10:50
CW: And I was like 13 waiting in line at a used bookstore. And it was a special time for me. Vampires hold a special place in my heart.

1:10:58
SS: That’s cool. I don’t know. It could be anything. We’ll see.

1:11:02
CW: But it’s coming. Ben, you had one last question?

1:11:05
BR: Yes, I have one last question for you. And it’s a folklore question. And it’s about vampires in ostentation, because as you know, there are many people that claim to be real-life vampires. I think Katherine Ramsland has written a couple. Every now and then you see sort of books about, you know, true stories of real-life vampires. There’s these whole subcultures and things like that. Can you sort of talk about where they fit into all this?

1:11:33
SS: Oh, so the best way to approach this is to first discuss, I guess, when this phenomenon started to become a thing. The first evidence we really have of people who were claiming to be vampires is like early 1970s, mid-1970s. In particular, there was a group of scholars and fans of vampires, and I think they were referred to at the time as the Dracula Club. And they did research into vampires and Dracula paraphernalia and stuff like that. And they started to get phone calls from people saying I’m a vampire and they’re like what the heck is this? And the vast majority of them they said we’re hoaxes and people just being you know messing around. But some number of people that actually said oh no no like I feel like I need to drink blood and stuff and they’re like wow what is this? So you have elements of that that definitely can be traced to roughly like the height of the Christopher Lee era. But people of course have drank blood for, in cults and stuff for centuries. So, you know, what’s the first person to claim you’re an actual vampire? I mean, who knows? But now as like a sort of subculture though, you don’t really see this starting to kind of form into something recognizable until like late 1980s. In particular, you have the founding of the vampire religion by – well, I shouldn’t say it’s the start of the vampire religion, but it’s really the first officially recognized vampire religious organization called the Vampire Temple, who comes out in 1989.

1:12:58
CW: There’s an officially recognized vampire religion?

1:13:01
SS: There is, yes.

1:13:02
CW: Wow.

1:13:03
SS: So you have them, but basically the way they approach it is they view vampirism as a symbol of human perfection and they see it as like a further step in evolution where it’s kind of like an ideal to reach towards to make the human race more than what it is currently is essentially what the religion is about It’s interesting so you have them then of course the popularity of Vampire the Masquerade when that game comes out in 1991 It starts a revolution and then role-playing games.

CW: My husband actually played that I believe it’s pronounced vampire the masquerade

SS: Oh, I’m sorry Wow Well, I’ve actually played the game in larp situations and they were never corrected me so now I feel dumb.

1:13:42
CW: That was the running title here in Las Vegas. They used to play Among the Storm Drains by UNLV.

1:13:49
SS: Oh cool.

1:13:51
BR: Could you buy the costumes at Tarjay?

1:13:54
SS: Tarjay.

1:13:55
CW: I’ve just outed my husband as a total nerd, but it’s true.

SS: It’s a fun game, I must admit. I’ve played it myself. But so you got that game and so of course there’s a whole like identifying this vampire thing going on there in a game setting. And then you see more and more of a development then after that point of people claiming to be vampires and saying that they need to drink blood or that they need to suck some sort of like psychic energy, like emotions or something like that. So it starts to become very diverse and of course there’s a big subculture that’s pretty well known in New Orleans and also in Texas. There’s another group that’s pretty well known there. So, you know, as a subculture, it’s really pretty modern still, although they will say things like, you know, people like us have been around for centuries and just, you know, now you’re learning more about it, you know, I mean, possible, I guess, but really-

1:14:42
BR: Sort of a pseudo history.

1:14:43
SS: Yeah, really it’s a modern phenomenon that doesn’t really become a thing until late 80s, early 90s. But I’ve met some of these people, they’re very nice. A good friend of mine lives in New Orleans and he’s one of the most well-known blood drinkers in the subculture. Some drink the blood claiming that they actually need it for their physical and or mental well-being and then there are others who will say, no, I don’t think that, I drink it just because I like it and I have the vampire fangs but it is a symbol of what I think of myself and not because I actually think I need to drink blood or something like that. So there’s not a lot of consistency. There are lots of variations in the way that people define themselves in the subculture and there are some people that have tried to make definitions and were kind of ridiculed for doing that. So it’s interesting. But basically, this sort of – the need for a subculture like that develops at the same reason that any subculture develops. Somebody feels they lack an identity and they try to find one and they develop on it. It’s the same thing as like, you know, punk or metal movement or anything like that. The subcultures form because the person wants to have an identity and they feel like they don’t have one. So it’s really pretty much the same basic human need that led to it forming, but it’s interesting because it’s so heavily attached to what’s largely a figure of popular culture. You know, something that’s really a media image and, you know, is it really real? I mean, the vampires don’t actually exist, you know, so no.

1:16:09
CW: The popularity of this type of ostentation just speaks to the power of vampires as a story, as a folklore, as an enduring piece of the human experience.

1:16:19
SS: Exactly.

1:16:20
CW: Well, so finally, you teach a course on Dracula, correct? Tell us how people can take the course. Tell us how they can reach you, hear more from you, and in case anybody wants some more information, although you’ve given us, I feel, so many gigabytes of information on vampires. It’s amazing.

SS: So the class is called Dracula, I only really discuss the novel in bits and pieces throughout the course. The course is really a history of the vampire and pre-christian Slavic belief to modern-day stuff like video games and things like that. So it’s a really big overview. So the course is currently taught at the University of Virginia.

1:16:40
I did teach it for a short time at University of Richmond, a much smaller school, but right now it’s taught at University of Virginia. I have plans for a while of trying to make a digital course for people that wanted to take it from anywhere in the world, but that hasn’t happened yet. So currently, it’s just something offered at UVA. It gets the special requirements out of the way for students here in Charlottesville, where the university is. That’s currently the only way you can take the class. I usually don’t take auditors, because so many students who want to take it for a grade always want to take it. But if you ever are in Charlottesville for three months in a row, and you want to take it…

1:17:35
CW: Do you have a Twitter handle or any sort of a blog you want to put people in touch with?

1:17:38
SS: I do have a website and a Twitter handle but it’s actually associated with my small business which is an underground record label and media site that really has nothing to do with vampires.

CW: Oh, okay. You can find me on LinkedIn if you want.

CW: Okay, on LinkedIn. You are a renaissance man, professor.

1:17:55
SS: I guess, yeah. Well, thank you so much for being here. Ben, I’m so glad you know all these amazing people.

1:18:04
BR: When people ask me what I love about folklore, this, this, this, this, this right here, this discussion, these ideas, these knowledgeable experts about niche things that other people are like, what? I’m like, yeah, let’s talk about this. So this is so cool for me. Thanks again for being on, and we wanna have you back.

1:18:23
SS: Oh, that’d be great, thank you.

1:18:25
PR: So that was nice of Dr. Stan to come by and educate us on vampires. There is a lot of a lot of stuff. I didn’t know Especially that they just obviously are not the cool vampires. We’re used to these days

1:18:56
CW: Yeah, apparently his vampire class down there in the University of Virginia is a must-take experience. So if you happen to be a student down there or know somebody, You know get yourself on the enrollment sheet and get into his class while you can. We, we’re glad to have him.

PR: I think it counts as an inhumanities credit.

CW: Oh Nice one Well, we’re kind of stirring up a witch’s brew of topics as Halloween approaches I’m hoping everybody’s got cool Halloween plans. Are you doing anything? Awesome, Pascual?

1:19:28
PR: Oh, well, you know, we’re slowly building up our collection of decorations in the front yard. And this year we have a sandworm from Beetlejuice.

CW: Oh, nice.

PR: Yeah, we’re very excited. Anyone who’s friends with me on social media or follows me on Instagram or something probably has seen a post of it already. And yeah, we’re just gonna hang out and our neighborhood is really active for Halloween so, I expect to see lots of kids and lots of costumes and we should have a great time.

1:20:05
CW: Albuquerque sounds like it would be a really fun town for Halloween. Vegas just tends to get a little too drunk and they go a little too crazy with the sexy this or sexy that costumes, so.

1:20:15
PR: Yeah, we do have a little bit of that, but you know, we’re out on the outskirts in the suburbs, so it’s a lot of families and a lot of kids, so we have a good time.

1:20:26
CW: Cool, yes, I’m looking forward to taking my little one out for trick-or-treating, and yeah, in the meantime, I’m just cobbling together costumes and coming up with ideas and trying to figure out what kind of candy I should hoard up on, so we’ll figure it out as time goes. I hope all of you have a wonderful Halloween preparation time, and in the meantime, everybody, take care.

1:20:45
See ya.

1:20:46
♪♪

1:20:51
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