Vampires! A Primer

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In 1892, Exeter, Rhode Island was practically a ghost town.

The Civil War had decimated the population, farms sat abandoned, some had even burned down.

On a cold morning in the dead of winter, the remaining townspeople gathered at the Chestnut Hill Cemetery and watched as shovels broke frozen ground to exhume three caskets.

Inside were three women from the Brown family, all of whom had fallen victim to consumption.

Two of the women had been dead almost 10 years, and they looked it, but one, Mercy, had only been in the ground for a few months.

And when they opened her coffin, she appeared just as she had the day she died, as though she'd been sleeping

or waiting.

The Brown family had been hit particularly hard by the wasting disease, and when Mercy's brother Edwin took a turn for the worse, the town had decided enough was enough.

Something was sucking the life out of this family, and they were going to find it.

They cut out Mercy's liver and cast it aside, but when they sliced into her heart, they found what they were looking for.

Blood.

Clotted and decomposed, but blood all the same.

Mercy Brown, the villagers were now certain, was a vampire.

Mercy's friends and neighbors burned her heart and liver on a rock nearby, and in an effort to cure him of his vampire affliction, fed them to her brother Edwin.

Less than two months later, he too was gone.

It didn't matter that the doctor who performed the autopsy on Mercy confirmed the presence of tuberculous germs in her lungs, or that, unlike her relatives, she'd only been dead a few months, preserved in the ice-cold ground, or that poor Mercy had been very much alive and human when she watched the life drain out of her mother and sister's eyes.

Mercy's neighbors had torn open her body looking for the answer to a simple question.

Why us?

Why has our town been left behind?

Why are we wasting away and why can't we stop it?

They weren't the first New Englanders to go vampire hunting.

Mercy was actually a late addition to the great New England vampire panic, a social contagion that swept Northeast America during the 18th and 19th centuries.

But news of Miss Mercy Brown traveled.

Eventually, a newspaper clipping found its way to an aspiring Irish novelist on tour in the United States with a theater company.

His name?

Graham Stoker.

Hello and welcome back to What Went Wrong, your favorite podcast full stop that just so happens to be about movies and how it is nearly impossible to make them, let alone a good one.

Ahead of this Monday's episode on Interview with the Vampire, and in honor of Spooky Season, we've put together a primer on vampires.

We're going to explore their evolution and folklore and pop culture and perhaps discover why the most terrifying monster of all looks so very human.

Vampiric creatures appear in ancient cultures all over the world, from the Zhangxi in China to the Mesopotamian lilitu or lilith in Jewish mythology.

But it was in Eastern Europe that vampires as we know them today were born.

Though there's evidence of vampires in Slavic folklore dating back as early as the 9th century, the first time anybody decided to write about them was 1047 AD.

Writings in Old Russian referred to a Novgorodian priest, or prince, depending on who you ask, as an upir,

a vampire.

The etymology of Upir is unclear, but it's possible it was a euphemism, something one could whisper in private without uttering the creature's real name.

A more literal interpretation of the word was the thing at the feast or sacrifice.

Guess who's coming to dinner?

He who shall not be named.

And he has very specific taste.

While an Upir certainly could drink blood, that wasn't necessarily its primary goal in afterlife.

Generally, they were thought to be reanimated corpses who had returned to make human life a living hell.

They could collect blood, eat you whole, including all your bones, or even mess with your livestock.

But most importantly, they could bring disease.

As with most folklore monsters, vampires were a handy scapegoat for all the bad things that people couldn't explain.

You could blame vampires for anything from crop death and famine to the actual plague.

In medieval Eastern Europe, the plague wiped out whole towns, frequently leaving bleeding mouth blisters on its victims.

Now, if you don't understand the concept of bacteria, which they didn't, and you're seeing corpses bleeding from the mouth, vampirism seems like a pretty reasonable assumption to make.

Apparently, plenty of people agreed because there's evidence that both the church and rulers in certain parts of Eastern Europe tried to ban vampire burials in the 14th century.

Basically, they were just asking that you please stop digging up your dead neighbors to burn them, chop off their heads, or stab them through the heart.

Considering these vampires were often the victims of communicable diseases, this was pretty solid advice.

In fact, there are a few diseases that may have contributed to our modern vampire, not least of which was rabies.

A victim of rabies might foam at the mouth, get aggressive, be afraid of sunlight, and show a strange aversion to water, all of which were early markers of vampirism.

But of course, how does rabies spread?

Through a bite.

There's also a nutritional deficiency called pellagra, which causes sensitivity to sunlight and strong odors, possibly where the garlic aversion came from, and a rare blood disorder called porphyria, which causes dark red urine.

Perhaps someone put two and two together and figured out that in order to pee blood, you'd have to drink blood.

Ah, the joys of medieval medicine.

Now I know what you're thinking.

Mouth-foaming, blood-peeing, bloated, reanimated corpses, not my Edward Cullen.

But I'm sorry to tell you that for most of their history, vampires were decidedly unsexy.

That was all about to change, though.

By the mid-18th century, vampire fear in Eastern Europe peaked thanks to decades of political unrest and massive outbreaks of disease.

Soldiers who had been fighting in the area returned to their homes across Europe with the stories of two men, Peter Blagojevic and Arnod Powell.

Peter was a Serbian peasant who died in 1725.

He then allegedly returned to murder nine of his fellow villagers, including his own son.

Understandably, the remaining villagers were pissed.

They dug up the body, only to discover that his hair and nails had kept growing.

He appeared not to have decomposed at all, and there was blood in his mouth.

They staked him through the heart, in order to pin him down, of course, and reported fresh blood flowing from his mouth and ears.

Arnod's story was almost identical, except when he was alive, he had reportedly complained of being pestered by a vampire.

These cases were well documented, often by local officials and physicians, and word was spreading.

Suddenly, vampires were legit and

they'd gone viral.

But exposing these vampires to the light left them vulnerable.

Over the next century or so, as modern medicine began to emerge, it became clear that these cases were likely a misunderstanding of pathogens and how the human body decomposes after death.

You might think that vampires would fade away after being debunked.

Instead, they simply found a new fear to prey on.

In the summer of 1816, a villa perched above Lake Geneva housed a group of friends.

Thanks to a massive volcanic eruption that disrupted weather patterns across the northern hemisphere, it wasn't much of a summer at all.

In fact, it was freezing.

And there, in a year so cold and dark it caused devastating food shortages, a different kind of vampire was waiting.

Holed up in this villa were Lord Byron, his doctor John Polidori, Percy Shelley, his mistress Mary, and her stepsister Claire, who was pregnant by Lord Byron.

Now, if you're unfamiliar, Lord Byron was a poet, probably most famous for his epic poem Don Juan, and for his prolific taking of lovers, one of whom called him mad, bad, and and dangerous to know.

One night, Byron suggested they all write ghost stories.

Now, one of these would go on to be Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, but the other began when John Polidori picked up an idea that Byron had cast aside.

Three years later, Polidori released The Vampire, a tale.

The story followed a handsome, charming, aristocratic vampire named Lord Byron.

Excuse me, Lord Ruthben.

He had a taste for virgin virgin blood, and he was fatal to his victims.

The modern vampire had arrived.

Plays, operas, and novels featuring suave vampires sprang up everywhere, including an 1871 novella in which a sexy vampire entrances an unsuspecting young woman.

Through first-person narratives from the victim, we learn about how she both adores and abhors the vampire.

As she becomes more deeply entwined with this being, those she loves fall ill around her.

And yes, there's even a vampire hunter involved.

That vampire's name?

Carmilla.

That's right, 26 years before we got Abraham, Bram if you're nasty, Stoker's Dracula, another Irishman, Joseph Sheridan LeFanu, wrote a steamy lesbian vampire romp that utilized the monster to explore sexual identity, gender stereotypes, and power dynamics.

But of course, it was 1897's Dracula that cemented the bloodsucker as a pop culture phenomenon.

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The origins of Stoker's seminal gothic horror are murky at best, but he certainly knew how to get under Victorian skin.

Was Stoker's version of vampirism a metaphor for the dangers of sexual exploration?

After all, syphilis was spreading wildly.

Or maybe it was playing on a bit of good old-fashioned anti-Semitism.

Immigration rates were through the roof with a particularly high influx of Jews escaping pogroms in Eastern Europe.

Then there's possible real-world inspiration like Mercy Brown or Vlad Tebas, aka Vlad the Impaler.

or even Stoker's shitty narcissistic actor boss Henry Irving, who sucked the life out of his employees on a daily basis.

According to Stoker's son, it may be all of these and none of them, since Bram often said the idea came to him in a nightmare after eating too much dressed crab.

We've all been there.

With Dracula, the vampire genre exploded with iterations, derivations, and spin-offs like the vamp, a predatory femme fatale who drains the life out of her male victims, popularized by the 1915 silent film A Fool There Was.

It was only a matter of time until Hollywood truly came calling, but Germany beat beat them to it.

In 1922, German director F.W.

Murnau and producer Albin Grau figured, hey, Bram Stoker's been dead for like 10 years.

What if we change a few names, make a few tweaks, release our own silent film about everybody's favorite bloodsucker?

What's Stoker's wife gonna do?

Sue us?

And thus, Nosferatu, a symphony of horror, was born.

Yes, this was a Dracula knockoff, and yes, Stoker's widow absolutely sued them, launching one of the most fascinating cases in copyright infringement history.

But Nosferatu was visually stunning, and it introduced a few key elements of vampire lore, most importantly, that sunlight was deadly to vampires.

Just two years later, Mrs.

Stoker authorized a stage adaptation of Dracula.

The play opened on Broadway in 1927 and introduced several key vampire elements, including Dracula's cape, handy for disguising trapdoors in the stage, and the man who played Dracula, Hungarian actor Béla Lugosi.

Lugosi so deliciously embodied the Count that in 1931, Universal chose him to play the lead in the first vampire talkie, Dracula, which they adapted from the play.

Lugosi's portrayal was so iconic that he found himself typecast as a villain for most of his career, struggling to escape the vampire's grasp and yet often returning to the character he was most synonymous with.

It was in death that Lugosi would fully succumb to the role.

On August 18, 1956, he was buried in his costume, including his cape.

Universal bled Dracula dry.

When Hollywood pivoted to science fiction in the atomic age, British production company Hammer Films exhumed the old bat and anchored their horror verse with 1958's Dracula starring Christopher Lee.

Unlike the vampires of the 1930s, this Dracula was fast-paced, bloody, and shot in lush technicolor.

Lee's Dracula was overtly sensual.

His penetrating bites and visible fangs took the existing sexual undertones and made them overtones.

By the early 70s, Hammer Films had churned out a total of nine Dracula movies, with Lee starring in seven of them.

And the well was again running dry.

There were clever spins on the material, like 1972's classic blaxploitation film Blackula, the gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, which saw Barnabas Collins as one of the first vampire protagonists, and the first appearance of half-human, half-vampire, all-vampire hunter Blade in Marvel comics.

But by the mid-70s, it almost seemed as though the genre had finally gone cold.

In 1975 and 1976, two novels were published that would send a jolt of life back into the undead.

Stephen King's Salem's Lot, whose bloodsuckers harkened back to the vampires of yore, and Anne Rice's Interview with the vampire, which brought them very much into the present.

Rice was born Howard Allen Frances O'Brien in 1941.

Her mother had thought that giving her a man's name would afford her an advantage in life.

The name didn't stick around and sadly neither did Anne's mother.

She died of alcoholism when Anne was only 15 years old.

Anne married Stan Rice at 20 and welcomed a daughter a few years later, all while struggling with her own intensifying alcohol addiction.

In 1972, Anne lost her five-year-old daughter, Michelle, to leukemia, a cancer of the blood.

Rice's sorrow accelerated her addiction.

She was spiraling.

It was during this time that she turned back to an old short story she'd cast aside.

She expanded it, using her own cycle of addiction to create Louis de Poin du Lac, a vampire constantly at war with his own desires, filled with regret and yearning for his old life.

She channeled her own immeasurable loss into the character of Claudia, a child-turned vampire, a child who could never die.

For the first time ever, vampires were decidedly human.

Rice mixed up the rules.

Traditional vampire tactics didn't work.

Light your garlic, crucifixes, and wooden stakes on fire.

These vampires healed rapidly, flew without shapeshifting, had the option to live off of animal blood, and became instantly hotter when they were turned.

Sound familiar?

Yes, Twyhards, you can indeed draw a straight line from Louis de Poin du Lac to Edward Cullen and all of his sparkling self-hatred.

In fact, of all the literary vampires, it's Rice's that have come to define vampires as we know them today.

Her vampires grapple with the ennui of immortality.

A through line we continue to see from Twilight to True Blood to one of my all-time favorite films, Thomas Alferson's Let the Right One In.

Rice's vampires are both hunters and hunted.

There are good vampires and there are very, very bad ones, a dynamic heavily explored in series like Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Vampire Diaries.

One could argue that the Lost Boys would get along just fine with Lestat, and we certainly wouldn't have True Blood's deliciously gratuitous Eric Northman or Bill Compton without Rice's willingness to explore sexuality and sensuality.

The idea of a vampire family and community is endlessly explored in What We Do in the Shadows, and even ripples through Catherine Bigelow's gritty cult classic vampire western near dark.

However, the bloody tides are turning again.

Set against the very real terrors of the Jim Crow South, Ryan Kugler's sinners broke free from the need to sympathize with its vampires and made them something terrifying, ancient, and entirely evil.

As we run headlong into the darkness of extreme political turmoil, polarization, and violence, our collective fears will keep evolving, and so will our vampires.

Oh, and in case you're wondering, you can still visit Mercy Brown's grave today.

She's buried next to her brother, who ate her heart and died anyway.

This episode was written and performed by Lizzie Bassett with research from Jesse Winterbauer and post-production and music from David Bowman.