icymi (& are looking for something to listen to in dracula off-season) i have a podcast called vampire campfire!
we’ve been reviewed as “an extremely fun and extremely informative podcast all about vampires,” & we talk about vampire media as an intertext — ie all the ways vampire literature, film, theater, comics, tv &c. have built off one another to create what we picture as the “vampire” today! (spoiler: it’s much more due to fiction than to folklore)
season 1 wrapped a couple weeks ago, so here’s a cheat sheet w/ all our eps (you don’t need to listen in order!):
The Hottest Newest Oldest Vampires: Nosferatu, Sinners, and AMC’s Interview with the Vampire
When You Get to Date Your High-School Boyfriend… Forever
Dracula’s Older Gayer Cousins
Are All Vampires a Leetle Gäy?
Schools & Rules
Why Do Vampires Love the South?
I Vant to Suck Your… Energy
A Vampire, a Werewolf, and a Witch Walk into a Bar…
How Many Vampires Does It Take to End the World?
To Slay or Not to Slay?
Romanticizing the Vampire & the Gothic Story (Thanksgiving Special)
links are to substack but you can also find us on apple podcasts, spotify, and overcast!
also here’s our ig if you want to find us on the hellsite: @vampirecampfirepod
Imagine if people watched Interview with the Vampire and it inspired them to think about how the past is in a very real way inaccessible to us and memory can be misleading even when you're not being dishonest and different people can have different experiences of the same event that feel emotionally true and are very real to the people who experienced them even if they contradict each other and often you will never be able to know what really happened and how this can make repairing damaged relationships difficult and threatening to a person's sense of self
I just love the idea of Dracula thinking he’s outsmarted everyone by impersonating Jonathan. As if the locals are going to be fooled by the creepy-looking ghoul with the giant Fu Manchu mustache, wearing clothes clearly not made for him, who just crawled out a window and slithered down the side of a ravine, assuring everyone he is the recently kidnapped lawyer who is doing just peachy, thank you. Like this is WORSE than three kids on each other’s shoulders in a trench coat. If anything it’s like the Wayside School bunch of dead rats in a trench coat
louis smiling and confirming to regina that hes gay is so funny to me.... no no i didnt want SEX oh god, you mustve thought i was so creepy haha. Noooo omg i want you to act like my dead vampire daughter who was also a stand in for my humam sister who died believing me to be a monster. which i am.
It really fucks me up every time Jonathan reports Dracula saying shit like “Tonight is mine.” His for what??? What do you mean you’re not going to give us a late-night entry, friend Jonathan???
Once again getting fucked up by the June 29/30 entries. Excuse me friend Jonathan I think you have neglected to explain to us how the Count GOT YOUNGER OVERNIGHT???
Something we don’t talk enough about is how when Dracula tells Jonathan, “I hope to see more of you at Castle Dracula,” Jonathan just thinks Dracula is being fake-polite while intending to let him die at the hands of the weird sisters — but what Jonathan doesn’t know is that if he dies by vampire bite, he too will come back as a vampire, bound to the soil in which he was buried.
That means whenever Dracula comes home to his castle, he will be seeing Jonathan again. He’s not just keeping up the facade of civility, he’s implying that Jonathan is his newest bride.
Duuude don't question my version of events I'm such a reliable narrator. I'm literally the protagonist and the main character. You can literally read some of my internal thoughts, that clearly means you have complete access to an objective view of my thoughts and feelings and a correct impression of my characterization and the events unfolding around me. I'm not omitting any information from the audience. Nevermind that timeskip just now
At a certain point during watching a bunch of Dracula adaptations, you ask yourself: Is it me? Am I crazy? Did I miss the subtext? Am I bad at reading Dracula? Am I the world's greatest fraud?
And then you go back and reread some sections and feel immense relief.
The NUMBER OF TIMES I have gone back to the first four chapters to *make sure* Jonathan does not actually bring a locket or frame with Mina’s photograph to Transylvania !!!
Please tell me if I am the only one with a bone to pick re: science fiction vampire stories. By which I mean everything from “these ‘vampires’ are actually just disease-ridden zombie people” to “this man injected bat blood into his veins and now he’s a supervillain” (you know who I’m talking about).
Part of it is definitely the fact that often, the more you start trying to explain the supernatural, the more explanation is needed to make things make sense — but too much explanation quickly becomes hard-to-read info-dumping. When vampires are shadowy creatures from folklore, it’s enough to say, “We don’t know how it works.” But the second you start attributing bloodlust to bacteria or nanobots, a million other questions have to follow, demanding explanations for every other facet of vampire existence. Which, let’s face it, can really bog down a plot.
But I think my bigger issue (since exposition can be deftly handled in the right hands) is that the folkloric vampire is such a rich trove of metaphor. The vampire can represent the fear of the stranger, of queerness, of sexuality or sexual predation, of masculine violence or feminine power, of the monster with a beautiful face, of disease, of the dark — of all of these at once.
Most of all, the folkloric (or Gothic) vampire represents the fear of the unknown, of the unexplainable: illness, passion, death. The whole point is that no one knows exactly what it is or where it comes from — all we can do is fight it the best we know how, and pray.
In stories where the vampire is dissected under the microscope, there’s no more unknown. There’s no more darkness, no more room for the nightmares to breed — we’re under the fluorescents now. Goodbye cobwebbed vaults and faded portraits; hello stainless steel and antiseptic.
Is every sci-fi vampire story so symbolically sterile? Of course not. I’m not an out & out hater… but I do think something is lost when vampire-as-disease becomes literalized such that vampire-as-anything-else is no longer even a metaphorical possibility.
Anyway if you want to hear me rant about this for 78 minutes check out S2E9 of Vampire Campfire. I promise I have some good vampire sci-fi recommendations, too! And actually at LEAST a solid 20 of those minutes are history of sci-fi horror in literature and film. OoooOooH!
Oh also we do talk about Atlantis. (Again.)
When you stick the supernatural on a lab slide and chase off the dark with fluorescents, what's there left to be afraid of?
