Why Are Vampires Sexy?

Demonic blood-sucking creatures have existed for thousands of years before Dracula showed up all sexy, suave and problematic. Who were these figures who inspired what we know today as vampires? Why are a lot of these supernatural creatures female figures? And why did left-handed red heads once get stakes through the heart!? Joining Kate today is the fantastic historian and author Janina Ramirez, to get to the bottom of these important questions. This episode was edited by Tim Arstall. The producers were Stuart Beckwith, Sophie Gee and McKenna Fernandez. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. Subscribe to the new Betwixt The Sheets YouTube channel here: https://www.youtube.com/@BetwixtTheSheetsPodcast Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week and ad-free podcasts. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener surveyhere https://www.surveymonkey.co.uk/r/6FFT7MK. All music from Epidemic Sounds. Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. History Hit is part of Little Dot Studios, a Certified B Corp™ Voting is now open for the Listener's Choice Award at this year's Podcast Awards! UK & Ireland listeners please place your vote on the Spotify mobile app here: https://open.spotify.com/s/xhg6PJa Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Kate Lister?

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• 2:10Kate Lister?

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• 3:17Kate Lister?

  Hello, I'm Kate Lister, and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the naughty podcast where we root around in the pants of history for your own entertainment. But before we can do so together, I do have to tell you, this is an adult podcast, but my adults to other adults about adult things in an adult way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. And if you can't tick all of that off your box, then just be off with you. We don't need you around here, holding up the show. For everyone else, let's get on with it.

• 3:46Kate Lister?

  It's the summer of 1890, and Bram Stoker has come to Whitby for a nice, restorative seaside holiday. Fresh air, bracing walks, perhaps a paddle? Instead, he finds an old graveyard, a ruined abbey looming over the cliff, tales of shipwrecks, and in the local library, one rather seductive name catches his eye: Dracula. But while the famous count may have found his name in Whitby, the story began way earlier than that. Behind him lay centuries of folklore, disturbing legends, and very real historical figures, all leading us to the vampire that we know today.

• 4:49Kate Lister?

  Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society with me, Kate Lister. It's that time of year again, folks! It's Halloween, where everybody dons a cape and buys a cheap pair of fangs and pretends that they have a decent Halloween costume. But what's the real inspiration that lies behind the Gothic masterpiece that is Bram Stoker's Dracula? Well, joining us today is the marvelous author and historian Professor Yanina Ramirez, who is going to help us find out. Fangs at the ready!

• 5:28Kate Lister?

  Well, hello and welcome to Betwixt the Sheets. It's only Yanina Ramirez. How are you doing?

• 5:34Speaker 04

  I am very happy to be here. I didn't accidentally just turn up wearing this, by the way. I've come themed.

• 5:41Kate Lister?

  Yes.

• 5:42Speaker 04

  Can you see my amazing bat wings on my dress? This is just you, Kate.

• 5:45Kate Lister?

  Looking absolutely incredible. Yanina is rocking the vampire look, and it's for our Halloween episode, so we're both doing spookiness.

• 5:52Speaker 04

  Excellent.

• 5:53Kate Lister?

  And the reason, it's not just Halloween, but we're talking about Dracula?

• 5:56Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 5:57Kate Lister?

  Or more specifically, the origins of Dracula? Because if you grab the average person on the street and said, "Name me a few vampires", I think that Dracula would be number one.

• 6:06Speaker 04

  Oh, absolutely, without a doubt. But as an invention, Dracula, I mean, I'm a medievalist. From my point of view, this is positively yesterday. Dracula, Bram Stoker's Dracula was, you know, 1897. That's not long ago for me. But are we talking about the origins, the idea of the vampire? Where the vampire comes from? What the association with blood is? And also where women come into the story as well?

• 6:29Kate Lister?

  And why are vampires sexy? I'd like to try and tease that out. Like, why? Because when you boil it all down, they're parasites. That's what it is. It's a giant leech that, in human form, why is that sexy? But they are undeniably hot, and I think every single teenage girl has to have their vampire face.

• 6:50Speaker 04

  Absolutely. My daughter's going through it at the moment, and it is a joy to behold.

• 6:53Kate Lister?

  My niece is going through it as well.

• 6:54Speaker 04

  It's so lovely. All the color palette in her wardrobe's gone black, and the big eyeliner's come out, and I'm just so happy. I'm happy, mother. Yeah, it has to happen. I mean, I've never grown out of it.

• 7:02Kate Lister?

  No, you're well in.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  I stayed well in. And it's really funny, because I often get, like, I remember when I first started doing history documentaries, and we'd be like, "Goth historian Yanina Ramirez." And I was like, "I've never, I don't like Goth music. I've never listened to that. That's not my scene." What I have always been attached to is the romance and the Gothic in the truest sense of it. And I think that that's what vampires manifest. They are the darkness, they're the nighttime, they're the antithesis of light, but they are also touching on something that isn't censored, it's not been societally dictated. It transgresses, it steps outside, and that's sexy.

• 7:44Kate Lister?

  It is sexy.

• 7:45Speaker 04

  Also, come on, black, red, white, that's sort of whole aesthetics, very sexy.

• 7:49Kate Lister?

  Because I'm pre-Twilight. I didn't come of age in Twilight. Mine was Interview with the Vampire that I was obsessed with.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Very sexy.

• 7:56Kate Lister?

  And then, when I re-watched it as an adult, that's when I went, "Oh, my God, they're gay!"

• 8:02Speaker 04

  No, it was not what was happening when we first watched it. Absolutely not.

• 8:05Kate Lister?

  It was so over my head.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  Well, that's the other thing, I think, that we'll talk about when we start thinking about what vampires do. Because they're transgressive, the hetero, the sort of the norms of sexuality, heterosexual norms, are constantly being subverted. And that's really interesting, too. So either bisexuality, lesbianism, homosexuality, these aspects have always been an underlying aspect of the vampire, certainly the modern romantic vampire image.

• 8:33Kate Lister?

  Yep. All right, well, let's take it back, then, because Bram Stoker did not come up with this. He was the latest in a long line of vampires before we get to this modern image of the vampire. What are some ancient versions of it? I mean, to date, was there like an ancient Mesopotamian Twilight?

• 8:53Speaker 04

  There has, you know, one of the, what I find so fascinating is how ubiquitous this idea of a blood sucking demon or entity is. It's found in almost every culture across the world.

• 9:06Kate Lister?

  That's fascinating.

• 9:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. There is some element of blood sucking, blood letting. I suppose it comes down to this cannibalistic aspect. But, but some of the famous ones, you think of Ranga and Bali, which is also connected to very, very important deity, the Hindu goddess Kali.

• 9:25Kate Lister?

  No.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  Yeah. And Kali is my favourite. I actually wrote a book on goddesses. And it wasn't, you know, it's so funny. I think even as an adult, your sexual awakening continues taking twists and turns as you go along.

• 9:36Kate Lister?

  It does.

• 9:37Speaker 04

  And it wasn't until I read about Kali, I was like, oh my God, the pure raw sexual power of women across time has been manifest in this sort of this goddess.

• 9:48Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 9:48Speaker 04

  And she is, I don't know if you've seen images of her cape, but she's got, she's got the forearm. She's either blue or, or sometimes painted black, big red lolling tongue, which instantly is where the Rolling Stones got their logo of the lolling tongue from.

• 10:01Kate Lister?

  Did not know that.

• 10:02Speaker 04

  Fact of the day. And she, she often wears a necklace of 50 skulls and a skirt made of human arms. And, and she's tantric. She's connected with the tantras, which are the sort of the, again, quite transgressive aspect of Hinduism, which is not just sticking to the scriptures, it's more about the, the human and the experiential and sort of pushing the limits between the spiritual and the earthly. And, and with Kali, she represents time, but she also represents death. And, and this idea of the creative and destructive energies. But the reason I found Kali so fascinating, she's so bloodthirsty. She drinks blood. That's what the long tongue is for, is for drinking

• 10:43Speaker 04

  the blood of her enemies. And very famously, she sort of stamps, accidentally stamps on her peaceful partner, Shiva, who's trying to calm her down in the midst of battle where she's like so inflamed with bloodlust that she almost kills her lover because she's just, she doesn't realise what's happening to her. And it was this reversal. I think we're so taught in the West to see female energy as quite passive.

• 11:05Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 11:06Speaker 04

  And that the masculine is the aggressive and the, the military minded and the sort of the, the pushing forward. And it's completely inverted in Kali. And, and so when you see Kali and Ranga's, Ragna's is again connected to, to Kali, that's Bali is a region that has, has Hindu myths at its origins. But Ranga is a different extension of that with these things. She's the queen of the, of these, these beings that at night their heads rip off and their guts hang down and they go around graveyards looking for the bodies of newborn babies and suck their blood. So it's all gory. It's all gory. And I was thinking about this. I was thinking about, why is it that so many world

• 11:47Speaker 04

  cultures associate women with, with sort of these, these demonic goddesses or these very powerful supernatural beings and blood? And of course, there's a natural association with blood, you know, menstruation is, it's, it's, it's, it's constant and, and part of it.

• 12:06Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 12:07Speaker 04

  But with menstruation, you have the life and death, creation and destruction. So in fact, I think that this, this is something deeper. This is something that's sort of turping into the very rhythms of being human and seeing female energy, but, but then at the same time being scared by it. By the fact that it's connected to sex, by the fact that it is connected to sensuality, this, this sort of rawness of female power, the ability to make and create life and.

• 12:35Kate Lister?

  And take life.

• 12:35Speaker 04

  Take life. So don't you think that's like possibly, that's sort of origin-y?

• 12:40Kate Lister?

  Definitely. I think that when you look like to the ancient world, they had some really terrifying female figures and female deities who, the idea of being demure, dainty and submissive would have just been absolutely deranged to them.

• 12:52Speaker 04

  Absolutely. Right. I mean, all of them, even, even when we think about the Greeks, I mean, the Greeks tend to be the worse for, the Athenians, women are slaves within Athenian societies. Part of, I put a lot of the responsibility down to the Athenians. But they have Lamia and, and she is a very kind of demonic woman who is luring people. And again, the connection with blood and, and eating bodies and Medusa and Lilith. I mean, we can look at all these world cultures, but this idea of, of drinking blood.

• 13:24Kate Lister?

  Because that's very specific, isn't it?

• 13:26Speaker 04

  Very specific.

• 13:27Kate Lister?

  Scary women, like being scary and awesome and having rage fits on a battlefield and accidentally stomping on their lover. Like that could be PMS. Yeah.

• 13:38Speaker 04

  Kali is definitely.

• 13:39Kate Lister?

  We've all been there. Just like the next day she wakes up and she goes, oh shit, I've done all of that. I'm so sorry about that. But the idea of drinking blood is very, very specific.

• 13:50Speaker 04

  And also piercing the skin to get to the blood. And I think this is, this is again, it's, we see it evolving. So you've got the ancient cultures that have this idea of blood and drinking bloods that seems to run through some of these myths.

• 14:05Kate Lister?

  Drinking the blood of your enemies. That's, that's the whole thing.

• 14:08Speaker 04

  But newborn babies is a very typical one as well.

• 14:10Kate Lister?

  Drinking the blood of newborn babies?

• 14:11Speaker 04

  Well, that's one of the Lilith myths, myths, you see. Naughty old Lilith. She, she drinks the blood of the newborn babies. That's odd. And I think again, that's connected to life and death and procreation. This idea of romance, sex and the biting, I think that's much more modern.

• 14:28Kate Lister?

  Yeah, I, I agree because there's a different, like you can trace monsters that drink blood.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:33Kate Lister?

  You can trace fearsome beings that like, I will drink the blood of my enemies.

• 14:37Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 14:38Kate Lister?

  I was, started watching the drama series Spartacus last night on Emma Southern's recommendation. I had no idea what was coming my way and it's insane. But there was someone on there that went, I will drink the blood of my enemies. But that's, that's very different. That's like a threat. What we're talking about is this, it's very intimate, actually.

• 14:54Speaker 04

  It is.

• 14:54Kate Lister?

  Drinking of blood. This isn't like severing heads and then like, bah, ha, ha.

• 14:58Speaker 04

  And this is a very, so the reason that it starts to develop, I think is, is interesting. I'm, I'm Polish Irish and Poland, my mum is, is the Polish side. And the, the Slavic regions, they have these very distinctive traditions, really complicated pre-Christian rituals that are about the relationship between the living and the dead. And, and when we start to see the emergence of what we would today recognise as vampire legends.

• 15:27Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Speaker 04

  They are very much coming in this liminal space. If we think about what's happening, happening in the Slavic territories, for a start, they have a different linguistic thread altogether. They are sort of people unto themselves, but they are split at the time that when we're thinking, we're going to start talking about some other people who come out of this region and influencing the myth. But if we're thinking sort of 15th century onwards, you've got the Holy Roman Empire on one side, you've got the Ottoman Empire on the other. It's a space that separates out Christendom from Islam. It's a space that even landscape wise, the transition starts to happen. You've got this mountains and translates into deserts. And so as a region, it's been at the front line of so

• 16:12Speaker 04

  much history, you know, so many conflicts have taken place. And just the control of that region is you need to be powerful and terrifying to control these vast swathes of mountains and forests. And I think it gave rise to a lot of different myths. So even the word, it's interesting. I was thinking like, what's the origin of the word vampire?

• 16:34Kate Lister?

  Oh God, I've never even looked that up.

• 16:35Speaker 04

  Okay. So I think there's lots of different arguments for where it may have come from, but the, the most clear explanation is it's from the Slavic, Old Slavic, possibly Old Turkish, which is, now I have to remember this, Uppior, Uppior, right?

• 16:51Kate Lister?

  Uppior.

• 16:52Speaker 04

  And I'll tell you a bit more about them in a minute, but the, what happens in Old Bulgarians, again, it's whole, this whole region, Old Bulgarian, they put a V at the beginning, it becomes Vonpiror.

• 17:03Kate Lister?

  Oh, I see what we're doing. That was very sexy. Can you do that again?

• 17:06Speaker 04

  Vonpiror.

• 17:07Kate Lister?

  Oh, yes.

• 17:08Speaker 04

  And it's very nice.

• 17:08Kate Lister?

  That's very good.

• 17:10Speaker 04

  Slavic and sexy. And yeah, so, so that's where the, whoa, that's where the word seems to come from. And the Uppiors, they are a very distinctive set of, like, it's really complicated. There's a whole hierarchy of these beings. And the way you can be, it's after death. So this is where the death connection comes in.

• 17:29Kate Lister?

  I was about to ask you, when did this, like you have to be dead.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  You have to be dead. And this is where it comes from. So this is separate to everything I was saying about Kali and goddesses and earlier bloodlust. This is revenant. This is dead people coming back from the dead. And there, there's this constant fear in these, these Slavic regions that if you have done something wrong, you've transgressed, if you are different, and this is where I find it really funny, there's a hierarchy of who is different. Left-handed people, red-headed people.

• 18:01Kate Lister?

  I'm so, so.

• 18:03Speaker 04

  If you in life had shown any sort of transgression of how everyone, well, yeah, you're done now, I'm afraid.

• 18:10Kate Lister?

  Done, that's all over.

• 18:11Speaker 04

  Gotta stick a stake in your heart after death, I'm afraid.

• 18:13Kate Lister?

  Oh, no, left-handed people and red-headed people are having stakes put through their hearts.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  I don't know if it's universal, but there is this definite superstition in this region that the upiors, the, the, these people who, and it can be something like, um, if a woman dies in childbirth, for example, that they haven't completed their relationship with life and death yet, or if weird things, like if an animal jumps over the corpse of someone, that could be the spirit of the upiors coming into the.

• 18:45Kate Lister?

  They really fear these things.

• 18:47Speaker 04

  So, and the hierarchy, like there's, there's so many ways that your soul could be possessed after you're dead. So it's just best to prepare in case.

• 18:55Kate Lister?

  This is a belief in the upiour that they would, that they are the undead, is that, is that, or they would come and get you?

• 19:02Speaker 04

  The person who is dead, the corpse will rise again as an upiour, that, that, that somehow that corpse is going to be reanimated and it's going to come back and it causes all manner of chaos when it does.

• 19:14Kate Lister?

  This is like zombies.

• 19:15Speaker 04

  Bingo. So there's a lot of overlap between these early vampire and zombie legends. Totally right. And, and even the way they looked, they didn't look sexy and cool, like, like kind of romantic. They were fat and bloated and they were sort of ruddy figured. Yeah. And, and the redness, this idea of drinking the blood is what they think gives them this sort of ruddy complexion. There's a whole load of modern proposals for why different medical complaints these people could have been suffering from, but they've all been pretty much disproved. So really you don't want to risk it. If your family member, someone you love has died, you are going to do something to stop their body reanimating.

• 19:54Kate Lister?

  And you do that by staking the heart. So would that have been, because that to us sounds like insane, like, you know, that, you know, your cousin Mildred's got red hair. She was lovely, but we better put a stake through her heart, unfortunately.

• 20:04Speaker 04

  Just to be sure, just to say so.

• 20:05Kate Lister?

  Is it actually quite a loving thing that they're doing?

• 20:07Speaker 04

  It is, it's to protect them.

• 20:08Kate Lister?

  It's a protection.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  So, so it's bizarre, like just recently, just they found 400 graves in, um, in a region in Poland where all of those women, children, uh, men, they've, all of those bodies have in some way been given anti-vampiric treatment. So it could be things like quite a few of them have been decapitated and had their heads put between their legs.

• 20:29Kate Lister?

  They really fear this then.

• 20:31Speaker 04

  Really fear it.

• 20:32Kate Lister?

  This isn't like a sort of, like a sort of half belief.

• 20:34Speaker 04

  It's not take it or leave it. No. And, and, and things, really, really interesting things. So one idea is that the, the body is going to come up out of the ground. So you've got to stop it coming out of the ground. One is you can bury them face down. You can bury them upside down. You can cut holes in their legs so they can't run away. You can weigh them down with bricks. You could put, um, a bit like the Greek idea of the, um, coins, you could put a coin in their mouth and all of these things would be found. But the best one in this particular recent discovery was a woman who, um, she'd had a padlock put on her toe, which was supposed to close her life cycle, the female, because she, I think she probably died in childbirth. So the padlock was supposed to close the

• 21:15Speaker 04

  female life cycle. And then she had a sickle, you know, placed across her neck so that if she woke up, if she was a revenant and she tried to get up, it would decapitate her.

• 21:27Kate Lister?

  Wow, that is belt and braces.

• 21:29Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 21:30Kate Lister?

  What the hell was going on there for them to do this to all of these people?

• 21:33Speaker 04

  Well, this is the thing, right? So when we get this version of the vampire from Transylvania and from this region, it's absolutely in a folklore going back hundreds of years. And we're seeing this in the archaeology. And, and the thing is, it, I do think it turns into, um, stories. Once you get the, the spread of the printing press, but then later the spread of international press, there's this emergence of dramatic accounts coming over from Eastern Europe to the West of these crises, these vampire crises, these dramas. First one's in 1725 in Serbia, and it involves the death of this individual,

• 22:12Speaker 04

  Petar Povagovic. And, yeah, and he is, he dies, but he is then seemingly buried, but he keeps being seen in the village. And Peter eventually ends up killing nine people in this village. And people have seen him do it. There's a sense that he's drinking their blood. And what the villagers want to do, they, they are terrified. They think this is just going to keep going until a whole village is wiped out. And so they want to, they want to bring the body back up. They want to exhume it. They want to open the coffin. And they want to do these anti-vampire techniques, you know, stake through the heart or, or decapitation. Uh, but the officials are sort of saying, no, we really need to get government approval for this. You can't just go ahead and exhume a body.

• 22:56Kate Lister?

  Can't just do random anti-vampire stuff willy-nilly.

• 22:59Speaker 04

  Well, you think that, Kate, but they did. They just went ahead and did it. And they exhumed him, they beheaded him, they burnt the body.

• 23:07Kate Lister?

  With no council planning.

• 23:08Speaker 04

  No council approval, I'm afraid. But the, the deaths did stop. So this vampire was stopped in his tracks.

• 23:15Kate Lister?

  Wild story.

• 23:16Speaker 04

  It is. And that's only one of, of, of others that were happening at the time. And there was this appetite. I mean, I suppose, I, I always say this thing, the people of the past were asked just earlier. And the idea that they didn't have the same sort of taste for horror, uh, for sort of intrigue and mystery, of course they did. And in the, the 1700s, yeah, they want to hear about a weird folklorish village where you, bodies are being exhumed and decapitated.

• 23:42Kate Lister?

  And what I'd say is if you were in that village and you really, with all of your heart, believed, absolutely believed that Peter, Pete was rising from the dead and knocking people off, I'd have dug that fucker up.

• 23:52Speaker 04

  You're so getting in my part of the ground, aren't you?

• 23:54Kate Lister?

  Absolutely. I wouldn't have even asked. I wouldn't have even asked permission, quite frankly.

• 23:59Speaker 04

  But it is, it's funny. It's like, they're almost like anticipating these things with some of the graveyards that are being found from the earlier period. But again, it's, it's, it's all, there's a big rise in what's happening when we go into the 1700s because you also have witch trials taking place everywhere. This is something that is unknown. It's on a, it's a, again, it's not so much even about the human transgressiveness of it. It's a religious transgression too. You know, you're stepping outside of so many norms in the vampiric world. You know, there's this idea of, of cannibalism, of blood, this idea of the sensuality of it, the intimacy of it. Um, but also this idea that it's again, it's against God. It's, it's almost devilish and demonic.

• 24:43Kate Lister?

  And it's interesting there that you're saying that, that it's got this Slavic history to it and this Slavic superstition and folklore, because I'm jumping ahead, we'll, we'll go back in. But when you get to Dracula, a really strong reading of that is that it is about British imperialism, because you have these, you have Jonathan Harker who goes to Romania, like the heartland of this place. And he's very logical and rational and he's, he's a lawyer and he's sensible. But suddenly all of these deep superstitions and folklore from this strange and mysterious place start to infiltrate. And then they arrive on the British coast. And it's a real like imperial, like in, in one way, it's, it's not mocking these beliefs, but it's holding them up as like superstitious and like, isn't it funny that these people believe this? But also there's a fear of it.

• 25:25Speaker 04

  I think you're absolutely right, Kate. And it's something I come across all the time in my work. But I'm, I, I mean, I, I do it in relation to the position of women within society, but also this idea of suppressing different cultures. And as you get colonialism and particularly British imperialism, that is a Ikea flat pack way of what a British person should behave like. And you just transpose it of whatever culture you encounter. And if that culture is behaving differently, then it's odd and it's off and it's counter and it's wrong and it's transgressive. And, I mean, we see it time and time again in, in this. And, and I think that's what gives rise to this fascination with the vampiric, that it is about the tension between what's socially acceptable and what's the norm and what isn't.

• 26:07Kate Lister?

  Ultimately, Dracula is an immigrant.

• 26:09Speaker 04

  Absolut.

• 26:10Kate Lister?

  Well, they're like coming over here, eating our women. That's what he's doing.

• 26:15Speaker 04

  Washing up in Whitby Bay, having his way with the locals.

• 26:18Kate Lister?

  That's exactly what he's doing. And there's like this fear of this invading foreign force who's seducing the, like, when you really break it down, you're just like, oh my God.

• 26:26Speaker 04

  But it's also, it's sort of what the difference between him being us going into his world, going into his castle, going to Transylvania and, and being terrified by what is being seen. And then what Bram Stoker does so brilliantly is reverses that and puts him on British soil. So I think you're so right. And I think at the root of all of this is, um, again, the appetite for the, the unknown and the, the things that are on the edges of what, what, what is normal. And vampires totally inhabit that realm. But I think if we want to think about the historical aspects and where there might be historical precedence, this region again comes right to the top. And in fact, the

• 27:07Speaker 04

  name Dracula, we can pin it to one individual. Dracul. There's this wonderful story. Um, I go to Whitby a lot. I don't know if you know.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  Fit in like a glove. Um, but yeah, Whitby is spiritual home. And it, it was in the local library there where he, he'd gone for a week's holiday. This is in, uh, 1870. And he'd had this idea, he wanted to do something about vampires.

• 27:34Kate Lister?

  Bram Stoker.

• 27:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, Bram, sorry, I should have said first, Bram Stoker.

• 27:37Kate Lister?

  I thought you were talking about Dracula. I was like, that's a bit of a book I missed.

• 27:39Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:39Kate Lister?

  He went to the library.

• 27:43Kate Lister?

  Did that bit just not make the book?

• 27:45Speaker 04

  Just decided he needed a bit of reading after, in between bites. Um, anyway, yes, Bram Stoker, of course. Uh, there is this appetite. There's definitely, I mean, we could go back across time and see what the earlier ones are in a bit, but, but one of the, to go back to the real historical figure, he had, was always going to call his main character Count Vampire, which it doesn't take much imagination.

• 28:09Kate Lister?

  It's a bit on the nose, that, isn't it?

• 28:10Speaker 04

  It's a little bit too close, isn't it?

• 28:12Kate Lister?

  It's like Mr. Werewolf or something. It's like, we can do better than that, I think.

• 28:18Speaker 04

  Anyway, he, he provides this little book and it's a very short pamphlet, a tour guide of Moldavia and Transylvania. And, and he's reading through and he finds this one footnote and it's a reference to the house of Dracul. And in this footnote, the author has put, Dracul also means devil. Now, this is true to an extent, the, the, when we come to talk about who these people are, the, the Draculs, that word comes actually from dragon, Dracul. But it can by extension be connected with, with the devil because it is this sort of, um, again, demonic force. But let's go back, because then that, that

• 29:01Speaker 04

  whetted Bram Stoker's curiosity, he went off and befriended an expert on this region and asked him about all the different historical figures. And he found out about this individual, Vlad Dracul, otherwise known as.

• 29:15Kate Lister?

  Mr. Impaler.

• 29:16Speaker 04

  Mr. Impaler himself.

• 29:18Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 29:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I mean, that's where history and legend and myth really start to collapse a little bit, don't it?

• 29:26Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah, definitely.

• 29:30Kate Lister?

  I'll be back after this short break.

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• 33:04Kate Lister?

  He wasn't a vampire, was he, Vlad the Impaler? But he was an asshole.

• 33:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:10Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 33:10Speaker 04

  Definitely an asshole.

• 33:11Kate Lister?

  You don't get a nickname like that for just like being kind to your relatives.

• 33:16Speaker 04

  I have a really, really love-hate relationship with Vlad the Impaler.

• 33:20Kate Lister?

  Do you think he's been like hard? Do you think it's all a bit of a PR disaster?

• 33:23Speaker 04

  No, I mean, I think he impaled. He loved a bit of impaling.

• 33:26Kate Lister?

  Just impale one person and that's all that can go on about?

• 33:29Speaker 04

  His historical circumstances are really fascinating, right? Because, so he's, he's born in about the 1430s, I think it is. He's at his height around the time of the fall of Constantinople in 1453. But his childhood's quite sad. His father is the one who first gets the surname of Dracula, because he joins the order, this newly-formed Order of the Dragon. And the Order of the Dragon is, it's a little bit like when we think of the Knights Templars. They are a group of Christians who are sort of the last line of defense against the Ottoman Empire. Because once you pass through those territories, that's it. This is, this is the last line.

• 34:11Speaker 04

  And it's the finest representatives of the military houses and lords and owners of that region. And so he takes this name on of Dracula. And his son Vlad, as the second, is Vlad Dracula. He's the son of.

• 34:28Kate Lister?

  Oh, hello.

• 34:29Speaker 04

  Right, Dracula. And, and so Vlad is sent away. His father's killed and Vlad has this sort of lifelong loathing for the person who, the group that killed his father. But he has a second group that he hates, and that's the Ottomans. He was taken hostage as a child and taken to the Ottomanian court. He was brought up speaking lots of languages, having a very nice time, learning to be a little military man and hadn't quite. I think he was treated worse than his brother. His brother stayed in the Ottoman court and actually ended up fighting him for.

• 35:08Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 35:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, because he enjoyed his captivity and he chose to stay with his captors. Vlad didn't. Vlad turned his back on them and he wanted to get revenge on two fronts. The people back in Wallachia, in his homeland, who'd killed his father, and the Ottonians who had, in his mind, imprisoned him. So 20, he's now an adult and he gets back. He leaves his hostage situation, goes back home to Wallachia. So in this region of Wallachia, where Vlad is from, there's a position, a ruler called a voyvod, who is sort of like, he's, he's, again, he has to be a really, really strong military leader, but he's constantly at war on many, many fronts.

• 35:52Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 35:53Speaker 04

  And as a result, this is a high turnover of these guys. They don't stay in the job very long.

• 35:57Kate Lister?

  I bet there is.

• 35:59Speaker 04

  But if you have the job, you have got to be hard as nails. Because people are coming at you from all sides, all the time.

• 36:08Kate Lister?

  There's not going to be taking any mental health days there.

• 36:10Speaker 04

  No way, no. And no, no days of rest, my dears, not for a voyvod. And after, you know, a few years, Vlad manages to get his hands on this position. He's killed off in, in, in a duel, his competitor, who is also responsible for his father's death. So this is like, he's revenged his father now. And, and he takes on the role. The Ottonians come over, they're like, right, we, we want to take Wallachia back. And in the meantime, as they're approaching Vlad's court, there's silence everywhere. Like, this is weird. Why is there no peasants on the streets? Why is there nobody walking around? What's going on? Why is it so eerie? As they get closer and closer to Vlad's court, they see what they think is a forest. It's not a forest.

• 36:52Kate Lister?

  Oh, no.

• 36:53Speaker 04

  It's thousands of bodies impaled on spikes. And they turn around and they go, they bugger off the whole Ottoman army.

• 37:02Kate Lister?

  You fucking would, wouldn't you? That, that's insane. He skewed his own people as a defense mechanism.

• 37:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:07Kate Lister?

  Wow.

• 37:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, his own people. And it's, and, and so this is where he gets this reputation for being really brutal. But what's, what's really interesting is actually what he's doing is creating such fear of justice, his justice, that nobody puts a foot wrong. There's this story, right? So a merchant comes to his court and he's got a cartload with, with goods and with gold. And he says, where should I park? Where should I park my carts? Don't want it to get nicked overnight. Vlad says, in my kingdom, park it anywhere. No one will touch that cart because they'll be too scared to.

• 37:42Kate Lister?

  I bet they won't.

• 37:43Speaker 04

  So the guy parks it overnight, comes back, yeah, the cart's there, yep, all his goods are there. But there's a bag, a small bag of gold, missing. Vlad sends in his, his team. They find the person who stole the coins, instantly impaled. As anyone had that had contact with this man is impaled. The merchant's just there going, oh my God, what the hell's going on around here? And Vlad gives him back his bag of coins. Now he's put one.

• 38:11Kate Lister?

  Thank you.

• 38:12Speaker 04

  No, no, no, listen to this, even more of a twist. He's put one extra coin in there. And the man's counting out the coins. He realizes it's one extra. It's a test. The man then goes, oh, Vlad, there's one extra coin here. This is for you. And he lets him go on his way. If he kept that coin, he'd have been impaled too. So what it is, is like extremely harsh justice. But for a reason, region where there is no way of controlling it in so many ways, the only way he can bring relative peace, dare I say,

• 38:46Kate Lister?

  Is murdering everyone.

• 38:47Speaker 04

  Is through this unrelenting murderous nature. But the, the reason that the vampiric thing becomes connected, obviously, it's an eerie place, there's castles, but there's this, his, his legend starts to spread after. He dies in 1470, I think it is, 1477. And his stories start to spread in Germany. And this is alongside the invention of the Gutenberg printing press.

• 39:09Kate Lister?

  Right.

• 39:10Speaker 04

  And then this pamphlet comes out telling the really grim stories of Vlad the Impaler with the first woodcut prints. And there's this very famous print, it was getting printed in tens of thousands, right? Sent all over Europe. And it shows all these bodies impaled on spikes and a bearded Vlad at a table with a bowl of blood in front of him.

• 39:30Kate Lister?

  Oh, you can see what's happened there, can't you?

• 39:33Speaker 04

  Can't you just? There is no suggestion that Vlad drank blood. That's not in any of the reports. He impaled people because.

• 39:39Kate Lister?

  He had some standards.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  He had some standards. But these, he'd grown up seeing it, right? Impaling was done by the Ottomans.

• 39:44Kate Lister?

  You're not, you're not going to convince me that this is acceptable.

• 39:47Speaker 04

  Everyone's impaling everyone at this time, hey? He's just doing a bit more of it.

• 39:53Kate Lister?

  When you're taking a revision of Vlad the Impaler.

• 39:56Speaker 04

  This version, Vlad the nice guy. I'm going to call him from now on.

• 40:00Kate Lister?

  He was great with kids.

• 40:01Speaker 04

  Vlad the sensible.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  Oh God. Yeah, I mean, he was.

• 40:05Kate Lister?

  You try keeping law and order in a place like Valakia.

• 40:08Speaker 04

  I know, I shouldn't, I shouldn't, I shouldn't try and rehabilitate Vlad the Impaler, but he, yeah.

• 40:12Kate Lister?

  If anyone can though.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, he's, he's, he's seen this growing up. That's what, I mean, think about the crucifixion. That's what the Romans were using as a form of. Impaling is almost the same. It's a slow, painful punishment. So it's, it's not just that you're going to be executed. You are gonna suffer. For like, if you're done, if it's done properly, could be up to a week.

• 40:31Kate Lister?

  Oh my God.

• 40:32Speaker 04

  I mean, what a way to scare the living crap out of anyone. Anyone's just gonna be like, oh, that is a fate worse than death. I, I, I'm not gonna go put a foot wrong because that could be me.

• 40:42Kate Lister?

  That is true. That is true.

• 40:43Speaker 04

  But he's literally seen it all his childhood. And when he comes back and does it to them, they don't like it. So anyway, I feel like he's got a bit of a bad rep.

• 40:49Kate Lister?

  We might have to get you back on to talk about, to talk about Vlad. But here's the thing, Vlad's not sexy. Right. Impaling people isn't sexy.

• 40:57Speaker 04

  Yeah, but I've got a thing for Vikings and marauders and.

• 40:59Kate Lister?

  Do you? Okay. Okay. Well, here's, here's one go. But my question is, like, when do the vampires get sexy?

• 41:08Speaker 04

  Well, I've kind of got to stop off on the way because we haven't actually talked about the other person from very similar, so Vlad is like modern day Romania.

• 41:16Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  Black sea across that way. Then you've got your Czech areas and Slovakia, that area coming up into Poland. We've got another character who is just about a hundred years after Vlad the Impaler.

• 41:31Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 41:31Speaker 04

  And this is where we get the female influence again.

• 41:34Kate Lister?

  I know who you're gonna say.

• 41:35Speaker 04

  You know, I'm gonna say, who am I gonna say?

• 41:36Kate Lister?

  You're gonna say Countess Elizabeth Bathory.

• 41:39Speaker 04

  I most certainly am. And she, I mean, her story, again, I could do you an hour on her, my friends, because she is fascinating. Again, if I'm trying to rehabilitate Vlad the Impaler, boy, am I gonna try and rehabilitate Elizabeth.

• 41:51Kate Lister?

  There's a new book that's just been published on her by Shelley Pahaki, just came on. And yeah, and she was fascinating. Anyway, so yeah.

• 41:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:59Kate Lister?

  You tell us.

• 42:00Speaker 04

  No, no, no. I mean, again, just fascinating and.

• 42:03Kate Lister?

  Not a vampire.

• 42:04Speaker 04

  Not a vampire and possibly not a serial killer in the truest sense of the word.

• 42:08Kate Lister?

  She was saying, she was saying that actually these are accusations of witchcraft.

• 42:11Speaker 04

  Absolutely. And it's, it's, it's really misogynist, but it's also coming from this area of there's this sort of liminal threat of where she is. That there is a brutality. And what, what we do know for sure, yes, lots of people died in her court. Yes, she absolutely beat, abused, attacked only young girls, no men, only young girls. Could go into that a bit more. But anyway, all these bodies are found, she put on trial, they think about 60, 50, 60 she gets finally accused of. Not the 600 that this, this little kid gives treaty on. But every one of those kids, yes, they've been abused and they've been beaten. But there isn't any suggestion of this blood, this bathing in the blood, no vampiric association.

• 42:54Speaker 04

  And it seems that what happened is she was brought up in a feudal system where the lords and ladies beat the servants if they didn't do things right. And I've read, I've read a couple of new theories, but what it seems is she must have suffered some sort of trauma as a teenage girl. And whenever she finds herself in a case of high stress or pressure or something politically facing, or something's gone wrong and she's, she's stressed out. She regresses back to that and she lashes out at the nearest young girl she can get her hands on.

• 43:22Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 43:23Speaker 04

  And, but that then in the hands of kind of misogynists and, and this sort of idea of witchcraft gets turned into this mad connection with vampires. And suddenly she's this vampire that's bathing in the blood of young virgins to keep herself youthful. And none of that is true. But I do think that the connection with this region and this idea of brute force that we see with Vlad, we also see with Elizabeth.

• 43:48Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 43:48Speaker 04

  And, and again, how does that turn into the sexy vampire? We've got to get up to the Victorians as well.

• 43:54Kate Lister?

  Well, we've got, because we've spoken about your, your toxic historical boyfriend Vlad. My toxic historical boyfriend's gonna make an appearance. Byron.

• 44:02Speaker 04

  Absolutely. You see, your toxic historical boyfriend.

• 44:06Kate Lister?

  Your, your toxic historical boyfriend would pick mine.

• 44:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, mine's like, beat you, beat, you know, beat people around the head toxic. Yours is just like sleep with a thousand people.

• 44:15Kate Lister?

  Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is.

• 44:19Kate Lister?

  He would, he'd impale you in a very different way.

• 44:21Speaker 04

  He would. I'm not sure. Yeah. I mean, to me, he's a little bit, yeah. Byron's always been, like, I did English literature at university and there were so many young kind of boys that really wanted to be Byron.

• 44:34Kate Lister?

  Really?

• 44:35Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:35Kate Lister?

  And you wanted to be Vlad the Impaler?

• 44:39Speaker 04

  Wage war on them all. I do like Byron. I think that Byron is such an important cog in the whole vampire story.

• 44:46Kate Lister?

  So tell me what he does.

• 44:47Speaker 04

  He's pretty much central to it.

• 44:49Kate Lister?

  Okay.

• 44:50Speaker 04

  And we do have earlier, late 1700s, small short stories that are starting to circulate, usually about females being the kind of blood suckers.

• 45:01Kate Lister?

  Sheridan Lefanos.

• 45:03Speaker 04

  Yes, a Camilla. And that, so that is, actually, that's a little bit later. That's 1870. But with Byron, he, he's reading these things. Remember also Byron is fascinated by the East. He goes and fights in the Greek War of Independence, for God's sake. I mean, he's a patron saint practically in Greece. And he, he loves to collect these stories of what's going on, particularly in, in Eastern Europe. He's getting these, these comments, these references back. He's hearing about things like naughty Peter and the, the headings and stuff. And this all really taps into his sense of the romantic, of the deviant, of the transgressive.

• 45:47Speaker 04

  And he writes on that famous occasion where him and the Shellys find themselves holed up bored on a rainy afternoon. And he sets them, they're, where are they? They're in.

• 45:57Kate Lister?

  Swit- Swit- Swit-.

• 45:59Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 45:59Kate Lister?

  No, Geneva.

• 46:00Speaker 04

  Geneva, that's it. And yeah, each of them's gonna write a story. He starts penning a very short little bit about, and one of the characters in it is, is somebody that ends up being, becoming a character in another story. Because with the Shellys is John.

• 46:19Kate Lister?

  Polidori.

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Polly Dolly, Byron called. Polly Dolly. They call him Dr. Polly Dolly as well, because he is the physician, the doctor that's there. And he takes this, this short snippet that Byron's done where he's referred to a doctor in his, to, what's the name of it? Mr. Duval, I think Byron's one is. But he takes that character and actually mocks Byron. He makes the vampire, he goes on, Polidori goes on to write, to publish this work.

• 46:49Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 46:49Speaker 04

  As the vampire. And the main character is based on Byron. And what's his name? Havinal, I think the character is. But anyway, he, he publishes it. But when the book is first published, it's accidentally published as a work by Byron.

• 47:06Kate Lister?

  Whoopsie daisy.

• 47:07Speaker 04

  So it becomes an instant bestseller. John's then spends the rest of his life going, hold on a minute, I wrote this. But, but it meant that it got into the mainstream consciousness, this idea of vampires. And in that story, he's blended these Eastern European myths of the opium, sort of the, the revenants with Byron. Smash the two together and come up with this sexy vampire. Pale, mysterious, alluring, sleeps with everyone, seduces everyone. So he's responsible for it. So Byron indirectly, right, has started a legend that ties directly back to him.

• 47:48Speaker 04

  It all ties back to his personality, his legends. Because as you know, you know, he was seen as irresistible.

• 47:54Kate Lister?

  He was.

• 47:59Speaker 04

  I'll be back after this short break.

• 48:11Speaker 06

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• 48:54Speaker 06

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• 49:11Speaker 02

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• 49:53Kate Lister?

  Now we've got the sexy vampire and that starts to permeate through the 19th century. We've got Lefenu's Camilla, lesbian vampires make an appearance before Bram Stoker gets his hands on it.

• 50:05Speaker 04

  I mean, Camilla is, it's even now, there's bits of it that make you go, oh, it's so hot. And, and it's so different too, because this predatory romantic side is entirely coming out of this Polidori thread, the Byron-esque thread. Up until this point, there is no suggestion or no connection between blood sucking revenants and sex, really.

• 50:28Kate Lister?

  No, that's, it's, that would have been very strange if you'd spoken to those, those people, gone, that's sexy, that's not sexy.

• 50:34Speaker 04

  That's not sexy.

• 50:35Kate Lister?

  That's not sexy at all.

• 50:36Speaker 04

  Digging up the body and putting the steak, that's not sexy. So the sex is totally this sort of invention of, of the 19th century. And, and it's coming out of the romantic and I think again, it's, it's this idea of reaching the sublime, the idea that through danger and fear comes this sublime release of ecstasy, which they're all toying with in their own way, aren't they, the romantics? They're all on the edge of that. Sex and death and.

• 51:05Kate Lister?

  And Bram Stoker's Dracula is like, you don't have to look too far to find the sex in that. It is just fusing with it. And also quite a lot of same-sex attraction is in there as well.

• 51:16Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, yeah, if we go sort of via Camilla's work, Camilla's work, it's, it's this idea of, in, in that story. Well, I find it so interesting that, that he wrote this work about these two women, Laura and Camilla, Camilla. And they seem to have what in some cases could be seen as, she's desperate. Laura is this young child who's growing up in this remote Austrian castle and she has no human contact apart from her father. And this, this mysterious girl rocks up, they have an accident in their carriage outside the castle. Laura's delighted because she's had no friends and this, this girl's a similar age to her. The mother comes in and goes, oh no, I'm on a really important errand. I must run off.

• 52:01Speaker 04

  Please look after my daughter for three months and I'll come back and get her.

• 52:04Kate Lister?

  As you do.

• 52:05Speaker 04

  As you do, disappears, leaves this girl there. And, and everything about her is slightly odd. I love her. She's like my spirit animal. She doesn't get up in the mornings.

• 52:14Kate Lister?

  Fair.

• 52:15Speaker 04

  So she doesn't go to prayer or anything because she's still having a lie in. She wanders about at night, very pale.

• 52:21Kate Lister?

  Totally.

• 52:21Speaker 04

  Very strange. But she becomes really best friends, you could say with Laura. But then it starts to cross over into the intimate and then it definitely crosses over into lesbian because

• 52:33Kate Lister?

  It definitely does.

• 52:34Speaker 04

  The descriptions are about becoming one. It's all about this sort of love and hate and fear and excitement. But, but the, there's a really orgasmic sense to some of the passages in that text that is climactic. And, and then it, it turns out that this woman, this girl is the reincarnation of a, of a baroness that goes back hundreds of years. And has kept coming back again and again as a different vampire, young vampire girl. So the, the connection between blood, women, vampire, death, power, Elizabeth, all these links across time. The vampire legend is, is so fascinating because while it is a spider's web, of all the mythological threads, it, it, it's quite consistent.

• 53:18Speaker 04

  There is a constant across the centuries, even the millennia, that you can see is sort of sticking.

• 53:24Kate Lister?

  What's interesting about the vampire legends as well, and it just happens with, with all kinds of different legends, is each generation that comes to it finds something new and changes it slightly. Like the vampires that we've got today, like you sort of your Twilight vampires, they would have been

• 53:39Speaker 04

  In their top shop.

• 53:41Kate Lister?

  In their top shop, like look, going to high school. That would have been so bizarre to the Victorians.

• 53:46Speaker 04

  Absolutely.

• 53:47Kate Lister?

  What do you think we're doing? Because you can look at Dracula and then you can look at Byron and, but you've got like, you've got all the benefit of distance. That you can go, oh, I see what you're doing. Like this is fear of eastern cultures. This is eroticisation. This is sexual repression. This is same-sex lust. But like, it doesn't take, I think it was Freud who said that semen and blood are often interchangeable in the subconscious. You know, like a vampire turning up to your bed to pierce your neck and suck your blood is like, come on now.

• 54:13Speaker 04

  Absolutely. It's penetration. It's all about fluids and it's, yeah.

• 54:18Kate Lister?

  But as a sort of, I don't even know if we could answer this now, but what are we doing with vampires? As like a way to round this off, like what is our generation? What is the vampire doing for us? Why are they in high school and glittering?

• 54:32Speaker 04

  Why are they still happening? Well, my favourite manifestation of any vampire is, is the current one, What We Did in the Shadows.

• 54:40Kate Lister?

  Oh, I love that.

• 54:41Speaker 04

  I'm obsessed with it. I'm absolutely obsessed with it. I love, the main characters, all three of them are hysterically funny.

• 54:49Kate Lister?

  Yeah.

• 54:49Speaker 04

  But they're also distinctive, all British as well, which I find really fascinating as this kind of American global phenomenon. But it's funny. And I think that's what we're doing with it. We, we know so much. It's so deeply entrenched, the basics, the iconography of it, the imagery, the

• 55:07Kate Lister?

  That we can now parody it.

• 55:08Speaker 04

  We all know, we all know the basics. You know, steak through the heart, maybe a bit of garlic. We know what it looks like. We know. I mean, I was writing a few years ago about the world record attempt to get the most vampires in one space. And it was over 1,300 met at Whitby Abbey.

• 55:24Kate Lister?

  That's a lot of vampires.

• 55:25Speaker 04

  And they, they got into the world record. And in each case, every single vampire that was turned to, had the same uniform. It was a white shirt. It was a waistcoat. It was a cape. It was a hat. So, you know, the, the trappings of a vampire that Byron and Paul Dossi, and even, even you right the way up Stoker and beyond, they were still establishing the foundations, the building blocks. They were still twisting with it. You know, we can, can we make them women? Can we make them homosexual? Can we put them in a different setting? Whereas now it's so rooted that what we have to do with it is play with it. We have to play with it and enjoy it and put it in our own environments. And so Twilight does that. Of course it does. It sticks it in, you know, American high school.

• 56:08Kate Lister?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 04

  But with What We Did in the Shadows, it's incongruous because they're just in, yeah, in America, in Staten Island. And they're just trying to kind of get on with their day. They're bored most of the time. And yet underneath it, they're sexy and they're funny and they've been around for hundreds of years. And so I think that's where we're at at the moment. We, we sort of understand it so well, we can play with it. And, and that's why I think teenagers still like it. There's a sense of play and there's a sense of rebellion and not looking like everyone else. When everyone else is looking one way, that idea of obviously physically transgressing through the way that you dress, it's just rebellion, isn't it?

• 56:45Kate Lister?

  It is.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  And sexy.

• 56:47Kate Lister?

  They're, they're always going to be sexy. They're always.

• 56:49Speaker 04

  Good in, in, you know, black.

• 56:51Kate Lister?

  Everyone does. And I haven't met a single woman that doesn't go feral for Matt Berry, quite frankly, as Laszlo Ravenclaw.

• 56:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. I just, I just adore the lot of them. I just think all of them.

• 57:01Kate Lister?

  Absolutely.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  What's her name? She's my favourite.

• 57:04Kate Lister?

  Nadia.

• 57:05Speaker 04

  My Nadia. Oh.

• 57:06Kate Lister?

  She's brilliant.

• 57:07Speaker 04

  Oh my God. I adore her.

• 57:09Kate Lister?

  Long live the vampires.

• 57:11Speaker 04

  Well, that's it. Long live the vampires. Long live the strange. Long live the transgressive. And yeah, as I say, we're not that different from people that have gone before. And, and I love the fact that my teenager's carrying on the baton.

• 57:22Kate Lister?

  Oh, you know.

• 57:23Speaker 04

  Kind of got bias some more eyeliner.

• 57:25Kate Lister?

  You have been magnificent. Thank you so much for coming along. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?

• 57:30Speaker 04

  Oh gosh. I am on social media, Dr Janina Ramirez, with a J, good Polish J, going on, Janina Ramirez. And I've just got books out, my latest book, Agenda, Real Women Behind the Myths That Shape Europe is out. No vampires, but lots of incredibly cool stories of, of powerful women in the past. And otherwise I'm all over the shop. I'm making programmes, I'm doing talks. Find me, come and see me. I give great hugs.

• 57:57Kate Lister?

  She does, she does. I can attest to that. But just watch where she's putting her teeth. Thank you so much. You've been spectacular.

• 58:04Speaker 04

  Thank you, my love. Camera's off. We're going to go and get a bite to eat.

• 58:11Kate Lister?

  This podcast was edited by Tim Arstall, produced by Sophie G, McKenna Fernandez and Georgie Turner. The engineer was Hanif Hussain and the senior producer was Freddy Chick. Join me again between the sheets, The History of Sex Scandal in Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.