Medieval Origins of Dracula

With Halloween just around the corner, it's the perfect time to really get to know the familiar figure of Dracula. What vampires came before him? What fears were the Victorians projecting onto him? And perhaps most importantly, who played the best version of him? Joining Anthony and Maddy today is Dr Kaja Franck of the University of Hertfordshire, who is a master of all things Gothic. This episode was edited by Hannah Feodorov. Produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Freddy Chick. 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. After Dark 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. Click to place your vote on the Spotify mobile app: 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:04Anthony Delaney?

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• 0:36Anthony Delaney?

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• 0:51Speaker 02

  Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ+ individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect, while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org/lgbtq. That's redcrossblood.org/lgbtq.

• 1:41Speaker 00

  Teeth pierce the throat. Blood runs hot across cold lips. A corpse drained of blood. The vampire waits in the darkness. Skin, corpse, pale. Eyes burning red, lips wet with blood. Two sharpened fangs waiting to sink into living flesh. This is Dracula, crawling down castle walls, drinking from the throat, turning his victims into the undead. But Bram Stoker did not create this monster. In today's episode, we uncover the bloody folklore, superstition,

• 2:25Speaker 00

  and very real corpses that gave birth to the vampire we know today. Welcome to After Dark.

• 2:59Speaker 00

  Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie.

• 3:01Anthony Delaney?

  And I'm Anthony.

• 3:02Speaker 00

  And on today's episode, we wanted to explore one of the most iconic figures of this spooky time of year, the vampire. I think it's fair to say he's After Dark's Father Christmas.

• 3:13Anthony Delaney?

  And joining us today to explore the disturbing origins of the vampire is Dr. Kaya Frank. Dr. Kaya is an expert in all things Gothic. Kaya, welcome to After Dark.

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me. It's a delight.

• 3:26Anthony Delaney?

  It is. You were telling me before we started, this is the manifestation of your friend, who despite all her pro sides, is American, you said, as if that was a bad thing.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  No, I meant that as an American, she was more likely, because she may well be listening. She was more likely to be more, whereas I'm a British person. She's like, you could contact and say, I'm good at things. Will you have me on? And I was like, yeah, no, that's, I'm British.

• 3:50Speaker 00

  That's deeply mortifying.

• 3:51Speaker 03

  Say nothing and just be mildly disappointed for the rest of my life, which is my option. And she had said that, oh, I'll email in and say you should have Kaya on. And actually, that didn't happen. I just randomly got an email whilst I was in the Rare Books Reading Room at the British Library.

• 4:08Anthony Delaney?

  Oh, that's nice. It's a nice setting to get that email, yeah.

• 4:11Speaker 00

  This is kind of After Dark lore we appreciate.

• 4:14Speaker 03

  It was wonderful. I was like, keep cool, keep calm, read it. Closed the laptop, went to the toilet, came back, read it again. It hasn't disappeared, so I guess this is real. And so my friend says she manifested it.

• 4:27Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 4:27Anthony Delaney?

  We get to all the oaky spooky girls and gays eventually.

• 4:31Speaker 00

  We have a big long list of you and we're just working our way through.

• 4:35Anthony Delaney?

  Now, before we get into the exact details of this, I just want to point out that vampires did not begin with Dracula, but we will mostly be talking about Dracula today. Because vampire-like revenants appear across European folklore long before Stoker. We have dead bodies believed to leave their graves. They're attacking the living. They're spreading disease or draining vitality. All that kind of good stuff that has been knocking around for centuries. So this doesn't begin in the 19th century. But as I say, we are going to be talking mostly about Dracula today.

• 5:09Speaker 00

  Beautiful pronunciation. It may not be from these parts, but Transylvania, anyone?

• 5:15Speaker 03

  That was very Legosian.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  Okay, Kaya, we are going to be talking about Dracula. Let's start with the very basics for anyone who hasn't read the novel or seen one of the gazillion adaptations on screen. Give us the bare bones of the story, please. Go.

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Okay, so Dracula is written by Bram Stoker and it's a epistolary. Oh, I hate that word.

• 5:39Anthony Delaney?

  It's a piss-take, I thought you were going to say.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  I mean, there have been piss-take versions. And I think it has real piss-take elements in it. Particularly some real critiques of English people as tourists in the early stage. But essentially, it's like letters and diary entries. And broadly speaking, follows a young solicitor who goes off to Transylvania to stay with Count Dracula to help him buy a house in England. Because that's really bloody hard even back then. He gets captured by Dracula and sort of goes missing. Meanwhile, Dracula comes over to England and starts preying on the solicitor's wife, his wife's close friend. And then when Jonathan Harker, the solicitor, arrives back,

• 6:24Speaker 03

  you get a crew of people who come together, led by Dr. Van Helsing, expert in the esoteric and weird. And they make it their mission to kill Count Dracula. There's lots of fun adventures, weird, oaky spooky bits. But generally, that's what it is. A kill the monster narrative.

• 6:45Anthony Delaney?

  Can I ask you a question, Maddie? Only so I can answer it myself as well.

• 6:49Speaker 00

  That is the only time you ever ask me a question.

• 6:52Anthony Delaney?

  I actually don't care what you need to say.

• 6:54Speaker 00

  Yeah, literally does not give a shit.

• 6:55Anthony Delaney?

  Do you like the epistolary form?

• 6:58Speaker 00

  I have a complicated relationship with it. I know you're going to say you hate it.

• 7:02Anthony Delaney?

  I hate it.

• 7:02Speaker 00

  Yeah, I know you are.

• 7:03Anthony Delaney?

  Fucking hate it. Can I do that? I've been doing the podcast for three years. I don't know if we can swear. I hate it.

• 7:07Speaker 00

  We swear constantly. It's fine. As someone who did an English undergrad degree, I feel like I've been traumatized by the 18th century in this way. I do like it when it's kind of, there's like a little bit of it left in. So like a Jane Austen or something where you've got, you know, you've got.

• 7:24Anthony Delaney?

  I can deal with that.

• 7:24Speaker 00

  You've got a narrator, but then you've got letters within that. That's fine. I can cope with that. When the whole thing is letters, no.

• 7:32Anthony Delaney?

  Kaya, what do you think?

• 7:33Speaker 03

  I tend to agree. I actually don't mind it because I actually think the way that Dracula does it is quite different because it has diary entries, it has different formats.

• 7:41Speaker 00

  It feels like it's kind of texturally rich, doesn't it? It feels like a world built rather than just, and here's another letter, and here's another one, and here's some characters talking to each other through letters. Like, yeah.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  And also the other thing is that very quickly, the letters don't feel like you're actually reading a letter. They feel like you're reading a narrative. Yeah. If you receive that letter, you'd be like, Jesus Christ.

• 7:59Anthony Delaney?

  Jonathan, for the love of God.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  Also, why are you still sending me letters when you simply can't send me letters? Because you're trapped in a.

• 8:08Anthony Delaney?

  Who's collecting this?

• 8:09Speaker 00

  Listen, don't question the logistics.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  So I don't mind it, but I find other ones, I teach them and I have read them. And I too, I'm traumatized by the 18th century.

• 8:19Speaker 00

  It's too much, guys.

• 8:22Speaker 03

  God, it's like, oh, it's so stilted and awkward.

• 8:25Speaker 00

  Yeah. I think it must have felt so exciting to people in that moment. You know, it's the form of the novel emerging and it's that kind of way of communicating that everyone would have known, everyone would have written letters to each other constantly. And, you know, not in the way that we would do it now, not that anyone does write letters. But, you know, they were meant to be read aloud and shared. They were kind of public property. And so I think it would have felt a lot more familiar to people than it does now.

• 8:47Anthony Delaney?

  Just listening to you say that, I wonder if it was a bit like, terrible example. I'm so sorry to be so basic. But I wonder if it's a bit like the Blair Witch Project of its day in that sense. Do you know what I mean? Like in terms of like, we're going, we're going. This is how we were like. It felt more modern is kind of what you're saying.

• 9:01Speaker 00

  The form is.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Oh, well, Anthony, sorry. I'm just, I don't know.

• 9:05Anthony Delaney?

  That was so kind.

• 9:06Speaker 00

  Kaya is levitating off.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  I'm very excited. Well, probably what we kind of think of as the OG Gothic novel. If we talk about big G Gothic, which is like, tend to think when we think about it as a genre, and we have the nice, simple narrative. Well, the first novel, Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto, when it comes out, it is masquerading as a found text.

• 9:29Anthony Delaney?

  Right.

• 9:30Speaker 03

  So it has a little preface. And so the found text format then becomes the found footage format. And what's really exciting.

• 9:37Speaker 00

  I've never made that connection because I was going to say found text, MR James, right? The absolute foundation of that tradition of ghost stories. We're really off topic. We will come back. But the idea of, you know, oh, this ancient text has been brought up out of the archive or discovered somewhere and then, uh-oh, it's full of horrors and secrets. But I've never made that connection on the screen. Oh, my gosh.

• 9:57Speaker 03

  And it's like every time it jumps mediums, there's a moral panic. So the classic one, of course, is, and I haven't watched this film, is Cannibal Holocaust, which is an Italian horror. Yeah, don't watch it. It's got animal, actual animal death and torture. And it is very, very questionable. But that was a very early sort of found footage horror film, I think 1970s. Might be a little bit earlier, but I think it's in color, so 1970s. And that caused a huge viewer, partly because the content is appalling. But also because the director had sort of said to the actors, can you just go into hiding a bit? So they think it's actually a found footage. And then he got arrested for the possibility that he actually created a snuff film or letter to the death of these actors.

• 10:40Speaker 03

  And he's like, can you come back out of hiding and tell everyone? But he still got done because it like, I mean.

• 10:45Anthony Delaney?

  Too weird.

• 10:46Speaker 03

  It is too weird. And it genuinely does have animals being killed. So there's lots of things that by modern standards, we're like, fine, whatever. But I think everyone was like, don't.

• 10:54Speaker 00

  There's a line that, yeah, yeah.

• 10:55Speaker 03

  That's not good. Or a turtle in this case.

• 10:58Speaker 00

  And next it will be the found voice notes. Can you imagine our voice notes released to the world?

• 11:03Anthony Delaney?

  There's a podcast somewhere of that already.

• 11:04Speaker 00

  Oh, there must be.

• 11:05Anthony Delaney?

  A found voice note.

• 11:06Speaker 00

  That's a really good idea for a podcast. Or like a found podcast that's like, if anyone's hearing this.

• 11:12Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 11:13Speaker 00

  I'm already dead. I'm going to make that.

• 11:15Anthony Delaney?

  Interesting. Look, it's almost as if you teach this.

• 11:17Speaker 00

  I know. Right, let's get back to Dracula, shall we? I have in my notes here. Something about the origins of Dracula specifically. And we're going to talk, you know, more broadly, you mentioned Horace Walpole, and we're going to, you know, talk about Gothic and the vampire idea more generally. But thinking about the origins of Dracula, we've got here, Antony's Tinder bio. Bit mythic.

• 11:42Anthony Delaney?

  I'm married, I've been married for the last million years.

• 11:44Speaker 00

  Bit mythic, bit Gothic, bit sexy, bit Irish.

• 11:47Anthony Delaney?

  Ah, I'll take all of those things. By the way, I'm not very sexy, let's be honest.

• 11:53Speaker 00

  I mean.

• 11:53Anthony Delaney?

  Or mythic.

• 11:54Speaker 03

  Don't do yourself that.

• 11:56Anthony Delaney?

  I won't. Well, I'm definitely quite Irish.

• 11:59Speaker 00

  A little bit, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, Kaya, talk to me about Antony. Yeah, talk to me about the origins then of Dracula, because there are all these elements. And I am, do you know, it's interesting, preparing for this episode, actually, obviously, I knew Bram Stoker was Irish, didn't realise the strong thread throughout this story, its origins, how it circulates Stoker's social circle. There's so much Irish history in here, which is, to me, news, anyway. But let's talk about this idea of Dracula, first of all. Who is he? Where does he come from?

• 12:37Speaker 03

  So, we tend to think, so Count Dracula, obviously from the novel, is relatively, comes in quite recently when it comes to the production of the novel itself. So, people probably think that what happened was, like, Stoker read about Vlad the Impaler, who was a void in Wallachia in the 15th century. Sometimes, you know, we call him Vlad the Impaler because he did stick people on spikes.

• 13:00Speaker 00

  He did do that.

• 13:01Anthony Delaney?

  Who wasn't?

• 13:01Speaker 03

  Yeah. You have to contextualise it. They were all a little brutal back then, and he's.

• 13:07Speaker 00

  It was a different time, guys.

• 13:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, just, you know, casual time, when you just stuck people on spikes and watched them die whilst you were having dinner. Good times. Now, we just go on Instagram and watch people humiliate themselves publicly whilst eating our dinner. Not similar. But he's kind of a folk hero of Romania. He actually comes in as the term, the name, Dracula, quite late on in the research process. So, one of the other things that people have said or perceived about Dracula is that Stoker just sort of invented it all himself. There was almost no research. But we do know, because we found his working notes, that there was tonnes of research, and he was drawing on lots of different sources. So, some of the sources likely were stories that he had been told

• 13:50Speaker 03

  about Irish folklore when he was younger. He'd been ill for a really long time, he hadn't explained illness, where he couldn't walk, he couldn't go out. And he's likely, he heard these stories. But then, if we look at the notes directly, we know that he was reading an author called Emily Gerard, and she was the wife of an Austro-Hungarian army member, and she went off to Transylvania with him. And as women of a certain education level were wont to do in the Victorian period, they were encouraged to basically collect, well, botany and folklore and all sorts of things. So, she, she wrote this all down, probably not according to the methods, there was no ethical review, she hadn't done that.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  She wrote it all down, she writes a book called The Land Beyond the Forest, which comes out in 1890. But prior to that, she writes an article called Transylvanian Superstitions, it comes out in 1885. And we know that Stoker was making notes from that.

• 14:47Speaker 00

  Side note to our producers, we have to do an episode on this woman. How have I never heard of her? My god. Wow. Kaya, you'll have to come back. Yeah, definitely.

• 14:56Speaker 03

  Oh, I would be delighted, because she's so interesting. And this is probably where he gets the word Nosferatu.

• 15:04Speaker 00

  Ah, wow.

• 15:05Speaker 03

  So, in the article, he, she uses the word Nosferatu, she describes things about vampires and werewolves. Again, like, this isn't the first time Nosferatu is being used in, well, in, in sort of European, Western European language, but it tends to show up in German text prior to this. So, we think this probably is one of the first times it's in the English language. It doesn't really have a very clear definition.

• 15:27Speaker 00

  We owe her so much, then.

• 15:30Anthony Delaney?

  And we don't know who she is.

• 15:32Speaker 00

  Well.

• 15:32Speaker 03

  I know little of who she is, but.

• 15:34Anthony Delaney?

  When I say we, I mean, the broader collective.

• 15:36Speaker 00

  We've not heard of her, yeah, yeah. My god.

• 15:38Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, okay, that's your next episode, I know.

• 15:40Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 15:41Anthony Delaney?

  Just to let you know. Now, your bread and butter, and definitely appeals to us on a lesser scale, we're not experts like you are, but is the Gothic, as you say, with big and small G's and all the G's around it. Talk us through what that genre is more broadly. We'll come back to Dracula, of course, as we always do on After Dark. But talk us through the genre of the Gothic.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  Okay, so I've already said it's the big G Gothic, because I can hear the Gothicists listening to this going, ah, but what about, what about? So, I am doing the big G genre Gothic, because that's just going to be easier to handle. But you're more than welcome to have me back, and I can talk all of the complexities.

• 16:17Anthony Delaney?

  Episode three.

• 16:18Speaker 00

  Yeah, we'll do a history of the Gothic, great.

• 16:20Speaker 03

  Everything that everyone had a meltdown at the recent International Gothic Association Conference, where all the cool Gothicists.

• 16:25Anthony Delaney?

  Wait, what's it called? The International Gothic?

• 16:27Speaker 03

  Gothic Association Conference.

• 16:29Anthony Delaney?

  I G A C.

• 16:30Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, it's the I G A, and it's their conference.

• 16:33Anthony Delaney?

  I see.

• 16:33Speaker 00

  Nice.

• 16:34Speaker 03

  So cool. A lot of black, a lot of velvet and lace.

• 16:38Anthony Delaney?

  Can I just say, Kaya's wearing a Slayer t-shirt today, Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

• 16:42Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 16:42Anthony Delaney?

  I was obsessed.

• 16:43Speaker 00

  Iconic.

• 16:44Anthony Delaney?

  Absolutely obsessed with her.

• 16:45Speaker 00

  Do you know, I've never watched it. It's, I know, I know, it's a heinous crime. I didn't see it the first time around, and now I feel like, it's a little bit like if you didn't catch Gilmore Girls at the right time.

• 16:54Anthony Delaney?

  Which I didn't.

• 16:55Speaker 00

  Yeah, exactly. And I think maybe I've slightly missed it. I'm so sad that I didn't watch it.

• 16:59Anthony Delaney?

  This is an age thing as well, because Maddie's younger than I am. And I dropped off Buffy at about season three, four. It started to go a little crazy for me, and you probably weren't even tuned in to those things at that point.

• 17:11Speaker 00

  I'm just a baby.

• 17:12Anthony Delaney?

  She's just a baby, raising a baby, but just a baby. So, anyway, talking about Gothic conferences and Buffy the Vampire Slayer t-shirts, we're on trend for what the Gothic is.

• 17:21Speaker 00

  The branding is strong with Kaya, guys.

• 17:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, the branding is strong. I've got bat earrings on as well.

• 17:25Anthony Delaney?

  Oh, my god, I didn't notice those.

• 17:27Speaker 00

  I'd made a mental note to be like, at the end of this, we need to talk about the bat earrings.

• 17:30Anthony Delaney?

  Listeners, go to Kaya's and see her bat earrings. Okay, sorry. Okay, Gothic.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Okay, Gothic. So, the easiest way to say this is that Gothic literature officially starts, as I said, with the publication of The Castle of Etranto by Horace Walpole.

• 17:45Speaker 00

  No, I love it so much. Just not to be one of those, well, actually, people, but it always bothers me. Didn't Mary Delaney write a Gothic novel pre The Castle of Etranto, which I don't think ever gets published? It's been published recently. I love Mary Delaney, she's an 18th century artist, becomes famous in her 80s. But I love that so much, so it annoys me that everyone starts, rightly so, like, this is the canon we have, Horace Walpole, beginning of Gothic. But he takes the credit.

• 18:19Speaker 03

  Well, isn't this the problem with canon generally?

• 18:21Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:21Speaker 03

  Because it's always, a lot of my time is me trying to, like, tell easy narratives for people to get information.

• 18:27Speaker 00

  Of course.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  And I'm like, yeah, it's more complicated, but if I make it as complicated as I want it to be, we'll be here for three hours.

• 18:32Speaker 00

  We will, we will.

• 18:33Speaker 03

  And I'll have got all my PowerPoints out.

• 18:36Speaker 00

  So, for the sake of this, Horace Walpole, beginning of Gothic.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  Horace Walpole. I think, one of the things I think is really interesting about Horace Walpole is how much he brings in the idea of architecture. So, when people talk about Gothic, quite often, if you're talking in a different context, everyone's thinking about the architecture, which is actually medieval architecture.

• 18:53Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 18:54Speaker 03

  And he builds his own house, Strawberry Hill, which is phenomenal. If you haven't visited, go visit it. And it's a folly in that it looks like it's older than it is. He tries to make it look like it's kind of medieval and Gothic, but it's not. It's from the 1700s. And he fills it full of things that he's bought, pilfered from his European tour. And that kind of inspires that first novel. And you get the aesthetic. So, quite often, these early Gothic novels are set historically, so they're sort of removed from the contemporary by time, they're set in the medieval period. They're often set in a Roman Catholic country as well, because of course, England's very anxious about its relationships

• 19:36Speaker 03

  with Roman Catholicism, and there's a lot about how Roman Catholicism is so superstitious and spooky and strange.

• 19:41Speaker 00

  It's also very materialistic, isn't it? It's very material based, obviously, with the architecture, the stuff that Horace collects. And I always love that about early Gothic. And I think it's something, maybe now, you think about the earrings, like, we are, we think of Gothic as being very much kind of an aesthetic vibe, and that there are material signifiers of it. But I feel like we lose that a little bit in the 19th century. It becomes very literary, doesn't it?

• 20:05Speaker 03

  It does. And the other thing that, given that we're going to be, we're talking about Dracula, is no speak, Dracula's contemporary. It's not set historically, and it is very much engaged with the technology of the time. So, it has this tension between this sort of superstition, whereas the early wave, or the first wave Gothic is quite dismissive to a certain degree of superstition, that it's a sign of perhaps being not well-educated, not being rational, not being a product of the Enlightenment, as we're heading out of the 1700s. By the, by the time we get to Dracula, you're seeing more of that anxiety that you're getting towards the end of the 1800s. But you do find that from the beginning of the 1800s to the end of the 1800s, broadly speaking,

• 20:46Speaker 03

  we move from Gothic set in the past to contemporary Gothic, and often dealing with contemporary concerns. You know, Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde would be a brilliant example. That's about science, really, and about fears about identity.

• 21:01Anthony Delaney?

  And do you think that is why the Victorians are so interested in the Gothic? Because in my mind, in contemporary imagination, Victorian, the Victorians, and the Gothic almost go hand in hand. So, they've left an indelible mark on each other over the course of the last 150 years, whatever it might be. Is it those fears of modernity that mean the Victorians are looking so dead fast at the Gothic straight in the face? Do you think that's part of it?

• 21:33Speaker 03

  I do. I mean, I'm pulling all these disparate threads here, because I think it's partly their anxieties about, you have these, you know, they have the Industrial Revolution, you have colonialism, but you also have the awareness increasingly, you know, I think we think that people didn't realise that colonialism was bad in the 1800s. There were plenty of people like, oh, my god, what are we doing? What is this impact that's going on? And you have this awareness that the Industrial Revolution is making huge wealth, but it's also making extreme poverty, which is more visible in the cities. That's the other thing you see a lot more in the 1800s, is the urbanisation of the Gothic. So, less of these sublime landscapes that you find in Walpole and Radcliffe, and kind of the more romantic style Gothic,

• 22:16Speaker 03

  and more these kind of gritty urban scapes. The other thing, of course, is you get a lot about the cult of mourning. So, you get the black aesthetic, and Queen Victoria kind of bringing that in.

• 22:29Speaker 00

  Yeah, because I think, you know, if people went to something like Strawberry Hill, Horace Walpole's house now in Twickenham, they would be surprised that it's not, there's not black drapery everywhere, the walls aren't painted black. It's colourful, it's flamboyant, it's, you know, a completely kind of different vibe to the Victorian idea of Gothicism.

• 22:56Anthony Delaney?

  Terry Cottle died by suicide, but his heart lived on, transplanted into Sonny Graham. Years later, Sonny died the exact same way, same heart, same fate. But that wasn't the strangest connection between them. Sonny also married Terry's widow. Hosted by Karen Kilgariff, this is Heart, an Apple original podcast produced by Plan B and Blanchard House. New episodes are available Mondays and Apple TV subscribers get special early access to the entire season. Follow and listen on Apple Podcasts.

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ plus individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org/lgbtq. That's redcrossblood.org/lgbtq.

• 24:19Speaker 04

  Hi there, I'm Dan, host of Dan Snow's History Podcast. And I can imagine on these dark winter nights, all you're gonna do is curl up with a cup of tea and get lost in an amazing story. Well, I can help you with that. Twice a week, I tell you the most dramatic and extraordinary stories from history with details I can guarantee you've never heard before. Feel the frostbite of that grisly failed American invasion of Canada in the dead of winter. Imagine every clash and blow at the Battle of Bosworth. Follow Eleanor of Accretaine, one of the most powerful women in the medieval world, as she goes on crusade to the Holy Land with 300 handmaidens in tow.

• 24:57Speaker 05

  She leads her own army. Everyone goes gaga for Eleanor.

• 25:00Speaker 04

  And trace the voyage of the first Vikings as they arrive on Iceland's lonely shores. For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan Snow's History.

• 25:26Speaker 00

  Kyle, let's talk about some of the main themes, and I suppose anxieties of Dracula then. We talked a little bit about technology there, but also thinking about sexuality is one of the huge things. And you know, it's sort of well known, this is a huge question in the 19th century, a huge anxiety, something people are exploring in all different types of ways. And thinking about, we have the idea of Dracula brought into the modern day at the end of the 19th century with Stoker's novel. But on the road to getting there, we have this figure that emerges of a sort of charismatic, aristocratic, sexy vampire.

• 26:07Speaker 00

  And what are the sort of the main hitters of that? I'm thinking about, you know, Byron Circle, for example, but also Sheridan of Nuremberg as well, and the extraordinary Camilla, which is just, oh my God, it's one of my faves. And there's a really good film adaptation that was done recently, and it's amazing. So what is happening there? Why is the vampire going from being this kind of Eastern European folk hero to this distinctly kind of sexual, sexually threatening, but also appealing figure in Western Europe?

• 26:44Speaker 03

  So once more, there's loads and loads of different ways to look at it. But one of the key things is essentially, once you move away from the 1700s and this kind of, these narratives that can emerge from like Serbia and other places of corpses being disinterred, and they're often shambolic peasant-like figures, and they prey on family and friends. It gets through the lens of Romanticism, literature, and those trends. And then it becomes probably more about individual identity, as opposed to what you could argue sort of communal anxieties around the infected, or the diseased, or the dead, or what do we do with corpses? And how do we treat corpses? And as you said, one of the big key figures is Byron. So there's a few, the word vampire comes into the English

• 27:29Speaker 03

  language, end of sort of 17, well, we start seeing it being used in literature, sort of the end of the 1700s. But there's a few really key, important ones that have an impact. So you have Lord Byron writes the Gio, or Gio, I am not good at pronouncing it, which is a Turkish, a rude Turkish term for an infidel. And in that, it's a fragmentary poem. He talks about someone being cursed to be a vampire as a corpse to go around and feed on family and friends. But actually, that's not as influential as Lord Byron himself. Because on the classic holiday that we all think of, to the Via Diodati in 1816, the Year Without a Summer, I'm sure you've spoken about this, and the Genesis of Frankenstein.

• 28:12Speaker 00

  It's one of those moments, isn't it, that it's always cited, but and we sort of all roll our eyes and go, oh yeah, that again. But wouldn't you just kill to be on that holiday?

• 28:19Speaker 03

  So much. I would. I would be lusting after Byron, and then regretting it big time. That's, that would definitely be my vibe. I wouldn't want to, but I would.

• 28:29Speaker 00

  You wouldn't be able to help yourself.

• 28:30Speaker 03

  So, but whilst he's there, he takes his physician, a guy called John Polidori. And John Polidori, actually writes his own little story that, that summer, and he publishes it as The Vampire in 1819. It's partly kind of a rip off of a story that Byron had written, a fragment which had a certain sort of vampiric appeal to it. But really importantly, The Vampire by Polidori has a vampire in it called Lord Riven, spelt Lord Ruthven. And that is directly an allusion to Byron, who is called Lord Riven in Lady Caroline Lamb's Glanarvan.

• 29:07Speaker 00

  I see. Okay. So it's literally how it's known, right?

• 29:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. So essentially, it's Polidori, like, this is Byron, who keeps going around and corrupting all these very innocent youths, which is kind of what he was known for doing. And essentially, it sends that up. And that, I think, is kind of your beginning of the very seductive vampire. But then once you've got a seductive vampire, well, it's like over 200 years later, we haven't given up on our seductive vampires.

• 29:31Speaker 00

  We're still obsessed. Yeah, yeah.

• 29:32Speaker 03

  I think it's a good way of thinking about some of the crises at the time that were happening around sexuality and gender identity. So whether that's things like the new woman, women having more, you know, power, both, but particularly outside of the domestic sphere, but increasingly, it's moving towards what will become more political power. But it's also worries about, well, the rising awareness of homosexuality. So it's not that people weren't having sex with same-sex relationships prior to this, but you start getting people writing about sort of homosexuality as a mental illness, as a disease, as all sorts of things. And in doing so, kind of, they've argued sort of creating the identity

• 30:15Speaker 03

  in some ways. And then, when you get to Dracula, I mean, even in The Vampire, you know, Dracula is just so queer. It's so queer. You have Dracula coming in when the three vampireesses are seducing Jonathan Hark and being like, this man belongs to me. He's mine, yeah. And you've got everything about like the teeth, and the biting, and the sucking, and the clear phallic symbolism, which, yeah, which I think why people like analyzing Dracula so much, because it's secretly very naughty.

• 30:45Anthony Delaney?

  One of the other things which I think really escapes modern audiences, and I totally get it, it's escaped me for an awful long time, but I think we should revisit it here just when we're having this conversation, is the idea of just how modern it would have been at the time when it came out. And the idea of technology. So if we're moving from sexuality into this idea of technology now, give us an insight into what we are encountering that to the Victorians, when they're reading this first, we're going, we are at the cutting edge here. Like, this is, this is iPhone Duo, like, brand new technology that they are encountering and using to help. Tell this story. So just talk us through some of those tropes.

• 31:25Speaker 03

  Well, one of the key ones is you get things like the telegram, for example. But you also get the phonograph, which is probably more what we would call like a record player. And it's the early attempts to record sound in a way that then can be played back. And Dr. Seward, who is one of the the crew of light. So one of the people trying to capture and kill Dracula. He is a doctor. He is in charge of a hospital for mentally ill people, or the asylum, as they refer to it in the novel. And he has one of these and he records his notes onto it. So he speaks into recorder. I mean, it's really not that dissimilar from podcasting.

• 32:03Anthony Delaney?

  It's that podcast thing you're talking about, yeah?

• 32:05Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  And then we have Mina Harker, Jonathan's wife, will then, she then writes it down so that she can collate all the notes. The other significant.

• 32:13Speaker 00

  A classic thanks for typing situation there.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  Literally Mina Harker, the the the good woman, the one who survives, not like naughty, naughty Lucy Westerner. Mainly she's good because she's very secretarial. And works really bloody hard and you're like.

• 32:28Anthony Delaney?

  She's handy.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  She's handy. We won't violently kill her. She's stayed in her lane. She's done the typing.

• 32:33Speaker 03

  That's all she's done. That's great. Well done her. And she actually talks about like all the stuff she's collated.

• 32:40Speaker 03

  And then Van Helsing gets all the attention for it. I really don't like Van Helsing. I just want to say, like, everyone thinks he's the hero.

• 32:45Anthony Delaney?

  No, I kind of don't. Yeah, no, he's annoying.

• 32:49Speaker 00

  Yeah, I like that take.

• 32:51Speaker 03

  And he's patronizing and he's such a patriarch. And I also feel sorry for Dracula. And I think I think what he does to Lucy Westerner, I don't care if she's become a scary vampire lady who feeds on children. Like, whatever, let her have her moment, okay? We've all felt that way.

• 33:06Speaker 00

  But that's exactly what you're saying, that kind of anxiety around this idea of the new woman, right? At the end of the 19th century, this, you know, woman who is maybe stepping out of the domestic sphere. Maybe pushing for voting rights, maybe interested in a career in something other than typing for the men. And then therefore they become like baby eating monsters, right? And and are treated accordingly very violently by the men in the novel.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  Yeah, incredibly anti maternal, she's an anti maternal figure and I'm really, I find them very appealing. I am a mother, so I'm a maternal figure. So I find this quite a release in reading these sort of very anti maternal figures.

• 33:41Speaker 00

  Do you think that's something to do with the the sort of idea of procreation around vampires? And in Dracula in particular, thinking about, you know, the fact that it's vampires are made. Well, in in Dracula, by Dracula, that he he becomes kind of mother figure and there's like queering of that whole process. And then when a woman is transformed into a vampire, there's something, she's kind of stripped of that that maternal aspect, I suppose, or it's it's taken from her and she's been created differently by a man. There's there's just something going on there, isn't there, about about the sort of creation of generations of vampires that's very at odds with patriarchal normative culture.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  So during my masters, because I'm so cool, I was writing, I was doing, I was writing an essay. I remember writing it really well about the idea that Dracula, and I'm judging the picture, the portrait of Dorian Gray as well. And then Venus and Furs, which is about sadomasochism. Because that's the kind of student I was. A lot about that that kind of crisis, not just about gender. So you made such a great point about Mina and those. It's not standard biological heterosexual reproduction. And in one scene, sorry spoilers, Dracula cuts his his chest and Mina lit, almost like breastfeeds from the milk. So that's a real inversion of the maternal.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  The other thing is we have all this industrialization and what we're starting to do is recreation of copies, so copies on copies and copies. And I was reading articles that were suggesting there's an anxiety about the authenticity of just existence and individuality because everything can be mass produced. And so the vampire kind of steps aside from that and that's a space for there. And certainly we then see that with Karl Marx picks up on on vampire imagery. And there's lots of real ways it's used and he uses sort of like the vampire to be the landowners sucking the blood out of the, you know, the the workers. And he says something kind of like vampiric about everything around proto and then capitalism.

• 35:43Speaker 00

  Relationship. That's so interesting.

• 35:45Anthony Delaney?

  On that political front and that pseudo political science that's coming in around it. Talk to me then about the idea, maybe explain first what reverse colonialism is. And then talk to me about how we see it coming in in in Dracula specifically.

• 36:00Speaker 03

  Okay, so you have to be a shout out for Stephen Arata, who writes so much about reverse colonial. He writes the article about reverse colonization in Dracula. Broadly speaking, reverse colonization is a fear that since, in this case, Britain has gone and colonized the world, that we are we are due some kind of violence committed against us. Or that we will then be colonized and it will literally reverse. So we'll be colonized.

• 36:25Speaker 00

  Topical?

• 36:26Speaker 03

  Yes, by the nation. Again, this is why I love what I study, because I love talking about fear. Because fear is such an element of control and how much I look at media nowadays and I'm like, that's just, you're just using Gothic language there. That's the language of horror and Gothic to control and, you know, newspapers do it terribly. So yes, that fear of reverse colonization, it continues now, that idea that we colonize and now we will be colonized. In Dracula, it's most obviously done because Dracula, of course, is is foreign. He is Romanian and whilst Britain hadn't colonized Romania, there had in the 1700s been a lot of tensions in that area between sort of Western Europe and Eastern Europe.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  And you get things like the Austro Hungarian Empire, which I mentioned in regard to Emily Gerard. So you've got these tensions coming through there. And so Dracula comes as a foreigner and invades the country. He arrives on a boat and then what does he do? He goes after our women. And then you get men, white British men, being real anxious about the safety of their women. And what will happen if this.

• 37:33Speaker 00

  Don't you hate when fighting age vampires come over here?

• 37:36Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 37:37Anthony Delaney?

  Fighting age vampires.

• 37:39Speaker 00

  Vampires. Yeah. And there's something as well, I suppose, specifically about vampirism, thinking about the corruption of blood, right? And thinking about, you know, good English bloodlines and ideas of inheritance and aristocracy and that in terms of Dracula, he is interrupting that, he's disrupting the the structure of society, the very foundation, the very architecture, if you like, of how England or Britain functions in this moment.

• 38:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, and he can turn you. So he can turn you. So you go from being pure and British. And again, it's about women and women's bodies. We know that symbolism of like the nation state as a female body and, you know, and it's noticeable at the end of the novel. We know that Dracula is dead because Mina has a baby and her and Jonathan Harker, the the honorable rising middle classes, who are decent people, they have their baby.

• 38:26Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 38:27Speaker 03

  And and the blood is is purified almost through it.

• 38:42Speaker 02

  Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ plus individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org/lgbtq. That's redcrossblood.org/lgbtq.

• 39:25Speaker 04

  Hi there, I'm Dan, host of Dan Snow's History Podcast. And I can imagine on these dark winter nights, all you're going to do is curl up with a cup of tea and get lost in an amazing story. Well, I can help you with that. Twice a week, I tell you the most dramatic and extraordinary stories from history with details I can guarantee you've never heard before. Feel the frostbite of that grisly failed American invasion of Canada in the dead of winter. Imagine every clash and blow at the Battle of Bosworth. Follow Eleanor of Accretaine, one of the most powerful women in the medieval world, as she goes on crusade to the Holy Land with 300 handmaidens in tow.

• 40:04Speaker 05

  She leads her own army. Everyone goes gaga for Eleanor.

• 40:07Speaker 04

  And trace the voyage of the first Vikings as they arrive on Iceland's lonely shores. For the best historical stories to get lost in, check out Dan Snow's History.

• 40:33Speaker 00

  Let's talk about this idea of Irishness that I think is so present with Dracula, but it's something that I hadn't really thought about. Obviously, we have Stoker himself, who is Irish. He's also in the social circle of Oscar Wilde and thinking about, you know, late Victorian ideas of of sexual deviancy. Obviously, we're not, I think we're we're quite close to the trial of Oscar Wilde at this point, aren't we, in the same decade?

• 40:58Speaker 00

  And and the idea of the the vampire comes into play in terms of the political relationship between Britain and Ireland as well. We have a cartoon here called The Irish Vampire, in fact, from Punch in the 18, what does that say? The 1880s. And so do you want to describe it for us? Then maybe we can discuss this. Because I think it's it's interesting just thinking about the ideas of colonialism and corruption of of sort of British values.

• 41:26Speaker 00

  Yeah, give us this image, please.

• 41:28Anthony Delaney?

  So we have a dark and cloudy night suitable for this time of year. There is a full moon which is being partially obscured by some stratified clouds or whatever they are. Then we have this absolutely gigantic bat with huge ears.

• 41:45Anthony Delaney?

  That is hovering over the figure of a woman, and I'll come to her in just a second because across this gigantic bat are is is written the words National League, of which my own great, great grandfather was part of the National League. And this is looking for home rule for Ireland. It is. It is an Irish nationalist movement. And the face of the bat is a man called Charles Stuart Parnell, who was at the the front of that national movement. And then on the ground below him, we have, and this kind of feeds into what you were talking about earlier, Kaya, the figure of Hibernia. And this is, this is uh Ireland personified as a, as a shapely, comely woman. And she is, you know, distraught on the ground. She is, you know,

• 42:30Anthony Delaney?

  put to to, he's, he's going to ruin her. He's going to ravage her, basically. And we have it called, it's called the Irish Vampire. And I'm, I'm assuming, I haven't actually seen this before, but I'm assuming that the implication is this idea for Irish national um rule themselves will ruin Ireland and only Ireland will be safe within um within the the empire. And and again, this feeds into this, which is so interesting because Stoker's Irishness is actually quite different than Oscar Wilde's Irishness in so many ways, because he's, to boil it down, very, very specific. On the most basic level, he's an Irish Protestant, and it is a different

• 43:11Anthony Delaney?

  viewpoint and a different political viewpoint. Also, his relationship, I mean, Oscar's mother was a staunch nationalist. So she was, she was out there fighting for this at this particular time. So it is a different experience. I presume this is produced in London, not Dublin, right?

• 43:26Speaker 00

  It's in Punch for Punch.

• 43:27Anthony Delaney?

  It's in Punch, yeah, okay, okay. Um, so yeah, that's my take on it, but I am not the expert, so Kaya, I'm going to, I'm going to give over to you and you can talk us through it.

• 43:36Speaker 03

  Well, I've got to say, I I am not the expert when it comes to Irish history either, because, as my dulcet tones suggest.

• 43:42Anthony Delaney?

  You're not Irish.

• 43:43Speaker 03

  I'm not Irish. And that's all. That's not mentioned to us because it's uncomfortable. And we dislike being uncomfortable with the reality of what we did. I do quite a lot of work around wolves and werewolves as well.

• 43:56Speaker 00

  You're gonna be in for a busy season.

• 43:59Anthony Delaney?

  You live here now, well, after dark, you're gonna have to just keep staying.

• 44:02Speaker 03

  Please do. Um, I love chatting about these sort of things. And I also find it's great because obviously I teach. And so often I have to teach things I'm not that interested in. I'm like, no, I'm born by it as well.

• 44:12Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 44:13Speaker 03

  Like, there have been times where they're like, why are we reading this? And I'm like, ah.

• 44:16Anthony Delaney?

  If you're Kaya's line manager, now is a good time to switch off, just to let you know.

• 44:21Speaker 03

  Penny, who's lovely, uh, lets me have full range. She's very much like, you do you. And you just, because the students love it, so that's fine. And you get, you get nice feedback. But essentially, I always think about the, when we talk about colonialism, is like, the call came from within the house first. England practised, it practised with Wales and Scotland and Ireland. And it really worked out how to destroy a people. And it was like, you destroy the stories, you destroy land ownership, and you destroy the relationship to the natural world as well, particularly what I'm interested in is the destruction of wolf populations. I found um this image that we've just been talking about from Punch, the Irish vampire image. Uh, and what really kind of struck me was partly how it inverts what Marx would go on to say.

• 45:07Speaker 03

  Because one of the things that the Irish National Land League were asking for was less powerful landlords and to give the land back to the people. Um, and yet, in that case, it's that desire that's being shown to be vampiric and threatening to the reality. Whereas Marx was like, no, no, it's the landlords who are the vampires and the people.

• 45:30Speaker 00

  So it's, it's such a, a strong image across the political spectrum then. You might say there are vampires on both sides.

• 45:39Speaker 00

  Oh, God. Um, yeah, it's, it's, it's so fascinating that this is presumably, therefore, so in the popular culture, um, the popular imagination, this idea of of something vampiric that's tied to power, that's tied to national identity, that's tied to sexuality, that's tied to all of these, these huge concerns in the 19th century. Does Stoker and his novel, do they come out of that context? Because, you know, now we think of Dracula as this completely formative keystone novel. Does it feel like that in this moment? Or is it, oh, look, another vampire story has arrived. Oh, it's quite good, but we already know this, this, what's happening. How revolutionary is it?

• 46:24Speaker 03

  Um, so this is great because part of my thesis, I did go to the British Library and get the microfiche out and then have a look at reviews, contemporary reviews. Um, and what was interesting was like, how much people were like, oh, it's another, it's another vampire novel. Um, there's another great one that comes out that same year called Blood of the Vampire.

• 46:44Speaker 00

  In the same year?

• 46:45Speaker 03

  In the same year, 1897, totally overlooked, written by a woman.

• 46:48Speaker 00

  This is like in Hollywood, right? Where you often get two films that are on the same topic that come out and will remember one and completely forget the other one. Yeah.

• 46:54Speaker 03

  Also worth looking at in terms of it's, uh, it's got a, uh, well, a vampire of colour. I, I think by modern standards, we'd probably refer to it as a black vampire, but it's quite non-specific. It's a lot actually about uh West Indies and slavery and violence. It is so worth looking at if you want, if you need.

• 47:12Speaker 00

  We have to do an episode on that as well. That sounds so much better.

• 47:15Speaker 03

  And I, yeah, I can also give you people who I know who work on it, who are more far better than me to talk about it. Though I'd always love to come back and talk about things like that. But yeah, it's a brilliant novel. Um, absolutely brilliant.

• 47:26Speaker 00

  Wow. What's it called?

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Um, it's called Blood of the Vampire. Blood of Vampire? I think I'm getting that right. Yes, Blood of the Vampire. Um, and so we've got lots of novels coming out. We've had Carl Miller in 1872 come out. We've had Varney the Vampire in the 1840s to 50s.

• 47:41Anthony Delaney?

  Sorry, now what?

• 47:42Speaker 03

  Varney the Vampire.

• 47:44Anthony Delaney?

  It sounds like Barney the dinosaur. Is it camp? Is it, is it over the top or no?

• 47:48Speaker 03

  I mean, yes, because it's, it's one of these classic serialized novels from like the, it, it's in the confident period of the Victorian like era where they're just like, you know, there's a kind of a, just everything has a tone of like, I don't know, just arrogance.

• 48:03Speaker 00

  Yeah, they're like, this is how the world has worked it all out now. This is the modern world. We're going with it. Yeah, yeah.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  So Varney the Vampire is like a vampire and uh he, in the end, he kills himself by throwing himself into a volcano, but it runs.

• 48:13Anthony Delaney?

  Well.

• 48:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:15Anthony Delaney?

  You're gonna do us.

• 48:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, like, but it's interesting because then people are like, is this the beginning of the sympathetic vampire? Because he has self-awareness and he kills himself.

• 48:22Anthony Delaney?

  Okay.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  So there's tons of vampire stories. I've got a wonderful little collection of like Victorian vampire stories. So yeah, the reviews are like, oh, yeah, it's another vampire. But it seems that it captures the popular imagination. And then quite quickly was, I think it's like got a nice, simple title, Dracula.

• 48:41Anthony Delaney?

  Sure.

• 48:42Speaker 00

  Hmm.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  And then I think, then you get things like Nosferatu coming out, which is a essentially ripoff version. Um.

• 48:49Anthony Delaney?

  What's the time lapse? So when does Nosferatu come out?

• 48:53Speaker 00

  Nosferatu is 1922, yeah.

• 48:55Anthony Delaney?

  So it's within a, well, just about a generation later. So people will definitely remember reading the book and now they're seeing this on screen. So that's impactful, yeah.

• 49:03Speaker 03

  And then 1931, you get your Bela Lugosi, uh, Universal Pictures. And then you get more and more coming out from that. And then you get into the 1970s, well, Hammer Horror, pick it up. And then you start getting more adaptations.

• 49:15Speaker 00

  And what's so interesting is all these moments when you get these adaptations are all moments of huge anxiety. Obviously, Nosferatu comes out just after the First World War. And we've had all like body horror and sludge in the trenches and all of that. And then, you know, obviously in the 1970s, we've got the idea of sort of the, the 60s have just happened and all that sexual liberation, all of that going on. And yeah, I think, I think it's really, it's an, it's a never-ending useful trope, isn't it, the vampire? Um, Anthony, favourite vampire?

• 49:43Anthony Delaney?

  No, well, I was just thinking about this. A favourite vampire? Hmm, yeah, that's, I'll come back to that in just a second. But I, I, this has just made me realise that, of course, the Bram Stoker's Dracula film version is how I was introduced to all of this, because there was no monster I was more afraid of than Dracula as a child. Like, I, one of my friends, and if she's listening to this, we were in primary school, I was six years old, her name was Anne Marie Kelly, it still is, her name is still Anne Marie Kelly. And she told me she had been to visit her family in Dublin and that there was a house somewhere that had A Dracula vampire, he slept in a coffin. And like at five or six, I absolutely believe, totally believed it. And I was sleeping in the bottom of my parents' bed for a very long time going, but there are vampires and I am absolutely petrified. So this was a very

• 50:28Anthony Delaney?

  real and present fear for me when I was like six or seven years old. I was like, I'm gonna get eaten. But the generational thing of what you were describing there, Kai, about going, and then there's this one, and then there's this one, and then there's this one. It's kept alive for us. And every generation has its own. So for me, it would be the Bram Stoker's Dracula version. My favourite vampire, I mean, it's probably Brad Pitt in Interview with the Vampire, but I know that's not Dracula, but let's just put all our cards on the table.

• 50:54Speaker 03

  That's fine. That's who my cat's named after. He's called Louis de Pont de Lac Von Frankels.

• 50:58Anthony Delaney?

  Ooh.

• 50:59Speaker 03

  And I made the vet like shout, so I sat there.

• 51:01Anthony Delaney?

  The whole name.

• 51:02Speaker 03

  All of it, including the Von Frankels, which is like a mixture.

• 51:05Speaker 00

  The vet receptionist, like, can you spell that?

• 51:06Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's like, you're gonna hate me. I'm really interested, because I've been trying to get my kids into creepy stuff. So they don't really get scared that easily compared to other kids, because they're like vampires are our friends.

• 51:17Speaker 00

  Right.

• 51:18Speaker 03

  And I, the moment I found out about vampires, I was obsessed with them.

• 51:22Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah.

• 51:22Speaker 03

  At 10, I made my best friend, Melanie Anderson, who has changed her surname.

• 51:27Anthony Delaney?

  All the people getting shout outs. Yeah, yeah.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  Um, I made her stay up and watch on Channel Four Interview with the Vampire.

• 51:33Speaker 00

  Yeah.

• 51:33Speaker 03

  Um, the adaptation by Neil Jordan. And I remember even then, this is why I did literature, like, watching it and being like, huh. So they're rolling around in that graveyard. I think there's stuff going on. I think there's layers here, because at 10, I probably wasn't that aware of like queer reading. Um, and then when I was older, I started watching Buffy and Vampire Slayer. My mum came in and the scene where Angel is tied to the end of Jussila's four poster bed, and yeah, in leather trousers, and she's pouring honey water on him, saying, you've been a bad daddy. And my mum said, I remember walking in, looking at your face as you watch this and going, huh, that'll have repercussions.

• 52:11Anthony Delaney?

  There's no bringing her back from that.

• 52:13Speaker 03

  Yeah. We're done. Um, but yeah, who's your favourite?

• 52:18Speaker 00

  Oh my gosh. I mean, yeah, Bram Stoker's Dracula, um, what's he called? The actor?

• 52:24Anthony Delaney?

  Keanu Reeves. Oh, Gary Oldman.

• 52:26Speaker 00

  Gary Oldman. I did, canon, like absolutely. I did love the, the adaptation of Camilla that was done, oh god, maybe three or four years ago. I don't know if you saw this one. It had Greg Wise in it. It had Toby Menzies. Love Toby Menzies.

• 52:40Anthony Delaney?

  Love all of those people.

• 52:40Speaker 00

  Um, can't remember any of the female actresses' names, which is really

• 52:45Anthony Delaney?

  Bad, Maddie.

• 52:46Speaker 00

  bad, cancelled. Um, that was a great adaptation. If anyone, it's like a sort of, it's filmed very much like sort of folk horror, the way that it's done. Um, yeah.

• 52:55Anthony Delaney?

  Period piece.

• 52:56Speaker 00

  Yeah, really good, really, really nice. Um, so I'd recommend that. I did like, I did like Eggers' Nosferatu.

• 53:02Anthony Delaney?

  Beautiful to look at.

• 53:03Speaker 00

  Is it the best Eggers film? Maybe not. Um, didn't love the ending.

• 53:08Speaker 03

  Maybe Werewolf will be though. I am so ready.

• 53:11Speaker 00

  Have you seen the trailer?

• 53:12Anthony Delaney?

  Romeo and Juliet. You know, did you see that?

• 53:14Speaker 00

  What?

• 53:15Anthony Delaney?

  That's his next one, Romeo and Juliet.

• 53:16Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, but it's never gonna be as good as the Baz Luhrmann one.

• 53:19Speaker 00

  Why would you ever touch it again?

• 53:21Anthony Delaney?

  We're aging ourselves here, but it's true. It's like, oh god, that takes me back to being 11 years old or whatever, and just all those bright colours. I didn't even know what I was watching, but yeah.

• 53:28Speaker 03

  God, I fancy Leonardo DiCaprio so much.

• 53:30Anthony Delaney?

  Oh, I know, so did I.

• 53:31Speaker 03

  There was a three-year window where I was the right age for him, and then I was too old. Like, it was like, I was too young, then I was three years, and then now I'm too old.

• 53:40Speaker 00

  You've missed the sweet spot.

• 53:41Anthony Delaney?

  Once you get past 24, you're done, sorry.

• 53:42Speaker 00

  Yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's time to wrap up on that.

• 53:45Anthony Delaney?

  Yeah, all our sexy vampires and whatever else. Yeah.

• 53:48Speaker 00

  Has, has DiCaprio done a vampire?

• 53:51Anthony Delaney?

  No, but he'd be good, wouldn't he?

• 53:53Speaker 00

  Some might say the ultimate vampire.

• 53:56Speaker 03

  Oh my god, because he could just turn all the pretty young ladies so they never age out, and then he can stick that to them forever.

• 54:01Anthony Delaney?

  Allegedly, by the way.

• 54:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, just making this up.

• 54:04Speaker 00

  Allegedly. Kai, thank you so much. This was

• 54:07Anthony Delaney?

  That was fun. Thank you, Kai.

• 54:08Speaker 00

  So wide-ranging and interesting. And I think that, yeah, we did not control this conversation.

• 54:15Anthony Delaney?

  Brad Pitt.

• 54:16Speaker 00

  Um, please come back and do more. That was absolutely fascinating. If you want to write in and tell us about your favourite vampire.

• 54:21Anthony Delaney?

  Write in.

• 54:21Speaker 00

  Write in. And good epistolary novel. You can write us an interview.

• 54:25Speaker 03

  Get it on the graph. Exactly. Record it on a wax cylinder and send it in.

• 54:28Speaker 00

  Send us a voice note. Yeah, you can do that at [email protected]. If you are listening, wherever you get your pods, don't forget to leave us a five-star review.

• 54:37Anthony Delaney?

  Before we go, Maddie, how do you get your hair so curly at the ends? It's looking really good today.

• 54:41Speaker 00

  Oh, thank you. Hot brush and having unruly natural hair that I fight against every single day. This was kind of straight when I left the house.

• 54:48Anthony Delaney?

  So you're not wearing bonnets or anything like that to like, poof them up?

• 54:52Speaker 00

  No.

• 54:52Anthony Delaney?

  Okay, looks great.

• 54:53Speaker 00

  It's just natural, darling.

• 54:54Anthony Delaney?

  Looks great. And your sister colours your hair, right?

• 54:56Speaker 00

  She does. She's a hairdresser.

• 54:57Anthony Delaney?

  It's very good. I love that dark, brown colour. Sorry, it's neither here nor there, but anyway, go read Dracula.

• 55:03Speaker 00

  It's just sad that this is not being, being filmed for this episode.

• 55:06Anthony Delaney?

  No, but they can listen to us.

• 55:08Speaker 00

  Yeah, but they're not gonna see my hair.

• 55:09Anthony Delaney?

  Oh, of course, Kay. She's gonna have to put a picture of her earrings and you're gonna have to put a picture of your hair when this comes out.

• 55:15Speaker 00

  Okay, goodbye.

• 55:15Anthony Delaney?

  Bye.

• 55:24Speaker 02

  Blood donation is now more inclusive. More LGBTQ plus individuals are able to donate blood with the American Red Cross due to FDA guidelines that eliminate eligibility questions based on sexual orientation. The Red Cross celebrates this historic change and welcomes those who may be newly eligible to donate blood. There's a place for everyone in the mission of the Red Cross, including you. The Red Cross is committed to achieving a blood donation process that treats all potential donors with equality and respect while maintaining the safety of the blood supply. Join us and help save lives. To learn more and make your appointment to donate blood, visit redcrossblood.org/lgbtq. That's redcrossblood.org/lgbtq.