An unofficial transcript of the podcast episode by Alexis Kennedy and Lottie Bevan.

LB: Alright, this is the first episode of…

(Both): Skeleton Songs!

LB: I suppose we should introduce ourselves.

AK: You’re Lottie Bevan

LB: And you’re Alexis Kennedy.

AK: Correct, [inaudible]

LB: So we are a small, indie game development team…

AK: Microscopic indie game development…

LB: Yes, we are two people in our own flat, with our cats, occasionally wearing clothes.

AK: Yeah.

LB: And we make…

AK: It’s not gonna be that sort of podcast.

(LB laughs)

LB: And we make narrative games, which is why we thought we should start a podcast about stories and narratives across both games and literature, because you, Alexis, are Mr Games, and Mr Literature, but I have no claim to the former, and can only claim… I’m an English graduate, so therefore can talk…

AK: [Ah, you’ve[?]] been making games for quite some time…

LB: I have been making games, that’s true.

AK: But basically, if I understand it correctly, the idea is that we spend most of our lives snorfling up nonsense, and it comes out in the games, and if we snorfle…

LB (crosstalk): Tasty, tasty nonsense!

AK: If we de-snorfle it in a podcast as well, there’ll be less nonsense in the games and more nonsense in the ears of the people who are listening.

LB: I mean, yes, so it’s not, you know, a method to help us be better, it should be interesting for people listening…

AK: Yes!  What you said.

LB: But yeah, so we thought we’d start our first episode about les vampires, the creepiest of all pires.

They are currently in the cultural consciousness, because of the BBC…

AK crosstalk: They are.

Lottie: …version of Dracula, which I have not yet watched, partly ‘cause I’m a snob, but also because it apparently is quite scary, so we thought we’d talk about those.

AK: Lottie, what do you think about vampires?

LB: Ah, I love them, as everyone does, but I a— I will be honest, there’s been a lot of them.

AK: So you are… you’re approaching my position, I think.  I’m sick of the fuckers.  But also I really like them!

LB: You can’t swear!!!

AK: I don’t… can we not?

LB: I don’t know, I mean, Apple won’t like it…

AK: We’ll just try and see if Apple notice.

LB: OK

AK: They’ve probably got some, some sort of swear-word recognition, but I—

LB (crosstalk): Bleep!

AK: I was— I was, um, I think I was…

LB (crosstalk): Were you bitten?

AB: I was sick of vampires while it was still cool to be sick of vampires, because you know, I’m really old, not like vampire-old, but, the Anne Rice Tom Cruise film came out…

LB (crosstalk): [inaudible]

AK: …and Buffy was a thing, and suddenly vampires were everywhere.

LB: Yeah.

AK: And everyone among my friends seemed to be saying, “Do you know vampires are actually about sex?”  And I– was, “Oh really?! Okay, I’d like to listen to that, that talk another time.”  So I’ve long been a bit grumpy about them, which is why usually when I put them in my games, I don’t make them sexy.  It’s a sort of…

LB: It is lazy, I think.

AK: To make them sexy?

LB: Yeah.

AK: Because they’re evil and they bite you, so they’re sexy.

LB: And they come in the night, and… ooh, and a lot of people kind of leave it there, they don’t add anything else on, they don’t say why they’re sexy, and if I went on a date and I came back and told my friends that I’d had a date with a sexy person, they’d say, “Why are they sexy”, and I was, “’cause he was pale and he appeared in the night”, they’d be like “I’m not sure that’s very sexy”, you can’t just intrinsically be sexy by doing that.

AK: But, that said, the thing is, they have always been kind of about sex.

LB: As, as we will get on to!

AK: So, what, I can’t remember if you’ve talked about this, because this is unrehearsed, people… but…

LB: We’ve never worked with this animal before.

AK: Um, you can go back a looooong way and you find things what are sort of what end up being vampires.  So, the first instance that I know about, and there will be other instances that better informed people know more about, there’s a creature in Sumeria, so we’re talking, like, four thousand years… six thousand years ago, called a lilu, and the lilu was the father of Gilgamesh, or was one of an order of beings called the lilu, and it’s some sort of night spirit that goes wandering about, I don’t think actually biting people, but making a nuisance of itself, and lilu became lilitu, which was a female version, and obviously, as you know, mythology, women are usually more upsetting than men…

LB: We’re the bad guys, yeah.

AK: But that becomes a lilitu, it’s stealing babies, and it’s having sex with men while they’re asleep…

LB: Mythical ladies…!

AK: And it’s spreading disease, and there’s an Assyrian thing called lilitu, I think it’s actually a storm demon, and that’s got like owls’ talons, and I think it doesn’t actually bite people, carries disease and…

LB: That sounds amazing, and this is 4,000, 6,000 years old.

AB: Well, yes, but, Assyrians, I think, are more, like, what, 2,000, 1,500 years BC?  So they’re a bit more recent… the point is that it’s a Middle Eastern, Fertile Crescent, myth, with this idea of a thing that goes around in the night making a nuisance of itself, and very quickly becomes associated with sex, and sex’s products, and as you probably know, sex often causes children, and so, a lot of vampires end up either stealing babies, or biting babies.  Or, being created when you— if somebody dies while they’re in childbirth?  Or while they’re pregnant… I think Malaysian folklore has a kind of vampire, I think a langsuir, I can’t remember which was which, which comes to be if a woman dies while giving birth, and another kind, which dies… which comes to live if a woman dies while pregnant.

LB: Right.

AK: And obviously, you know, if you die while pregnant, and then become a vampire, or if you die while you’re in birth and become a vampire, you probably want to bite babies, because that makes you a good villain.

LB: Yeah.

AK: But!  Here my— here’s my etymology fact: there are obviously…

LB: We should point out to listeners that you are, in fact, a linguist, so etymology…

AK (interjects): Long ago!

LB:… totally is your jam.

AK: So.  There’s obviously lots of great words for for… for vampires that we’re gonna… get into, I think the most famous word for vampires, apart from ‘vampires’, is admittedly a bit rude about it, but, um, empousa and soucouyants, and, and, and, and alukite…

LB: They are…

AK: and vrykolakas, and…

LB: Delicious words

AK: They, they all are… a lot of them, especially for English-speakers, sound great.  But, uh…

LB: You think in the original language, they’re like…

AK: Well, that’s the thing, I…

LB: Great.

AK: I told you my Croatian ex-wife, I wanted to call our kid, if we had a boy, Zvonimir, because it sounded amazing to an English-speaker…

LB: That’s a beautiful name…

AK: Well, she said, “No, in Croatia being called Zvonimir is like being called Kevin”, or something, it’s really sort of… no, she said it’s an old man’s name, so it’s like [I’d call him?] Edward.”

LB (laughing): Edward’s not an old man’s name…

AK: I did that, I did it badly[?].  So!  Etymology.  Lilitu, or lilu, appears to come from a root that means something like night-crying bird or screech-owl…

LB: Mm-hmm…

AK: And then, there’s another much more famous word for vampires, they’re called strigoi… I think it’s a Romanian word, I think it shows up in Albania as well?  And obviously, anybody who’s been watching vampires on TV the last five years will know that it’s the word used to identify the vampires in Guillermo del Toro’s The Strain.  So, wonderful, guttural word.  Strigoi, there’s a bunch of similar words, like strigais and stryx, that often are used to mean sorcerers as well as vampires.  There’s a lot of confusion about what’s a sorcerer and what’s a vampire, what’s a witch in the folklore.  But it’s from, originally, the Latin term stryx, which means screech-owl.  So, from the beginning, we’ve got these flying, shriek-y things…

LB: That’s really interesting, actually.

AK: Yeah.

LB: That’s wild [?]

AK: There you go.  Etymology! [Inaudible]

LB: So you were gonna talk to me about… empousai?

AK: YEAH!

LB: So what’s the difference between empousai, alukites, and soucouyants?

AK: Right, so: as I mentioned earlier, I’m sort of mean about vampires, so when I decided we were having vampires in Cultist Simulator, I wanted to make them…

LB: Which is, if you haven’t heard of it, the game that we’ve made most recently.

AK: Yeah, you should play it.

LB: Buy it!

AK: We… buy it, then play it. (Pause) I wanted to put vampires in because they’re fundamentally an interesting myth, because they have something to do with sex, inevitably, annoyingly, because they have an impression of age and power that sort of comes with the territory, because the whole idea of sucking somebody’s blood or other essences… you know, there’s a Malay vampire— it’s not the langsuir, it’s the other one, but it actually has got long hair and it sucks blood through a hole in the back of its neck… Pontianak!  Yes, there we go.  Yeah, so… a lot of them suck blood, some of them suck other things, soucouyants suck blood through the soft places in the body, and they leave, like, black marks…

LB: Mmmm!

AK: But I just— I wanted words that expressed…

LB: ‘Soft places in the body?’

AK: Particularly unusual words that people mightn’t have come across, that sounded like they’re from two or three different languages, so, alukites, that’s from aluka, which is a Hebrew word which I believe means horse-leech, originally?

LB: Right.

AK: But refers to vampires in Jewish mythology.  Empousa is a Greek word that means a sort of night-prowling thing that makes a nuisance of itself, soucouyants are vampiric creatures in Caribbean, I think particularly Trinidadian folklore, that shed their skins.  And I wanted, without too many spoilers about what happens within the game, a bunch of terms for a general type of shapeshifting, skin-shedding, night-flying, vital essence-devouring ancient, powerful, usually but not always a lady, and there’s a particular reason they’re usually but not always ladies.

LB: And it’s not just because they were written by a man and it was sexy.

AK: Defi— No.  And in fact, empousai AKA alukites AKA soucouyants in Cultist Simulator are very rarely sexy, but there is a particular set of circumstances that leads to them coming to be, and that’s a set of circumstances that is more likely to involve, on average, a woman than a man.  

LB: Right.

AK: But you do get male soucouyants as well, they’re just considered a rarity.  Anyway, so, soucouyants are these very folkloric Caribbean things that suck blood out of soft places while you’re sleeping, and I think they suck your breath as well, they shed their skins, they fly, they look like old women or something… that’s the thing about mythological female menaces, right, they’re either really hot…

LB: Or ancient hags.

AK: Or ancient hags.

LB: Those are the two types of women.

AK: Because we know middle-aged women don’t exist in folklore.

LB: [snark]

AK: And, um, Aluka, I don’t know much about, but, just, there’s a lot of Hebrew words imported into English sound great, they have this sort of occult quality to them, and they’re often quite guttural, and they sound half-familiar to people from a Judaeo-Christian background, very often, so that’s very useful.  And empousa, I was just very taken by the, sort of, the meticulous details of the empousa myth that didn’t make it into, um, Cultist Simulator.  So for example, you know what empousai’s legs are made of?

LB: No?

AK: Bronze.  Or brass.  But they’ve only got one of the legs.

LB: They’re peg-legged ladies.

AK: Yeah, they’re a thing that sort of hops around on, like, a brass[?] boing, boing, boing, and they bite people, or otherwise make a nuisance— BUT…

LB: What!?

AK: Sometimes they’ve two legs.

LB: Two bronze legs?

AK: No.  One leg is made of bronze…

LB: Right.

AK: And the other leg is made of cow dung.

LB: I’m sorry.  Who wrote this myth?!

AK: The Greeks.  I think the cow dung thing particularly…

LB: (interjects) After an excellent party.

AK: … is, I can’t remember which playwright, but somebody claims to be attacked by an empousa in one of the, um, one of the Greek comedies, and he tells his master all these ridiculous stories about it, including that its left leg was brass and its right leg was cow dung.  But I didn’t think those would, really, add verisimilitude.  

LB: (long pause). Well…

AK: But they fly, that’s something about vampires that you keep noticing, is, lilu’s a screech-owl, strigoi are from screechers, lots of the Malaysian things fly about the whole time, and this thing that they’re present in the air, [aloft and?] some sort of lighter form of flesh seems a constant, and so this thing of turning into bats…

LB: Mmmmmm

AK: Feels like a modern invention, but it’s not actually that, that modern, it’s…

LB: I think the thing about them eating, eating babies is really interesting, because I think it sounds like the very, very oldest forms of vampires have been [or that you now] linked to various forms of vampires, like the empousai or soucouyants, sound like they were essentially developed to be bad things and they reflected, magically, bad things that happened in reality.

AK: Mmm.

LB: So obviously, one of the worst things that could happen to somebody six thousand years ago is their baby dies, that’s just, you know, roundly rubbish, for lots of reasons.  So you invent a creature that’s responsible for it, and that creature, you know, makes sense to come from a mother who herself has maybe lost a child or died in childbirth or whatever it is.  But in the Western tradition of vampires, that I think people are more familiar with, there’s no specific affiliation with killing or eating babies.  There’s definitely a sense of upsetting the natural order of things.

AK: Hmm…

LB: I think you mentioned the infamous Interview with the Vampire, and Anne Rice, earlier, and of course that famous film features, I think, a very young Kirsten Dunst as a 12-year-old vampire…

AK: Oh my god, it is her, isn’t it?

LB: Yeah, very very small Kirsten!  Um, and that’s meant to be creepy, because here’s this, you know, angelic-looking little Kirsten Dunst, and actually she’s deliberately luring older men in a slightly, sort of, paedophilic way, to their deaths, and that’s very frightening, and of course she has superhuman strength, so she looks very innocent but is in fact extremely powerful, but we don’t get the same sense that they are fundamentally responsible for, you know, murdering children.  Um, the Western tradition, I think, leans much more heavily into the kind of fun sexy bit of it.  And I want to talk about, for, today, is something that actually predates the infamous Dracula, by 26 years, it’s by an author who I have a total soft spot for, because he’s not very good, I wouldn’t say he’s the best writer, but he really commits, and I respect that.  So this story…

AK: [interjects, inaudible]. Before you start the story, can I get in one last etymological note?

LK: Always with the etymologies.

AK: So: the word that people are most likely to think of, after ‘vampire’, in European folklore, is of course Nosferatu.

LB: Nosferatu…

AK: The thing about Nosferatu is, it sounds, as an English-speaker, basically Eastern European, but if you speak a Slavic language, or one of the weird Eastern European languages that aren’t Slavic like Hungarian, you may well be furrowing your brow and thinking, ‘This doesn’t actually sound that familiar, except via vampire mythology’.  And it seems that Bram Stoker found it in…

LB: The fraud!

AK: Well, he— he was frauded [sic] by a fraud, by the sounds of it, there was a lady who wrote a bunch of quite compelling, um, accounts of, um, folklore, in, actually, in Romania, in the area which was then still mostly called Transylvania, and, um, she was misinformed or misspelt something, by the looks of it— there are some dubious etymologies for Nosferatu, but it looks like, um, her book was the first time it appeared.  And the reason I’ve thought of it is because you’ve talked about the disruption of the natural order.

LB: Mm.

AK: And notably she talked about two kinds of vampires, two kinds of nosferatis, haunting Romania: the living ones and the dead ones.  So the dead ones, you know, you put in your grave and they stay there, and the living ones, if you are the child of two parents who are themselves illegitimate…

LB: Right.

AK: Then you might turn into a vampire while you’re still alive, you certainly will after you’re dead, so you have to put the vampire in the grave, and you need to walk around it every year on the anniversary of its death, smoking a cigarette.  As long as you do that, it won’t make a nuisance of itself.

LB: Wait, I’m sorry, so, so— does not being married, is enough…

AK: Being the child of two people, neither of whom were the children of married parents, so yeah, like, grandson of illegitimate (inaudible)…

LB: I see… So you’re, like, illegitimacy squared.

AK: Yeah, [although you can’t mess about?], you should get married before you start generating children.

LB: This podcast…

AK: Just in case.

LB: …is sponsored by the Vatican.  We hope you’ve enjoyed its wholesome message.  Um, that’s… bizarre.

AK: Folklore.

LB: Um… But yeah, the story I was going to talk about is by a chap called Sheridan Le Fanu.  He’s actually called Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu, he just wanted lots of names, and he wrote an 1872 novella called Carmilla, which, like I said, pre-dates Dracula.  A lot of people haven’t heard of it, and like I said, he’s not the best writer, but I would maintain that Stoker is not the best writer either: his book just captured the attention of the public in a way that Le Fanu didn’t manage to.  But this is, um, a novella that was initially published as a serial in a London literary magazine called the Dark Blue, um, and it is pretty sexy.  It’s a classic case of, um, well it reads very modernly, basically because the template we now have for the vampire that we all know and love, the Dracula, is essentially drawn, uh… not explicitly but in large part from what Sheridan Le Fanu did in, in Carmilla.  Um, so it’s as explicitly lesbian as you could have got in 1872, and bearing in mind it was written by a guy in a society that was not particularly forward-thinking in terms of gender equality, it’s pretty voyeuristic and meant to be sexy because it’s about two ladies, theoretically, having a kiss.  Which is terribly exciting.  And it does a lot of the things that, again, you would expect from modern vampire fiction, so it’s presented as a case-book, an extract from a case-book of a, a Dr Hesalius, which sounds a bit foreign and fun and it’s a sort of case-book, so someone else has written it, and you don’t know who they are, and it’s, he is interestingly considered one of the first occult detective[s in] literature, which sounds like an amazing accolade for him.  

Um, but the story follows a teenager called Laura, who lives in a secluded castle in Austria, with her sad widower dad, who’s rich, ‘cause he lives in a castle, but he’s sad.  They have a lovely childhood together, she is fairly lonely, but fairly content because her dad is a nice dad, um, and she opens the book by telling us about her happy childhood, which is only marred by one event, which is an early dream she has when she’s six where she sees a vision of a beautiful woman in her bedchamber, um, and later complains of pain in her breast, where she has been punctured, but upon being examined, there is no such puncture wound upon her breast.  So already, we’ve got a kind of weird vibe going on here.

AK: And she’s six.

LB: She is six at the time, yes.

AK: Why, this… well, it’s the baby stealing again, isn’t it?

LB: Well… I was gonna say: we’re already establishing that there is some sort of weird breast focus going on in the bedroom, but I think six is a bit young for even Sheridan Le Fanu to be implying it’s sexy, but, uh, I think it’s… what us literary scholars would call foreshadowing.

AK: Right.

LB: So buckle on up, because we fast-forward twelve years after this event, um, to a time where a planned visit to the castle by one of her father’s friends and his, um, young niece is cancelled, because of the niece’s mysterious and unexplained death.  And the, uh, friend of her father, this guy called General Spielsdorf, sends this enigmatic letter to her father saying, you know, I’m sorry we can’t come, my niece is, unfortunately, dead, which was unexpected, and I will tell you the horrible details of what happened when I see you, but I’m not gonna put it in the letter.  So, there’s this… there’s this strange…

AK: As you do.

LB: It’s a strange cancellation.  Um, and it makes Laura realise that she’s actually very lonely, even though she’s content in her isolation in a spooky gothic castle.  Um, but just as she realises she is lonely, and that she regrets not being able to meet this niece, called, by the way, Bertha (remember Bertha), there is a quite significant carriage accident just outside their castle, which brings a mysterious girl of Laura’s age called Carmilla into her life.  Um, along with Carmilla’s mysterious mother.  Who kind of just has a total fit, and says that Carmilla definitely can’t say anything about herself, and that she, the mother, is on very important business, and is going to have to leave, and leave Carmilla with these kind, random hosts three months, while she’s away on business, but Carmilla isn’t allowed to say anything about it.  Um, which— which is taken very well by Laura and her father, particularly because Laura and Carmilla both recognise each other as the woman they saw in visions when they were six— so it turns out that Carmilla also had a vision of a beautiful lady in her bedchamber at night.

So— I’m not gonna tell you the whole of the plot, because you should read the book (it’s quite short), um, but we go through some romantic advances between Carmilla and Laura— there’s nothing actually explicit, again, because it’s 1872, but there’s lots of intimations that Carmilla is interested in Laura beyond just [as] a sort of innocent female friend, bearing in mind they’re both 18 now, so urges are probably occurring… um, there are some typically vampiric behaviour, that, remember, would not have been typical to the reader of the original story at the original time— so we know that, well, Laura notices that Carmilla will sleep in the day, and she refuses to join in prayers, and that she tends to sleepwalk at night, and women and girls in the towns around tend to start dying from mysterious diseases… there’s a bunch of Gothic tropes, which is something we’re gonna come back to, I think, a lot in this podcast…

AK: Mmm…

LB: So we get, um, of course she’s already in a spooky isolated castle with no, kind of, clear mother figure.  An heirloom painting is delivered to the castle for, for the, Laura’s family, um, which shows a centuries-old ancestor called Mircalla (notice the letters), which looks exactly like Carmilla, um, and there are some horror elements as well, like, she has nightmares of being pounced on by a cat-like beast at night, um, and she actually sees a vision at one point of Carmilla at the end of her bed in the middle of the night drenched in blood, so there’s some pretty powerful imagery going on here.

AK: Mm.

LB: And it’s written in a very fun, engaging way, even though it is… slightly old prose now.  And anyway, Laura’s health gets worse, as you might expect, doctors find small pin-pricks, um, that they can’t explain in her neck, um, and eventually the, ah, narrative comes to a head when General Spielsdorf appears again on the scene and finally tells Laura and her father that, uhhh, how Bertha died, which is essentially that she met a girl who looked exactly like Carmilla, who is called Millarca, and her strange mother… you see what I meant about [inaudible]

AK (interjecting): THE SCRABBLE MURDERS!

LK: He doesn’t try terribly hard!  It’s great nonetheless.  Um, and, the general tried to save Bertha when he realised that some horrible spirit was visiting her at night, and making her ill, so he hid in the corner with a sword and tried to attack the, the thing when it came, but then he didn’t manage it, and the person who, um, returned to the form of Carmilla ran off into the night without being harmed, and unfortunately Bertha died.  So Spielsdorf tells this to Laura and her dad, who were on their way, for reasons I won’t bore you with, um, to somewhere else, and they end up going to find Mircalla’s tomb, so, remember, Mircalla is the…

AK: Mm-hmm

LB: …ancient ancestor of the family, who looks exactly like Carmilla.  Um, and of course they find it in a ruined chapel, um, and Carmilla follows them and appears in this chapel, at the crisis of the story, and General Spielsdorf goes totally nuts when he sees her, because of course it looks exactly like the girl he saw

AK: Mm-hmm

LB: murder Bertha, and Carmilla in turn goes totally nuts, ‘cause she now realises that the jig is up, um, so they have a big ol’ fight, um, the general attacks her with an axe, a descendant of a vampire-vanquisher appears, um, and says…

AK: Has he been foreshadowed, or is he just, like…

LB: He does… I mean, he’s been foreshadowed a bit, but kind of, the paragraph or chapter before, it’s really not woven complexity here, and he says it’s definitely vampires, he finally confirms— ‘cause remember, for a modern reader, we’ve seen all of these tropes before…

AK: Yeah.

LB: We know, the moment they say, “Ooh, the beautiful lady, who sleepwalks and is a bit lesbian”, and we say, ‘ooh, classic vampire’.  But, but, the 1872 reader of the Dark Blue would not necessarily have leapt to that conclusion.  So you need some kind of vampire expert to come in and say, “Ja, this is vampire!”, which he does, um, so they go and find, ah, Mircalla’s hidden tomb, which is delightfully covered in blood and appears, um, to still— the corpse appears to still breathe, with— you can see its heart beating and its eyes are open, so they drive a stake through its heart, it shrieks, they decapitate it, and they burn the body and throw the ashes in the river.  So, it’s actually very very similar to what happens in Dracula the book, there’s lots and lots of different versions of the story that have been re-told in a variety of mediums, but the original book follows that in, in lots of ways, apart from, it sort of takes out the lesbianism, and puts in a bunch of stuff about stuff at home, but it’s— I think it’s really interesting, that it follows so closely, and there is something about Stoker’s Dracula that really captured the Western attention, that, there’s just something about Le Fanu’s that just didn’t, and there’s lots of reasons for that, you know— context being probably one of the most significant ones.  But— but that really is one of the first prototypes of a vampire.  And if you think about it, it hasn’t changed that much, I mean, we’re talking about centuries ago now that he wrote this…

AK: Well, it worked, right, isn’t it, I guess, the story, you have, a bit of dramatic irony where the audience knows more about what’s going on than the characters, you have this slow decline, which can be paced to the author’s preference, you know, you can take as long losing blood as you like— you have advances and retreats, and, and then, there is something about this image of opening a coffin and finding… a corpse which is not a corpse…

LB: Mmm…

AK: …that really strikes, and I guess it’s what you said coming in about vampires disturb—

LB: Upsetting the natural order.

AK: Yeah.

LB: Yeah, yeah, and I guess it’s, I guess everything in— in the stereotype upsets it, you know— it shouldn’t be a beautiful lady doing evil, because apparently beautiful ladies are good, there’s a strong history of basically saying the more pretty something is, the better it is morally… um, vampires shouldn’t be strong, if they’re skinny, attractive women…

AK: Mmm.

LB: Vampires shouldn’t be able to fly, because they look like humans, uh, dead people should stay dead (except vampires don’t), so I guess, I guess a lot of it is about the things not going the way they should.  But I also wonder if our, kind of, vampire ennui is because, certainly, the western tradition hasn’t really changed it up…

AK: Mm.

LB: … for two hundred, three hundred years now, which is weird!

AK: Well… I mean, the, there was a big change which occurred, I think, about the ‘80s, I remember…

LB: The hair got big.

AK: The hair got big, but, so, so we had— I don’t know when Anne Rice started writing, obviously she’s the, the grandmother of all current, um, sexy vampire literature and…

LB: Here I thought that was Tumblr?

AK: But there was a film called The Lost Boys…

LB: Yes, which you keep trying to make me watch and I keep ‘having to wash my hair’

AK: Because it might be good, but the first time I watched it as,

LB: Uh-huh…

AK: As a teenager, I thought it was brilliant, and the second time I watched it, as an adult, I thought it was… not brilliant, so I think it’s possible it’s not brilliant, but…

LB: But that’s exactly what I just said about Le Fanu, to be fair.

AK: That’s true, and that’s the thing, is…

LB: He’s not brilliant, but I love him

AK: …is vampires are, like, monosodium glutamate, you put them in a story and it becomes very palatable even if it’s still basically nonsense. But, Lost Boys, I remember the poster, the tagline was “Sleep all day, party all night, never grow old, never die, it’s great to be a vampire.”

LB: Oh, I see, it made it fun.

AK: So, and that’s the thing, up until, all through, you know, Carmilla is not somebody who has a, a particularly good time.  Dracula, you know, he’s, he’s, he’s, he’s living the life in his castle, but he’s not a cheerful gent.

LB: Well, I’m glad you mentioned that, because…

AK: But— ah, okay, go on.

LB: I have facts to contradict you.  Which is, I was looking into, um, whether Carmilla was the first vampire novel in the Western tradition that we now consider vampire literature.  And, um, it’s not, it was pre-dated by two other works, which are considered the earliest forms of vampire literature, which, again, is way before Dracula, um, and the first one is an 1819 piece of work by a guy called Polidori, called The Vampyre, which is inspired by the life of Lord Byron, which is hilarious, that Byron is the first vampire…

AK: I remember now, the characters… it’s actually Lord Ruthven, isn’t it?

LB: I’ve not read it, so I don’t know, but that’s not the— the bit…

AK: It— it rings a bell.

LB: The bit is the second one, is a story called— it’s a penny dreadful written in 1847 called Varney the Vampire, and it’s the fir— I am, I’m not lying to you, like, imagine the jingle.  Varney the Vampire.

AK: Yeah.

LB: And it’s considered the first example of what’s called a sympathetic vampire, which Anne Rice then went on to popularise, by having, you know, Brad Pitt look all mournful and say, “I’m so handsome, and yet, where is my soul?”.

AK: Mm.

LB: Um, and Varney the Vampire is apparently quite a sweet interpretation of— you know, of a really evil creature from Satan, but you kind of like him and he’s kind of having, like, a fun time.

AK: So, so— I d— I didn’t know that, um, I, um, heard of the Polidori one, although I couldn’t tell you much about it, but I didn’t know about Varney at all.  And… it’s not a great name, is it?  But what I mean is…

LB: Sounds a bit like Barney the Dinosaur.

AK: Up until, sort of, perhaps the ‘80s, there was this general expectation that vampires were gloomy men with widow’s peaks, or ladies with long flowing hair, who…

LB: They were very serious.

AK: …pronounced things in operatic tones, and were basically antagonists.  And post-Anne Rice, Joss Whedon, about a gazillion Vampire Diaries, and, and, True Bloods and all the rest of it, with this general idea that vampires are people who, uh, have some kind of psychic disease that makes them extra sexy and mean, and then, like, maybe, then, sunlight kills them, or not, maybe garlic kills them, or not— that’s basically the thing, that they’re—they’re not elemental forces that have to be dealt with by the characters, they are characters themselves.

LB: Yes, that’s a very good point.  That’s a very good point, they’re actually interested in their psychological existence rather than just, “There is a vampire in this room.  Who is it?”.  But while on that bombshell, I think we’ve actually run out of time for our first episode about vam— I think we’ve covered all of vampires, there’s nothing left to say.

AK: (in vampire accent) “HELP ME I’M CRUMBLING TO DEATH”.

LB: Yes, Alexis has unfortunately just stumbled into a pool of light.  Um, but thank you very much for listening, I hope that you enjoyed that, and we’ll be back for our next episode with more gothic stories and narratives in games…

AK: And etymology.

LB: And etymo— you can’t escape the etymology.  Um, so thank you very much for listening, and… 

AK: Are you going to say “Have a spooky day”?

LB: I did write that, in the notes because…

AK: I think you should say “Have a spooky day”.

LB: Have a spooky day.