After Dark: Myths, Misdeeds & the Paranormal - Medieval Origins of Dracula

Episode Date: October 12, 2026

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 survey here.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 for more information.

Looking for more shady and sinister stories, sign up to History Hit. You can join us to explore the tragic life of the Bronties or discover the chilling story of Burke and Hair. Plus, with your History Hit subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe to start exploring the past. 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 and very real corpses

that gave birth to the vampire we know today. Welcome to After Dark. Hello and welcome to After Dark. I'm Maddie. And I'm Anthony. 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. 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. Kai, welcome to After Dark. Thank you so much for having me. It's a delight. 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. 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.

So 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. That's deeply mortifying. 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 Cairoam. And actually that didn't happen. And I just randomly got an email whilst I was in the rare books reading room, the British Library.

Oh, that's a nice setting to get that email, yeah. There's a kind of after dark law we appreciate it. 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 was like, it hasn't disappeared. So I guess this is real. And so my friend says she manifested it. Nice.

We get to all the spooky girls and gays eventually. We just get there. We have a big long list of you. It takes a while. 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 century. So this doesn't

begin in the 19th century, but as I say, we are going to be talking mostly about Dracula today. Beautiful pronunciation. You may not be from these parts, but Transylvania, anyone. It was very Lagosian. Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Okay, Kyia, 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. Okay. So Dracula, it's written by Bram Stoker, and it's a epistolary.

Oh, I hate that word. It's a pistak, I thought you were going to say. I mean, there have been pistake versions, and I think sometimes it has real pistake 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 it broadly speaking follows a young solicitor who goes off to Transylvania to stay. with Count Dracula to help and buy a house in England because that's really bloody hard even about them.

He gets captured by Dracula and sort of goes missing. Meanwhile, Dracula comes over to England and starts praying on the solicitor's wife, his wife's close friend. And then when Jonathan Harker, the solicitor, arrives back, 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 and ooky-spooky bits, but generally that's what it is. A kill-the-monster narrative. Can I ask you a question, Maddie? Only so I can answer it myself as well. That is the only time you ever asked me a question. I actually don't care what you need to say. Yeah, literally does not give a shit. Do you like the epistolary form?

I have a complicated relationship with it. I know you're going to say you. it. I hate it. I know you are. I can I do that? I've been doing the podcast for three years.

I don't know if we can swear. I hate it. We swear constantly. Okay. Good. Yeah. Had 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...

I can deal with that. 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. Kaya, what do you think?

I tend to agree. I actually don't mind it because I actually think the way that Jack Kidd has it is quite different because it has diary entries, it has different formats. Yeah. It feels like it's kind of textually 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.

And also the other thing is it 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'd receive that letter, you'd be like, Jesus Christ. Jonathan, for the last.

Also, why are you still sending me letters when you simply can't send me letters? Because you're trapped in a car. Who's collecting this? Listen, don't question the logistics. 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. It's too much, guys.

God, it's like, oh, it's so stilted and awkward. Yeah. I think it must have felt so exciting to people in that moment. And it's the form of the novel emerging. And it's like 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. 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.

Yeah, that the form is. Oh, well, Antony, sorry. I'm just, I don't know. That was so, you can't see me. Kaya is levitating. I'm not by seeing right now. Well, probably what we kind of think of as the OG Gothic novel. If we talk about big G Gothic, which is I tend to think when we're thinking about it as a genre.

And we have the nice simple narrative. Well, the first novel, Horace Walpole's the Castle of Atranto. When it comes out, it is masquerade. as a found text. So it has a little preface. And so the found text format then becomes the found footage format and what's really exciting. I've never made that connection.

Because I was going to say found text, M.R. 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 horror and secrets. But I've never made that connection on the screen. Oh, my gosh. 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 horrific. Yeah, don't watch it. It's got actual animal death and torture, and it was 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 colour. So 1970s. And that caused a huge viewer, partly because the content is a... Pauling. 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 led to the death of these actors.

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

Yeah. Yeah. That's not good. Or a turtle in this case. And next it will be the found voice notes. Can you imagine our voice notes released to the world? I'm sure there's a podcast somewhere of that already. Oh, there must be.

That's a really good idea for a podcast. Or like a found podcast that's like, if anyone's hearing this, I'm already dead. I'm going to make that. It's so interesting. Look, it's almost as if you teach this. 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 more broadly, you mentioned Horace Wolpole-Pol-O-Lacare. We're going to talk about Gothic and the vampire idea more generally. But thinking about the origins of Dracula, we've got here, Anthony's Tinder bio, bit mythic, bit Gothic.

I've been married for the last million years. Bit mythic, bit Gothic, bit sexy, bit Irish. I'll take all of those things, by the way. I'm not very sexy, let's be honest. I mean... Don't do yourself that. I won't. But I'm definitely quite Irish.

A little bit, yeah. Yeah, yeah. So, Kaya, talked to me about Anthony. Yeah, talk to me about the origins then of Dracula because there are all these elements. And I am, you know, it's interesting preparing for this episode, actually. Obviously, I knew Bram Stoker was Irish. Didn't realize the strong thread throughout this story, its origins, how it's, how it's 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? 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 Stoker read about Vlad the Impala, who was a Vovost. in Wallachia in the 15th century. Sometimes, you know, we call him Vlad the Impaler because he did stick people on spikes. He didn't do that. He didn't do that.

You have to contextualize it. They were all a little brutal back then. It was a different time, guys. 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.

That's true. Not dissimilar. 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 to have invented it all himself. There was almost no research. But we do know because we found his working notes that there was tons of research and he was drawing on lots of different sources. So some of the sources likely were stories that he had been told 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 like 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 want to do in the Victorian period, they were encouraged to basically collect, well, botany and folklore and all sorts of things. So she wrote this all down, probably not according to the methods. There was no ethical review.

She hadn't done that. 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 on Transylvanian superstitions. It comes out in 1885. And we know that Stoker was making notes from that. Side note to our producers, we have to do an episode on this woman. How have I never heard of her?

Oh my God. Wow. You'll have to come back. Yeah, yeah, definitely. Oh, I would be delighted because she's so interesting. And this is probably where he gets the word nosferatu. Oh, wow. So in the article, 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 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 that it's in the English language. It doesn't really have a very clear definition. We owe her so much then.

And we don't know who she is. Well, I know little of who she is. When I say we, I mean, the broader collective, yeah, yeah, yeah. We can't. Yeah, okay, that's your next episode on a after. Yeah. 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 Gs and all the Gs 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. Okay, so I've already said it's the Big G Gothic

because I can hear the got the gothethysts listening to this. 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 do it. Episode three. Yeah, we'll do a history of the Gothic. Great.

Everything that everyone had a meltdown at the recent International Gothic Association Conference where all the cool gothists. Wait, what's it called the International Gothic? Gothic Association Conference. I-G-A-C. Yeah, well, it's the IGA and it's their conference. I see.

Nice. So cool. A lot of black. A lot of velvet and lace. Can I just say, Kai is wearing a Slayer t-shirt today, Buffy the Vampire Slayer? Yeah.

I was obsessed. I'm iconic. Absolutely obsessed with her. 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, right? And now I feel like it's a little bit like if you didn't catch Gilmore girls at the right time.

Which I didn't. Yeah, exactly. And I think maybe I've slightly missed it. I'm so sad that I didn't watch it. This is an age thing as well, because Maddie is 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 into those things at that point.

I'm just a baby. 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. The branding is strong with Kaya guys. Yeah, the branding is strong. I've got bat earrings on as well. Oh my God, I didn't notice those. Oh, I'd made a mental note to be like at the end of this, we need to talk about the bat earring. Listeners, go to Kaya's and see her bat earrings. Okay, sorry. Okay, Gothic. 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. I hate it. No, I love it so much. Just not to be one of those, well, actually, people, but actually, no, but actually, no, it always bothers me. Didn't Mary Delaney write a Gothic novel pre the Castle of Atranto, which I don't think ever gets published. It's been published recently. I love Mary Delaney, which is 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. Well, isn't this the problem with Canon generally? Yeah. Because it's always a lot of my time is me trying to like tell easy narratives for people to get information. Of course. And I'm like, yeah, it's more complicated. But if I make it as complicated as I wanted to be, we'll be here for three hours.

We will. We will. We will. We will. I've got all my PowerPoints out. So for the sake of this, Horace Walpole, beginning of nothing. I think it, one of the things I think is really interesting about Harris 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.

Yeah. And he builds his own house, Strawberry Hill, which is phenomenal if you have 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 with Roman Catholicism. And there's a lot about how Roman Catholicism is so superstitious and spooky and strange. 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 know, think about the earrings. Like 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? It does.

And the other thing that, given that we're going to be, we were talking about Dracula, is mostly to be Dracula's contemporary. It's not set historically. And it is very, very. much engaged with the technology of the time. So it has this tension between this sort of superstition, whereas the early wave, well, 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,

when 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 the 1800s, broadly speaking, 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. 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? 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 realize 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 well-polized. and Radcliffe and kind of the more romantic style Gothic 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. 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 draper everywhere.

It's on painted black. It's colourful, it's flamboyant. It's, you know, a completely kind of different vibe to the Victorian idea of gothism. Kaya, let's talk about some of the main themes, and I suppose anxieties of Dracula then. We've 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. And what are the sort of the main hitters of that? I'm thinking about, you know, Byron's circle, for example, but also Sheridan LaFernou 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 sexually, sexually threatening, but also appealing figure in Western Europe? So once more, there's loads and loads 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 come emerge from like Serbia and other places of corpses being disinterred, and they're often chambolic 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 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 Giao. I am not good of pronouncing it, which is a Turkish term, 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 Dio Dardi in 1816 the year without a summer I'm sure you've spoken about this and the genesis of Frankinside it's one of those moments isn't it that it's always cited 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. So much.

I would. I would be lusting after Byron and then regretting it big time. That would definitely be my vibe. I wouldn't want to

but I would. You would be able to help yourself. 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 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, spelled Lord Ruthven. And that is directly an allusion to Byron, who is called Lord Riven in Lady Caroline Lambs, Glenarvan. I see. Okay, so it's literally how it's known, right?

Yeah. So essentially, it's Polidori. We're 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 hundreds of vampires. 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 power, both, well, 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 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 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 vampiruses are seducing Jonathan Harkin,

be like, this man belongs to me. And you've got everything about like the teeth and the biting and the sucking and the clear phallic symbolism, which I think why people like analyzing Dracula so much because it's secretly very naughty. One of the other things, which I think really escapes modern audiences, and I totally get it. It escaped to me for a enough 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 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. 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 crew of light, so one of the people trying to count. 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, really.

Is that podcast thing you're talking about? Yeah, yeah, yeah. 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... A classic, thanks for typing,

situation. Literally, Mina Harker, the good woman, the one who survives, not like naughty, naughty Lucy Westernra, mainly she's good

because she's very secretarial. Yeah. It's really bloody hard and you're like, she's handy. She's handy. We won't violently kill her. She's stayed in her lane.

She's done the typing. That's all she's done. That's great. Well done her. And she actually talks about like all the stuff she's collated. And then Van Helsing

gets all the attention for it. I really don't like Van Helsing. I just want to say, Everyone thinks he's the hero. No, I kind of don't. Yeah, no, he's annoying. Yeah, I like that take. And he's patronising and he's such a patriarch.

And I also feel sorry for Dracula. And 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. 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 are treated accordingly very violently by the men in the novel. 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 there's quite a release in reading these very anti-maternal figures. Do you think that's something to do with 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 Dracula, by Dracula, that 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 maternal aspect, I suppose, or 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 the sort of creation of generations of vampires that's very at odds with patriarchal normative culture. So during my masters, because I'm so cool, I was writing an essay.

I remember writing it really well about the idea that Dracula, and actually doing the picture, the portrait of Dore and Gray as well, and then Venus and Furs, which is about sadomasochism. So that's kind of student I was. A lot about 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 chest and Mina almost like breastfeed from the milk. So that's a real inversion of maternal. The other thing is we have all this industrialisation and what we're starting to do is recreation of copies. So copies on copies and copies.

And I was reading articles that was suggesting that there's an anxiety about the authentic. 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 like with Karl Marx picks up on vampire imagery. And there's lots of real ways that's used. And he uses sort of like the vampire to be the landowners sucking the blood out of the, you know, the workers. And he says something kind of like vampiric about everything around proto. Yeah, that subservient relationship.

That's so interesting. 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 Dracula specifically. Okay, so you have to be a shout out for Stephen Arata, who writes so much about reverse colonization in Dracula. Broadly speaking, reverse colonization is a feel. that since in this case Britain has gone and colonised the world, that we are due, some kind of violence committed against us,

or that we will then be colonised and it will literally reverse. So we'll be colonised. Topical? 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, 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 verse colonisation, it continues now, that idea that we colonise and now we will be colonised. In Dracula, it's most obviously done because Dracula, of course, is foreign, he's Romanian and whilst Britain hadn't colonised Romania, there had, in the 1700s been a lot of tensions in that area between sort of Western Europe and Eastern Europe.

And you get things like the Austro-Hungarian Empire, which I mentioned in regard to, 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... Don't you hate when fighting age vampires come over here? Yes. Fighting age vampires. Yeah. And there's something. as well, I suppose, specifically about vampirism, thinking about the corruption of blood, right,

and thinking about good English bloodlines and ideas of inheritance and aristocracy and that in terms of Dracula, he is interrupting that. He's disrupting the structure of society, the very foundation, the very architecture, if you like, of how England or Britain functions in this moment. 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 it's noticeable at the end of the novel. We know that Dracula's dead because Mina has a baby and her and Jonathan Harker, the Honourable Rising Middle Classes,

who are decent people. They have their baby. And the blood is purified almost through it. 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 Stoga himself, who is Irish. He's also in the social circle of Oscar Wilde and thinking about, you know,

late Victorian ideas of sexual deviancy. Obviously, we're not, I think we're quite close to the trial of Oscar Wild at this point, aren't we, the same decade? And the idea of 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.

Anthony, do you want to describe it for us? Then maybe we can discuss this. Because I think it's interesting just thinking about the ideas of colonialism and corruption of sort of British values. Yeah, give us this image, please. 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 that is hovering over the figure of a woman. And I'll come to her in just a second because across this gigantic bat 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 an Irish nationalist movement. And the face of the bat is a man called Charles Stuart Parnell,

who was at 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 Ireland personified as a shapely, comely woman, and she is, you know, distraught on the ground. She is, you know, put to, to, he's going to ruin her. He's going to ravish her, basically.

And we have it called, it's called the Irish Vampire. And I'm assuming, I haven't actually seen this before, but I'm assuming that the implication is this idea for Irish national rule themselves will ruin Ireland and only Ireland will be safe within the empire. 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 viewpoint and a different political viewpoint. Also, his relationship, I mean, Oscar's mother

was a staunch nationalist. So 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? It's a punch for punishment. Yeah, okay, okay. So yeah, that's my take on it,

but I am not the expert, so Kai, I'm going to give over to you and you can talk us through it. Well, I've got to say, I am not the expert when it comes to Irish history either because, as my dulcet tone suggests, you're not Irish. I'm not Irish. And therefore, that's not mentioned to us because it's uncomfortable. We dislike being uncomfortable with the reality of what we did.

I do quite a lot of work around wolves and werewolves as well. You're going to be in for a busy season. Sorry, you live here now, well, after dark. You're going to have to just keep staying. Please do. 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. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like there have been times that they're like, why are we reading this? And I'm like, ah. If you're Kyya's line manager, now is a good time to switch off. Just to let you know. Penny, who's lovely, 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 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 practiced. It practiced 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 destroyed the relationship to the natural world as well, particularly what I'm interesting is the destruction of wolf populations. I found this image that we've just been talking about from Punch, the Irish vampire image. And what really kind of struck me was partly how it inverts. what Marx would go on to say. 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. 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. So it's such a a strong image across the political spectrum then. You might say there are vampires on both sides. Oh, God. Yeah, it's so fascinating that this is, presumably, therefore, so in the popular culture, the popular imagination, this idea 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 huge concerns in the 19th century, Does Stoker and his novel, do they come out of that context? Because 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, what's happening. How revolutionary is it? So this is great because part of my thesis,

I did go to the British Library and get the micro-fiche out and then have a look at reviews, contemporary reviews. And what was interesting was like, how much people were like, oh, it's another vampire novel. There's another great one that comes out of that same year called Blood of the Vampire. In the same year. In the same year, 1897, totally overlooked, written by a woman.

This is like in Hollywood, right, where you often get two films that are on the same topic that come out and we'll remember one and completely forget the other one. Also worth looking at in terms of it's got a, well, a vampire. of colour. I think by modern standards we'd probably refer to as a black vampire, but it's quite non-specific. It's a lot actually about West Indies and slavery and violence. It is so worth looking at if you want to, if you read off a show an episode on that as well, that sounds so much better.

And 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, absolutely brilliant. Wow. What's it called? It's called Blood of the Vampire. Blood of Vampire? I think I'm getting that right. Yes, Blood of the Vampire. And so we've got lots of novels coming out. We've had Car Miller in 1872 come out.

We've had Varney the Vampire in the 1840s to 50s. Sorry, now what? Barney the Vampire. It sounds like Barney the dinosaur. Is it camp? Is it over the top or no? I mean, yes, because it's one of these classic serialized novels from like the, it's in the confident period of the Victorian era where they're just like, you know, there's a kind of just everything has a tone of like

I don't know just arrogance 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 so Varney the vampire is like a vampire and he in the end he kills himself by throwing himself to a volcano

but it runs well yeah who hasn't do us yeah I mean like but it's interesting because then people like is this the beginning of the sympathetic vampire because he has self-awareness

and it kills himself 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.

Sure. And then I think then you get things like Nosferatu coming out, which is a essentially rip-off version. What's the time lapse? So when does Nosferatu come out? Northratus 1922, yeah. 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. And then 1931, you get your Bella Lagosie universal pictures and then you get more and more coming out from that and then you get into the 1970s. We'll have a horror pick it up and then you start getting more adaptations. 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 60s have just happened and all that sexual liberation and all of that going on. And yeah, I think it's really,

it's a never-ending useful trope, isn't it, the vampire? Anthony's favourite vampire? No, well, I was just thinking about this. A favourite vampire? Yeah, that's, I'll come back to that in just a second. But 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, one of my friends, and if she was listening to this, we were in primary school. I was six years old. Her name was Amory Kelly. It still is. Her name is still Amory 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 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 real and present fear for me when I was like six or seven years. I was like, I'm going to get eaten. But the generational thing of what you were describing there, Kaya, 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. Every generation has its own.

So for me, it would be the Bram Stoker's Dracula version. My favorite 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. That's fine. That's who my cat's named after. He's called Louis DuPont de Lack von Frankels.

Ooh. And I made the vet light shows. The whole name. All of it, including the Von Frankles, which is like a mixture. The vet receptionist's like, can you spell that place? It's like, you're going to hate me. I'm really interesting 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.

Right. And I, the moment I found out about vampires, I was obsessed with them. Yeah. At 10, I made my best friend, Melanie Anderson. who has changed her surname and doing shoutouts. I made her stay up and watch on Channel 4 interview with the vampire

the adaptation by Neil Jordan and I remember even then this is why I did literature watching it and being like so they're rolling around and 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 queer reading and then when I was older I started watching both of the Vampires Sayer My mum came in in the scene where Angel is tied to the end of Ducilla's four-posted bed. And yeah, in leather trousers and she's pouring cold water on him and saying, you've been a bad daddy. And my mum said, I remember walking in, looking at your faces, you watch this and going,

huh, that'll have repercussions. No bringing her back from that. We're done. But yeah, who's your favourite? Oh, my gosh. I mean, yeah, Bram Stokes, Dracula, what's he called? The actor. Can we.

Oh, Gary Oldman. Gary Oldman. Canon. Like, absolutely. I did love the adaptation of Camilla that was done, oh God, maybe three or four years ago. I don't know if you saw this one. I had Greg Wise and it. It had Toby Menzies, love Toby Menzies.

Love all of those people. I cannot remember any of the female actress's names, which is really bad, cancelled. 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. Yeah. Period piece. Yeah. Really good. Really, really nice. So I'd recommend that. I did like, I did like Eggers and Osferatu.

Beautiful to love that. Is it the best Eggers film? Maybe not. Didn't love the ending. Maybe Werewolf will be though. I know. I am so ready. Have you seen the trailer? And then Romeo and Juliet. You know, did you see that?

What? That's his next one, Romeo and Juliet. Yeah, but it's never going to be as good as the Baslo. I know. Why would you ever touch it again? 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

that didn't even know what I was watching. God, I fancy that I had a defence of that. Oh, I know. There was a three-year window where I was the right age for him and then I was too young, then I was too young, then I was three years and then now I'm too old. You've missed the sweet spot.

Once you get past 24, where you're done, sorry. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, I think it's time to wrap up on that end. Yeah, all our sexy vampires and whatever else. Has DiCaprio done a vampire? No, but he'd be good, wouldn't he? Some might say the ultimate vampire. Oh my God, because you could just turn all the pretty young ladies so they never age out and then he can stick up.

Allegedly, by the way. Yeah, just making this out. Allegedly. Kaya, thank you so much. This was so wide-ranging and interesting. I think that we did not control this conversation. Please come back and do more. That was absolutely fascinating.

If you want to write in and tell us what your favorite vampire. Right in. Right in. And good epistolary novel, you can write us on a graph. Exactly. Record it on a wax cylinder and send it in. Send us a voice date. Yeah, you can do that.

Afterdark Historyhit.com. If you are listening, wherever you get your pods, don't forget to leave us a five-star review. Before we go, Maddie, how do you get your hair so curly at the ends? It's looking really good today. 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.

So you're not wearing bonnets or anything like that to like poof them up? No. Okay, looks great. It's just natural darling. Looks great. And your sister colours your hair, right? She does. She's a hairdresser.

It's very good. I love that, dark. I'm in colour. Sorry, it's neither here nor there, but anyway, go read Dracula. It's just sad that this is not being filmed this episode. No, but they can listen to it. Yeah, but they're not going to see my hair. Oh, of course, okay.

She's going to have to put a picture of her earrings, and you're going to have to put a picture of your hair when this comes out. Okay, goodbye. Bye.