Ologies with Alie Ward - Vampirology (VAMPIRES) Part 2 with Jeff Holdeman

Episode Date: October 31, 2022

Start with Part 1 for all the folkloric history, superstition, and Dracula basics. And then this Part 2 has vampire finches, fang straws, vegan bloodsuckers, threshold invites, horniness, grain alcohol, garlic breath, psychic vampires and all our questions answered by Dr. Jeff Holdeman, professor and Vampirologist in Indiana University’s Slavic and East European Languages and Cultures department. Also: I think you should write a novel. Part 1: alieward.com/ologies/vampirologyDonations went to Myeloma.org for blood cancer research in honor of your Grandpod, Larry Ward and NaNoWriMo.org. Go write your book. More episode sources and linksOther episodes you may enjoy: Our whole Spooktober 2022 catalog, Procyonology (RACOONS), Racoonology (PROCYONIDS),  FIELD TRIP: I Go France, Taphology (GRAVESITES), Osteology (SKELETONS/BODY FARMS), Thanatology (DEATH & DYING) Updated Encore, Desairology (MORTUARY MAKE-UP), Anthropodermic Biocodicology (HUMAN LEATHER BOOKS)Sponsors of OlogiesTranscripts and bleeped episodesSmologies (short, classroom-safe) episodesBecome a patron of Ologies for as little as a buck a monthOlogiesMerch.com has hats, shirts, masks, totes!Follow @Ologies on Twitter and InstagramFollow @AlieWard on Twitter and InstagramSound editing by Jarrett Sleeper of MindJam MediaTranscripts by Emily White of The WordaryWebsite by Kelly R. DwyerTheme song by Nick Thorburn

It's no longer a lady recording from a rental car, thank all that is holy, but it's Alliward. This is Allegies, and this is part two of Back-to-Back Spooktobury Vampire episodes. And we're getting this up a day early to celebrate Halloween, but this info on spirits and superstition disembodied, ghouls, grain alcohol, pickles, wailing, teeth, horniness, invitations, the changing needs of culture and vegan vampires, it's necessary all year long. It'll stick with you. So let's get into it.

First, thank you to everyone at patreon.com slash allergies for supporting the show. This episode is all your questions, and you too can join. You can submit questions for 25 cents an episode. That's patreon.com slash allergies. And thank you also to everyone who rates and subscribes. Subscribing really helps the show. So do that. Also, if you leave reviews, I read them all, such as this really fucking nice one from

Golden Girl 11 who says, I love it so much that I have started to wonder what will happen when you run out of allergies. And Golden Girl 11, don't worry, I have had this exact nightmare and I woke up sweating. Only to remember that there's thousands of allergies with new ones invented all the time. There's also a lot of isms, which is a clue that your internet dad here is hatching something. What? Okay, stay tuned. Also, thank you to Compose Yourself who left a review that said, the show is beautiful

and that they are wishing you the beat of lick alley. And that made me cackle. I love you. You can listen to the catacombs to understand that reference. Okay, on to part two with beloved Indiana University professor of Slavic and Eastern European languages and culture who helms the bonkers popular course, the vampire and European and American culture, vampirologist Dr. Jeff Holderman. Can I ask you some listener questions?

Oh, absolutely. They had great ones. They mentioned that every vampire is the one that the age needs and so many people. Looking at you, patrons Anthony Charabino, Allie Vessels, Greg Wallach, Lauren Mascobrota, Kelly King, Kathleen Daling, Caitlin Owens, Alex Joseph, Terina, Felix Wolf, Paul Cerillo, Deli Dames, Samantha Tovey, Nicole Ursula Woods, Swoon With Us, and first time question asker, Maddie Hobson. They all want to know.

When did vampires get so horny? Why are they such heartthrobs? When did this idea that you're going to get seduced by a vampire? When did it start turning into that? So if we think about it, the folkloric vampire is a reanimated corpse. It's going to stink like a reanimated corpse. That's hot. It's going to have a bloody mouth because it's perceived to be feeding on people.

You do not want to be around a reanimated corpse. When we get through the 19th century of literature, all of these vampires, our very first vampires are all nobles, Lord Riven in the vampire, Sir Francis Varney, the vampire, and Carmilla as a countess and Dracula as a count. The nobility has a castle and everything. So already in the 19th century, when we're trying to demonize the nobility, what better way of trying to tear them down than to call them vampires? People who take more than their fair share, who suck us dry of our life force.

Newsflash, John, the super rich, they're not like us. We get the introduction of beauty. Lord Riven is hypnotizing. He's got this weird gray eye, but he's still captivating, charming, mesmerizing, and people still keep inviting him into their house to meet their daughters. That was the story based on Lord Byron. Maybe the vampire is still a noble and is clever and smart and powerful. Carmilla is described as being just supernaturally beautiful and she's charming and she's coquettish

and she is passionate and then Count Dracula is hypnotizing and he's wealthy. He's got piles of money with dust on him in his castle and he can control the weather and he can control people's actions and he can control wolves and everything else. That arms escalation starts already by then with beauty and with abilities and with wealth. When you're undead, when you're undying, you remember the old times, which then means that you're this automatic historian. You're smart and you remember things and you've seen people's actions over a very long period of time.

Dead end because nobody wants to be with Nosferatu. He's like, he's older, but he's got tuxedo on and he's debonair and he's got this way of speaking and he's kind of mysterious and he's got these eyes that are enchanting and he can control people. I tell my students that one of the mysteries we have to solve is how do you go from a reanimated corpse to a vilf? This is the vampire I'd like to fornicate with. A vilf, bless this man, protect him.

So why in the world would you want to be with this gross reanimated corpse? Well, you clean them up and you give them lots of money and you make them really smart and then what we need, they're still predators, right? They're still dangerous. In 1973, we get Jack Palance from, do you remember Ripley's, believe it or not? Oh yeah. I remember that show, but maybe what some people immediately think of with Jack Palance is him winning an Academy Award for City Slickers in 1991 and during his Oscar acceptance

speech, he paused to do some one-handed push-ups. He was 73 at the time and one thing I never associate Jack Palance with as a leathery fitness buff is the 1974 British made-for-TV version of Dracula, starring him. Many motion pictures claim to be horrific. Now comes one which reaches a new height in unabated terror. The Bram Stoko masterpiece, Dracula. Jack Palance has an amazing voice and everything and he is our first remorseful vampire. He feels bad about being a vampire, about having to drink human's blood and he still

has to do it, but he feels bad about it. Introducing that to make us want to have compassion for him then takes off and then we get this bifurcation of vampire types where there either is the solely evil vampire or there's a vampire that's remorseful about their nature. And again, this is the 70s and we're like trying to understand psychologically why people are the way they are and we're in therapy and we're trying to heal and I'm okay, you're okay and this is the way that people are different and maybe I can overcome my alcoholism or my addictions and maybe there's something about my nature that I can overcome.

I'm still redeemable. Of course, every human is redeemable, but before the 1950s or so, the notion of introspection wasn't super popular, so what changed things? Well, rewind a few decades actually to 1936 when Dale Carnegie published How to Win Friends and Influence People and then a year later, Napoleon Hill wrote the book Think and Grow Rich, but by the early 1950s self-help was beginning to grow as kind of an industry and what cracked the door open a little more was a clergyman and author named Norman Vincent Peel writing this massively popular bestselling title, The Power of Positive Thinking.

So by the 1970s, a whole generation had been raised with this mindset that maybe we could control our lives with our minds and now the self-help industry has a fervent hold on us. It makes about $10 billion a year in the US alone, which is why I'm really excited to announce I'm finally writing a book. It's called How to Stop Buying Self-Help Books and Spend the Money Feeding Raccoons Corn Dogs Instead. That's not true, but I bet if I wrote that book, I could probably buy a boat. Also do not feed raccoons any corn dogs.

They can have worms that can eat your brain and kill you. You can see the prosyanology two-parter on raccoons for more on that, but anyway, in 1972, the book I'm Okay, You're Okay by California-based psychiatrist Thomas Anthony Harris enjoyed just a cozy spot on the bestseller list for years. In the 1970s, this was a big breakthrough for pop psychology and the notion that our childhood experiences still affect how we regulate or don't regulate our own emotions and thus, our behaviors. So while vampires may not have a reflection, they do mirror the zeitgeist.

I'm not stake-worthy anymore. We actually be given a chance, and then that evolves, and we get vampires that are then more and more desirable. They go from the kind of bad boy, it's like, I know he's dangerous, but he's hot, he drives a motorcycle, and this James Dean turns into lost boys. And there's a desire to be with a demon lover. Well, I'd like to try. And then we just keep adding on every movie that we get.

There's some other way of overcoming this badness, and then we get like, well, maybe I won't drink human blood, but I'll drink animal blood. Or maybe, you know, PETA's gonna get mad at that, so maybe we could come up with a synthetic blood that then doesn't harm anybody. Which, side note, is kind of the narrative hook of the HBO series called True Blood, which is set in this time when synthetic blood called True Blood is on the market, leading to what's called the Great Revelation, which allowed vampires to come out of the coffin, they say, and enjoy their perihuman human rights.

And True Blood, the substance, wasn't supposed to be delicious. One character described it as giving up your favorite meal for slim, fast shakes forever, but it gets a job done. And hello, in real life, today, somewhere, so many people are alive human beings choosing to drink soylent. So True Blood is pretty plausible, considering it's convenient and portable and allows you to stop murdering people. But is there something more permanent than having to keep buying cases of fake blood

at Costco? Maybe there's a cure, right? We still don't get cures for vampirism at that point, because rather than fixing people and there's so many problems that still haven't been fixed, it's like maybe it's living with this condition, which is the important thing. These people don't deserve to be executed or locked up. Maybe we can reform them. And then we want to hear that story.

And we want to hear their backstory, too. And that's all of a sudden, from that point on, all of our vampire movies have the flashback of, like, you know, why this person became a vampire. Now you know what we are. Now you know what you are. You never grow old, Michael. And you'll never die. But you must feed.

It's this exact same fascination with the origin stories of people and then of why they are the way they are in life. And can you overcome your dangerous urges? And can you be trusted anymore? Which brings us to your crotch and the horniest of all the reanimated corpses. Edward Cullen is the manifestation of this. People always ask me, like, do you like Twilight? Is Twilight saga?

Do you like those books? Do you like that movie? I'm like, it doesn't matter if I like them. The point is that a lot of people did. And every age creates a vampire that it needs. There had to be something resonating about Edward Cullen that spoke to so many millions and millions and millions of people that they wanted to be with him. And it's not just the demon lover and it's the person who is able to stay under control.

Right? Bella wants it. And Edward's like, oh, no, I can't. And it's like the perfect boyfriend who wants to wait until after they're married. And she's like begging for it and probing and pushing and everything. He's like, no, no, Bella, I can't, you know, and like pulls himself away and all this kind of wonderful chased imagery and everything. He's that ideal boyfriend, right?

And Charlie's, you know, got his shotgun. He's like cleaning the gun on the table and it's like ready to meet Edward. All right, bring him in. Can you be nice? He's important. Then Edward brings Bella home, you know, like one minute before curfew. It's hard to not like this guy. Listen, I had to edit here because Jeff dropped so many plot points, boilers.

I had to cut him out because maybe some people out there are going to queue up Twilight tonight for the first time to psychoanalyze the whole thing. And I didn't want an angry mob trying to burn me in a barn. Okay? We can have the demon lover who is reformed, who's learned to control his urges like the whole family has, right? So the, you know, the Cullen's house is a halfway house, right? They've all learned to kick the habit and they're all living together this vegetarian

lifestyle. And again, Pete is going to get mad or the Sierra Club is going to get mad because they're out, you know, hunting mountain lions, but at least they're not killing humans. I immediately was like, dude, why don't they just eat squirrels or start like a gopher catching business at a golf course? But I looked into it and Twilight author Stephanie Meyer apparently has said that she thinks predators would taste better than herbivores. And that checks out.

But I was like, what is Stephanie Meyer's deal? And I knew she's like religious. She's a member of the Church of Latter-day Saints, AKA Mormons. But I didn't realize that that is why there is such a push for abstinence only activities, if you will, until marriage in these movies. This woman delivered us the hottest, most brooding vampire who's also sensitive. And then it's like, wait for a ring, but you know what? One person's fantasy genre is another's horror.

Also before Twilight, Stephanie Meyer had never written a book before. She had a dream about the plot. She woke up a little horny. Objection. That's pure conjecture. Objection overruled. But anyway, she wrote about it and now she makes tens of millions of dollars a year. And then E.L.

James, who somehow churned out literary work that we call books, the 50 Shade series, started those books as fanfic of Twilight. What is my point? My point is, if you have an idea for a book, please write it. This right here, this is a signal from the universe that you've been waiting for, okay? After me, standing over your bed in the shadowy moonlight, I'm holding a frying pan and I'm telling you, I will swat my own head with it if you don't start your book. And actually, November is National Novel Writing Month via a nonprofit called Nano-Rymo, which

stands for National Novel Writing Month. And Nano-Rymo started over 20 years ago as a challenge for people to write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. And according to their site, now, each year on November 1st, hundreds of thousands of people around the world begin to write, determined to end the month with 50,000 words of a brand new novel. They enter the month as elementary school teachers, mechanics, or stayed home parents. They leave novelists.

How inspiring is that? So nano-rymo.org, I'm linking them in the show notes and we're going to donate to them this month as well. So Nano-Rymo, write a book, do it for future you and do it for me with a frying pan. But yes, back to Edward and Bella and eating mountain lions instead of people. Now we can live happily ever after, actually completely ever after. Ever after forever. Forever and ever, right?

And so this is that evolution that we get. It's really, really amazing and at each step, it can't happen overnight. We had Varney the Vampire is actually, as technically our first remorseful vampire. Do you think you'll ever read this? Oh, no, but I'll take a spoiler. Okay, good. So Varney is unable to control himself and attempts at killing him have failed and failed and failed all through the 400 plus pages.

And he throws himself into Mount Vesuvius. Oh, what a death. And self-cremates. Wonderful. He's so remorseful and he can't be killed and the one way to really, truly cremate a vampire is one thing to like, you know, decapitate and burn them. It's another to be thrown into the bowels of the earth and to be cremated by Mount Vesuvius. That's wonderful.

The people at that time just did not need that vampire. They still needed nobles to be villains. And we just don't pick up that thread for another 130 years until Jack Phalance. That's amazing. We just, we needed the literary vampire, the cinematic vampire to be evil and an enemy and something that we know how to identify and name and stake and destroy up until the 70s when we decide that maybe bad people can be reformed. Maybe we can overcome our shortcomings.

And then that makes everybody salvageable at that point. Every step is a product of the time, right? Every age creates the vampire that it needs. Every step of softening that vampire and making them more attractable and making them more marriageable is important. It's an amazing evolution. I've ordered the movies, the 650 or so movies in my syllabus in chronological order. And if you want to watch all of them in chronological order, you can actually see that development

over time. It's absolutely fascinating. We can track when the first time a trait gets introduced. So set aside a few months and watch 650 movies. Okay. So that was the first question. Patrons Allie Vessels, Zombot, Angela Clark, Christian Krupp, Alex Parrish, Sick Sugar and Pachica asked permission to enter the conversation with the query.

So many people want to know when did they have to get invited in? Was that something that's super historical or did that emerge in like 1985? This is from folklore. So many of these things. Again, the literary vampire didn't just immediately be born out of nothing. This is just importing all of these traits from the folkloric vampire selectively at first. And then when the well runs dry, we dig somewhere else.

People will go back to these old sources that the Prakowski book has folklore from lots of countries. And you can tell that people have been reading this book and they hear this word marroy and like, oh, I've got to put that in vampire academy. Okay, side note. For more on vampirology, hit the 2006 scholarly reference book, Vampire Lore, writings of Jan Louis Prakowski, which is a textbook in Jeff's class. And buried in all this literary history are mentions of the marroy, which now appear as

characters in the Netflix series, Vampire Academy. And marroy are mortal, but they're magical creatures who can go out during the day, but with parasols. And they have human blood sources called feeders that they sip from, but they don't kill. And they have more troubled and kind of bitchy counterparts called the strigoi. And those will drink you dead and or infect you with simmering rage and the blood munchies. And in Roman mythology, strigoi means a troubled spirit. And yeah, maybe they're just hangry.

Maybe they have low blood blood sugar. And so there's always this pulling from folklore. And in Central and Eastern Europe, you didn't let people who you don't know into your house. So I am an ethnographer and I go out into the villages in Poland and Lithuania every summer. And a stranger walking into a village, even today, people are suspicious. You can see people watching out of their windows. It doesn't help that I go and work in cemeteries too.

They'll often you'll see me, the road only leads to the cemetery. And then, you know, like somebody shows up 30 minutes later, just to, you know, water the flowers. Or the coincidence. And then they're like, so what are you doing here? And then we talk and I explain what I'm doing. And then they're welcoming. Once I'm a known quantity, I'm welcomed in, but you wouldn't welcome in somebody who

didn't know, especially in this pre-modern time when they're diseases. So you don't know if somebody's a murderer. You don't know if someone's a thief. And you don't know if someone's a plague bearer. And so it's safer to keep them, either keep them completely out of your village or if they come up to keep them on the other side of the fence and talk at a distance. And I have a lot of people who will do that. And then if they judge that I'm safe, then they'll let me in and then we'll be in their

yard for a while. And then if they judge that I'm safe, then they'll invite, you know, oh, you must be thirsty. How about if you come into the, into the house and then according to Central and East European tradition, you have to feed a person and give them something to drink. And so, you know, I go from the person who's looking at me with suspicion to the person who's like feeding me and giving me drink and saying, next time you're in the village, you can come and stay in my spare room.

That tradition though of not inviting strangers in is very old and it's very logical. And what the weird thing that has then happened is we've, again, before it would just be don't invite a person in and now, you know, true blood, if you watch true blood, I'm familiar with it, but I haven't watched a lot of it. Now you'll have a reason to go and watch it, but you'll have a, you'll invite a vampire in and then if they do something you don't like, you say out loud, I rescind my invitation into my house and then the vampire like gets dragged out supernaturally out of, out of the house.

Arms escalation, things that just go over the top and we, we get that now. We get either like people will bleed if they come into a house uninvited or they trick people to being invited or they buy the house and then it's not their house anymore and then I can come in wherever I want to. There always these logical hurdles to get around being invited in. And again, that's the money will get you into people's house, intelligence will get you into people's house, brute force will get you into people's house, your status will get you into people's house.

Just a side note, I watched a scene from true blood where an invite was rescinded and in the scene instantly like some thunder rumbles and the front door flings open in a wind and the vampire just glides backwards and the comments on the YouTube video were about how this breakup scene was supposed to be sad, but how people just howl with laughter at it. And one YouTuber Wicca4991 commented, I always picture a random stage crew member pulling him backwards on a skateboard, just whoosh and cut. We get to see this in a good form in Dracula where they, they're these good people who

are fighting Dracula, among whom are wealthy people and knowledgeable people and noble people and they use their status to commit all these crimes, but because they're good people and they're doing it for a good reason and because nobody would doubt that they were up to anything bad, they can also break into these places like where Dracula lives and where he has his stashed boxes of earth all over London and the neighboring areas as well. We keep seeing this idea pop up in movies and literature in funny ways. So either we do it and it has become a standard norm or we've turned it into something that's absolutely ridiculous and sometimes in a comedy, then that's going to be really, really

funny. Well, what about garlic? Asked patrons, Rachel Kasha, Allie Vessels, Melanie Metzger, Brittany Peake, Michael McLeod, Lucas O'Neill, Super Sarah, Holly Spencer, Cassie Chow and M. Hold, Avon, Erin Ryan, Lizzy Carr, RJ Doge, Hannah Boyd, Michelle Zendgraf, Margo, Lex Clearwater and Nicole, plus first time question askers, Janelle Farage and Olivia French, as well as listener slash farmer, Scott Nichols, who offered, if any of you are having vampire problems, I have garlic.

When did the garlic trope come up? Garlic is old. So in Central and Eastern Europe, garlic is medicine. Garlic is medicine. Distilled alcohol is medicine. Vodka. Honey is medicine, right? Honey doesn't go bad and our distilled alcohol, you can use that to clean cuts and to reduce

pain and garlic is just very healthful. And the interesting thing is, unlike onion, which will make your mouth stink. When you eat garlic, it comes out of your pores. I can remember being in Russia for the first time in 1992. And right after the fall of the Soviet Union, alcohol was really, really cheap and people would just like put three fingers on their shirt, meaning, you know, I need two other people to split up the cost of a bottle of vodka with me, go into the park and you can never, in Central and Eastern Europe, you never drink without eating.

And so one of the things you can eat is garlic. Okay, look this up and he's not lying. In Ukraine, vodka is known as herilka, which derives from a root word meaning it burns. And apparently it's very uncouth to drink herilka without nibbling on things like thinly sliced pork fat, which is called sallow, or munching it with garlic pickles. Will that help you in any way? I don't know about the herilka, but the garlic might. And according to many, many, many published stories like the 2015 Journal of Immunology

report, immunomodulation and anti-inflammatory effects of garlic compounds, it reports that allium cetivum, which is garlic's birth name, can enhance the immune system by stimulating certain cell types like, quote, macrophages, lymphocytes, natural killer cells, dendritic cells, and eosinophils by mechanisms including modulation of cytokine secretion, immunoglobulin production, phagocytosis, and macrophage activation. Sure, what the fuck does that mean? So it modulates inflammatory responses and also helps your immune system attack invaders, like maybe not giant dead corpse invaders who are mad at you, but it's worth a shot.

But why so stinky? I needed to know and I found out that sulfur compounds are released while your body metabolizes garlic, and one chemical, allyl methyl sulfide, can't be broken down. So our body is like, okay, take this to the dump via your blood highway and then just exit via the off ramps, your lungs and skin. So yes, even if you are tube-fed garlic, straight into your stomach, you will still have garlic breath, which is what one physician discovered in the 1930s with a patient who probably did not appreciate it.

But other docs are on the case too. There's this one researcher, Dr. Cheryl Berenger of Ohio State University, who has authored so many papers on the matter of garlic breath, including the 2017 Journal of Food Science, Banger, Deodorization of Garlic Breath by Foods and the Role of Polyphenol Oxidase and Phenolic Compounds in the Deodorization of Garlic Breath. And I read a bunch of it, the TLDR is that drinking milk or something with fat and water with garlic and a meal can help break down that allyl methyl sulfide that stinks. And if you're like, who chugs milk these days, unless it's a latte, you can try acidic

lemon juice or raw apple, which can also break down that sulfur so that it won't have to take the blood highway out of your lungs and skin. It can take the regular southbound exits, the turnpike to the toilet instead. Now herbs can also work and according to Dr. Berenger's other paper, Deodorization of Garlic odor by fresh and dried herbs from 2021, the team found that fresh rosemary had the strongest deodorization effect among the fresh herbs, while dried mint had the strongest effect among the dried herbs. So munch some rosemary or have some mint tea perhaps.

Now this is only slightly related, but it's my show, so I'm just going to do one more tangent and tell you the world garlic capital is Gilroy, California, which is the smallish municipality between San Francisco and Santa Barbara. And the entire freeway stretch through Gilroy smells like focaccia, God bless it. And they have a yearly garlic festival that involves garlic ice cream and so many wonders. And somehow I wound up on Gilroy's official city website and saw that their local botanical gardens host a Halloween show for children and who's on stage, but Frankenstein, they got a ghost and a vampire.

Excuse me, Gilroy, you're the garlic capital of the world. And somehow you casually thoughtlessly feature a vampire in your Halloween show. Your whole October branding message should be the world's safest haven from vampires. No vampires here. Visit Gilroy and leave your chain mail turtlenecks behind. Capitalize on this Gilroy. I'm not mad. I'm just, I just expected more from you, I guess.

Anyway, yes, Jeff remembers well the food and beverage culture of Eastern Europe. The hard stuff at lunch with a side of garlic lard. And honestly, it's probably delicious on the way down, but... I can remember being on the trams and just smelling these people who smelled like they were pickled between the vodka and the garlic coming out of them. But it's really high in vitamins and everything and it grows well. It grows abundantly in the conditions of Central and Eastern Europe. And it has that magical property of coming out of your skin and it's stinky.

So if you can imagine, onion might protect your mouth, which is an important orifice to protect. But garlic protects your whole body and so you then have the folk traditions of smearing garlic over the windowsills. Any place where a vampire could come in, any place where something evil could come in, any portal, you then smear with garlic. And that's just a long old tradition. So you can eat it and it makes you healthy and you can smear your windows with it in

order to protect. And that falls into what we call an apotropaic, apotropane, to turn away an evil spirit. And so garlic is an apotropaic, it'll repel vampires. So an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure, right? So it's really hard to kill a vampire, it's a whole lot easier just to keep them away. And we will devour them in a minute, but first a word about sponsors of oligies who make it possible to donate to a charity of the oligest choosing. And this week, the Gem Jeff chose the donation to go to the Blood Cancer Research Foundation

at myloma.org. And my dad, your grandpa, passed away from multiple myloma in July. And Jeff, knowing that, wanted to point his donation that way in honor of my dad, which warmed my bloody heart, we're also going to toss a small donation at nano-rymo.org in honor of you. Yes, I'm talking to you. The one who wants to write a book, but has needed a little nudge and the courage, I'm telling you do it.

Thank you and you're welcome. Okay, those donations were made possible by sponsors. Okay, first up, a bunch of you patrons at patreon.com slash oligies such as Laura and Mass Cabrota, Justin Saucito, Take Up Ellsbury, Nicky DeMarco, Stephanie Lesky, Zambot, Chelsea Rabble, on behalf of Bob Bradley, their boyfriend's dad, and Joel Henderson made me ask this pointed question. One of the last listener questions we had, a ton of people wanted to know about fangs, which is great.

Joe Portofito wanted to know, are they able to use their fangs like straws to suck blood? Or did they pierce and then they suck with their mouth? Do they pop out? Are the fangs always out? What do you think historically of different fang styles? Great. So we have to distinguish between the folkloric vampire and the literary vampire down here to make that distinction.

So the folkloric vampire, there are a lot of things that fight and take our blood in real life. So if you've ever had an outside dog and found an engorged tick on it, you can very quickly see how the Bulgarians imagine the vampire as just a bag of blood. It kind of looks like a Bulgarian bagpipe full of blood. That also explains, because they don't have bones, that also explains how they would get in and out of a grave. Think of ticks and think of leeches and think of fleas and think of bedbugs and mosquitoes.

Did you know that there are vampire finches? I thought bats were the only ones, but I mean, vampire finches, amazing. Medrilennial butterflies, vampires, bloodsuckers, the assassin kissing bug, bloodsuckers, the kandiru, that's the one that will like, you know, in South America and you're peeing in the water and it like jumps up into your urethra and lampraise and lice and things. These are all natural bloodsuckers. They are finches. I know that that sounds fake, like attacks evading flamingo, but it's true, they exist

and these little birdies with sharp beaks live on two of the Galapagos Islands and while they would love to be eating seeds and drinking fresh water, the islands are a bit arid, so they're simply forced. They are forced to find a seabird, sit on its ass, and peck its wingtips to drink their blood. They must do it. They bloodsuckle blue-fitted boobies and the world is weird. Also vampire bats, which likely started by eating ectoparasites and then just kind of

cut out the middle bug and went straight for the blood. They puncture little fangholes and then they just lap up what bleeds out, but what's even creepier is that vampire bats, unlike most other bats, can run on land, on their wings. They just bound around beautiful furry little ghouls. Videos of it are haunting, but out of 1,400 species of bats on earth, only three species are vampire bats and they are endemic to Northern Mexico and Central America and a few countries in South America. Speaking of regions and kind of eerie hopping around, patron Nathan Andrew Leigh Flight

left a comment in this week's discussion thread on Patreon to tell me about the folklore of the Zhengxi or Chinese hopping vampires, which are a reanimated corpse, sometimes fresh-looking, sometimes horrifically decomposed, it really depends on how all in you want to go with your makeup. Zhengxi means stiff and so a proper impersonation involves hopping like a bunny without stretched Frankenstein arms and Nathan Andrew also casually told me to look up Southeast Asian Penangalan, which sounds kind of like a type of omelet or like a custard dessert, but no. Oh no, I'm going to read you a small slice of the Orchopedia entry for Penangalan because

that's plenty. It says, quote, its form is that of a floating, disembodied woman's head with its trailing organs still attached. From afar, it twinkles like a ball of flame, just a glowing vampiric ball of decapitation and entrails. Nothing to see here. Now, same thing with the African Ashanti folkloric entities called oboeifo, which are vampire witches that at night are said to emit a phosphorescent light from their armpits and anus.

Do you know how boring a Dracula costume is at a party? When you could have a luminous and butthole, get a couple glow sticks, think outside the coffin. Will ya? Happy Halloween. Also, for more on bats and ticks and body farms and bones, you can see the other Spooktober ologies episodes any time of the year, really, but we'll link them in the show notes for this.

But yes, back to Jeff and Eastern European and American vamps. So you can see that Comparis and these things around us in Central and Eastern Europe, at least half of those things, are feeding blood from us. And then how do you get blood out of a victim? It's got to be something sharp. And if you're living around bed bugs and things, you probably got bite marks on you. So that kind of explains bite marks. It explains the diseases that you might get.

This area isn't particularly known for malaria, despite its swamps. It's just too cold for malaria. And so our folkloric vampires, what we say is we never see a folkloric vampire feeding. We only find its victims. And so when you have a person who's been exsanguinated, a person who's lost blood, something's got to be taking that blood from them. Why are they withering? Why are they shrinking?

And then we make that jump in logic to say that this must be something that is sucking the life force of blood out of these victims. And again, that's why vampires are blamed for wasting diseases. It's not all diseases. It's not bubonic plague, at least in the beginning, not going to attribute bubonic plague to vampires or measles or chickenpox or something like that. But wasting diseases, anemia and things like that, make really logical choices that we have there.

So now, in terms of literary vampires and cinematic vampires, we can get close enough to them. As a kid, when I saw vampires drinking, I was completely convinced that they had straws in their teeth. And every kid going to McDonald's, you know, stick two straws up into their mouth and pretend to be a vampire and drink from that. And so I was completely convinced that vampires had canine teeth, and then they were sucking their blood up through that.

And then I was like, actually, it'd just be easier to put it on your throat. So we can catch a cinematic vampire in the act and do a dental examination. But with folkloric vampires, we never see them feeding. We only find the victims. Fangs not hollow. So if you've been thinking they're like rattlesnake teeth, but with a suction function, we have been officially divested of such flimflam by a professional vampirologist. Last listener question, a few people asked boldly, I thought this was a great question.

I wouldn't have thought to ask it. Nancy K. Clark, World Nurse Collective and Lauren Maskebrota wanted to know if vampires were real and you could be one, would you all want to know, would you ever vampire as a verb? That depends on the conditions under which I'm a vampire. So there's the moral burden of saying, if I am a blood drinking vampire, then do I have to drink human blood? Can I drink animal blood?

Or is there a synthetic blood substitute? Or is there a way of just like feeling that urge, but you can stop it in some other way? It's bad enough to be human and to see history repeating itself over and over and over. Now make that centuries. I think that would get really frustrating after a while. And that's also why you have vampires in certain works of vampire fiction, that vampires can't kill themselves. There's actually a prohibition against vampire suicide.

And so you either have to pay another vampire to slay you or provoke a slayer to do that. When you're tired and you finally need that, literature is still throwing barriers in our way to try to keep us from ending ourselves, which is just a really old tradition of prohibitions against suicide and self-harm. And that's why we'll have works where vampires can't feed off themselves. It's like perpetual motion vampire machine. I'm like, well, I can just drink from myself and then I'm only harming myself. In a movie like Daybreakers, that will accelerate your de-evolution into a subsider.

And then to drink another vampire's blood will cause that, and then to drink your own will be even worse. Just to PS, I had never seen Daybreakers. But Daybreakers is the 2009 film starring Ethan Hawke as a hematologist, which is a blood scientist. And yes, we do have a hematology episode, I'll link it in the show notes. But in Daybreakers, vampires have taken over the world after this plague started by a bat. Rude, because we love bats.

But in the movie, there's a blood shortage. And a subsider is a version of a vampire that's starving and desperate and jonesing for blood. And I looked into it, here's my theory. Based on the filmmakers' ages, their twin brothers born in 1976, who attended part of high school in the early 1990s in New Jersey, I think subsiders were born out of the vestiges of the Reagan era war on drugs, which taught schoolchildren that if you ever tried any addictive substance, you would live in a sewer, your face would be a battlefield of self-inflicted gashes, and you would break into people's homes desperate for your substance of choice

before being killed to the jubilation of cops, which happens in the movie. Subsiders should just say no to human blood. We fixed it. So we throw those prohibitions. So I will try to lead the best and cleanest life that I can while I have it. But the Central and East European life cycle, you want to do your part and complete your life cycle and go, but not too old. So people who lived to a very old age are accused of taking more than their fair share

of life force, hence the prohibition against very old people. And there are a lot of prohibitions. There's a huge list, and they're absolutely fascinating. Okay, so I looked into laws against being old, and I couldn't find anything. And so I checked in with Jeff, and he meant prohibited in more of a resource sense. But on that note, in March of 2021, the World Health Organization released its first-ever global report on ageism. And you can download this 202-page PDF, but I'll summarize it for you here.

People are mean to old people and disabled people, and it sucks. So knock it off. There you go. And I will link that report on my site if you want more granular details, though. But okay, one more listener question asked by Andrea Devlin, Red Cedar, Kathleen Sacks, Alexandra Coutul, Anna Frazier, Shelby Smith, Nikki DeMarco, Alia Meyers, Dantween, Kana Peters, Bex Woodruff, Connie E. Carringer,

Amanda Richardson, Jacqueline Church, Bennett Gerber, Sam Taylor, and Nina Jacobi. They all wanted to know if Jeff has a favorite vampire movie or franchise. And all these people mentioned the following titles. I'm just going to say so that they get on your radar. You ready? Blackula, Fright Night, Once Bitten, Vamp, A Vampire in Brooklyn, From Dust Till Dawn, Blade, Queen of the Damned, Let the Right One In, The Invitation, Lost Boys,

Buffy the Vampire Slayer, of course, Vampirina, Dark Shadows, The New Interview with a Vampire Series on AMC. And I had never heard of this, but the Mel Brooks, Dracula, Dead and Loving It. So, Jeff, pressures on, pick one. Is there a vampire in pop culture that you feel like is your favorite? Every age creates a vampire that it needs. Every vampire meets a need at a certain time.

Sometimes I like chocolate ice cream, sometimes I like mint ice cream. So, there are certain times when I need a certain type of vampire movie to watch. And if that's frustration or if that's hope or redemption or something like that, I'll pull those different vampires out. So, I don't typically have the one-time, all-time favorite. But you're definitely Team Edward, right? Why are you saying that? From Twilight?

You're asking me to pick a vampire over a werewolf. That's not too much of a problem. I'm not going to have an answer. I would probably say more that I'm Team Cullen than Team Edward. So, I'll stick within that general family. P.S., if you haven't seen Twilight, Edward lives with a whole-ass coven of vampires in a cool house. And his adoptive parents are vampires.

They're frozen in the ages of like 23 and 26, because someone's got to buy wine coolers for these 104-year-old teen vampires, except they don't really drink. And they're also teetotalers of human blood. They're just like, just puma juice, please. But Team Jacob, how dare anyone even imply it to Jeff? That's a good answer. What about the hardest thing about your job?

The hardest thing when it comes to researching this? Is there something that is frustrating about it? Well, I'm a teacher, so I spend my time teaching about this. It is fascinating, and I think everybody needs to understand vampires in so much more depth than typically what we reduce them to in vampire movies. You can watch a vampire movie for pure entertainment, and that's okay if all you're doing is passing the time by consuming media. That's completely okay.

There are perhaps other better forms of escapism than vampire movies, but with my job of trying to get people to understand vampires, it is to take that folkloric vampire and understand how and why people held it in their belief system. And it takes four very intense weeks of unprogramming people and getting people to understand how people were living in Central and Eastern Europe in pre-modern times when it was really living year to year in survival kind of mode and all the things that could kill you out there.

To get everybody to peel back their western lenses, their modern lenses, their 20th and 21st century lenses, and that attitude of taking someone else's belief system and calling it superstition. So to get people to understand why we needed a folkloric vampire, so many people can't understand why you would invent a vampire just to be scary. And that's one of the reasons we do it for movies and films, but that wasn't the reason why we developed a folkloric vampire. It takes a very long time to get people to process that.

And then to get people to really reflect on that phrase every age, creates the vampire that it needs to be able to say, I can watch this movie for entertainment, but I can also treat it as a cultural artifact and say, this is telling me something about the people who created it and the time in which it was created. And to see a vampire movie that is popular over many, many years means that the filmmaker, the author, is tapping into these human universals that we are probably never going to solve.

Who can you trust? This is Let the Right One In. If you're down to be scared as hell, the 2008 original Swedish version of Let the Right One In involves adolescence, trust, and of course, vampirism. And it sports a 98% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. One critic, Joe Lipset of the Horror Queers podcast writing that, quote, it's a near-perfect horror film that captures the horrors of bullying and coming of age in a chilly, unflinching fashion.

Is this a classic queer romance or a morally conflicted tragedy? The answer may just be yes, Joe writes. And I watched the trailer and I was afflicted with instant goosebumps. So that's 2008's Let the Right One In. Who can you let into your life, into your bedroom, into your family? And what are the signs of the red flags for dangerous people? Can people overcome their dark pasts or their urges? We're constantly focused on that.

You can have a really good vampire movie that is popular only in a specific time. Frank Langella's 1979 Dracula is like that, based on marital infidelity as divorce rates were rising. That's great. But the movies which keep coming back and stay fresh and intriguing, Dracula is, again, 125 years old and it is still completely rereadable. It's still moving because the themes of disease and marital infidelity and the danger of foreigners and the fears that we have of things that are not like us,

those will always tap into lizard brain and make us afraid. And consuming that as literature will always get that chemical release that we can't control that makes it compelling and interesting to consume. Which is also why having anchors on cable news screaming opinion pieces generates billions of dollars a year and influences who's in power, while also fomenting hatred and division. But if you lost your older loved ones to political talk radio and the 1980s, should have rubbed some garlic on the dashboard.

But on a brighter note, And is there a favorite thing about it? Is there something that just really hooks you? Is it the tie to your maybe your own history? Or is it just kind of how enduring it is? We learn to spot vampires all around us and so it's a lens to see the world. We have four types of vampires. So we have our folkloric vampire that existed in the belief system.

We have our literary vampire with its subtype of cinematic vampire. We have the psychotic vampire, which is a real person who has a mental illness, who attacks a person in the style of a folkloric vampire or cinematic vampire, literary vampire. And it's a criminal act to do that, to attack someone and drink their blood. PS, just try not to do this, especially if you happen to have open stomach ulcers. It's a great way to catch a disease. And according to a recent and pretty helpful pop science article titled,

Is it okay to drink blood? And excess of iron can be fatal to humans. Unless you're into vomiting, diarrhea, abdominal pain, dehydration, or maybe hepatitis, just grab a cold-pressed beet juice and lie to your vampire friends. Your secret's safe with me. I'm not going to tell anyone. And then we have the psychic vampire, the person who seems to suck the psychic energy or energy from your body.

This is the now most commonly known to people through the Colin Robinson image of what we do in the shadows of the television series. Everybody has known a psychic vampire in their life. And this is the person who uses fear, intimidation, or guilt, or shame to weaken another person. And when you're standing from the outside and looking on, it really does look like that person is sucking life force out of the victim there. What really is happening, of course, is that that person who's using that intimidation is getting a rush from it.

And these are our aggressor chemicals that our brain creates in using intimidation or seeing the results of our action and having that satisfaction or that thrill that you're doing. And at the same time, the person who is undergoing that is having negative chemicals being produced in their body, which will lead to loss of appetite and fear and nervousness and anxiety and everything. And it really looks from the outside that that psychic vampire is draining that person. We can explain that with brain chemistry. So thank you, Modern Brain Science for giving us that reaction.

But we can spot those similarities in our everyday life. So those are psychic vampires. And maybe ask yourself, what media do you consume that leaves you feeling anxious and shitty and afraid and smaller? And what people do you associate with who seem to delight in your defeat? If you're feeling drained, you might have a psychic vampire. And also, conversely, do you hate watch certain people's Instagram stories? Do you tear down cheesy bloggers in the comment section?

Check in with yourself. Every vampire rises up depending on need. And maybe you need different things to fuel you. And if you're actually trying to attack people and consume their blood, which happens from time to time, you might have a condition known as clinical vampirism, sometimes called psychotic vampirism or Renfield syndrome, which is an obsession with drinking blood. And in honor of Dracula's sycophantic servant, psychologist Dr. Richard Noll snarkily coined this term, Renfield syndrome, in protest to psychiatry having too many diagnoses.

And to his dismay, it actually stuck as a term to describe wanting to drink blood. So it's like a joke turned reality for him. That's just got to really, I guess, it's got to suck. Every year, we're going to have a news article of someone who attacks someone and drinks their blood. And we know psychic vampires in our lives. And we read literary vampires and see those parallels to our own lives. And again, those vampires are processing these basic human existential problems. Good vampire literature never gets old. It might get a little bit worn out, but the vampires evolved so much that if we've had enough of remorseful vampires,

then we'll pull out the predator vampire again. And if those are exhausted, we can create that next form of a vampire. And we're held in check by whether that innovation will resonate with the people who are consuming it. And that's why you might have a movie that might be brilliant, that just doesn't resonate with people. And that tells us that that age doesn't need that vampire. And then there are other things that are just so well done that just hit those aspects of the frustrations of our human mortal existence that will make vampire literature undying. Nothing that we will still be making vampire movies and writing vampire literature far, far, far into the future. I think that is so amazing to have the kind of context that I

never realized how much I needed that. I can see why hundreds of people sign up for your course every year. This has been such a joy. Thank you so much for letting me drain all of the information out of your veins. Always, always happy to be a willing victim, willing donor. I would be that person. I would be the person whose friend is a vampire and I would in controlled quantities give them my blood. That's why I donate blood every 56 days, less my students think that I'm a vampire. Every fall, I'll roll up my sleeve and let them see my mark that I've indeed been giving blood and not taking it. Well, that's a good reminder for everyone to go out and give blood. Absolutely. Every 56 days. So ask smart people, sanguine questions because

unlike vampires, you live but once. Dr. Jeff Haldeman is so amazing. If you see him on campus at Indiana University, Bloomington, tell him dad word says hi. Give him a fist bump or a high five and take his class, The Vampire and European and American Culture. There are a ton of links to the studies and books we mentioned and more up at alleyword.com slash ology slash vampirology, which is linked in the show notes so you don't have to write it on your arm as you drive, please. And if you're looking for classroom friendly ology's episodes, we have small ologies which are shorter, condensed versions of classic episodes and they're cleaned and edited of my swearing so they're safe for work and all ages. Those are right in the feed or we have them all

collected at alleyword.com slash ologies, which is linked in the show notes. Thank you so much, Mercedes Maitland and Zeke Rodriguez-Thomas of Mind Jam Media for the edits on those. Thank you to all the patrons from patreon.com slash ologies for sending in questions for this. You can send yours in for upcoming episodes at patreon.com slash ologies. Joining costs as little as $1 per month. Our hearts are cheap. You can wear ologies shirts and sweatshirts and socks and stickers and hats and more via ologiesmerch.com. Thank you to the lovely Susan Hale for managing that and so much else. Noelle Dilworth does all our scheduling and so much more. Erin Talbert admins the ologies podcast Facebook group. This is from Shannon Feltas and Bonnie Dutch of the

podcast You Are That. Kelliard Dwyer does our website. She could do yours too. Emily White of The Wordery makes our professional transcripts and Caleb Patton bleeps them and those are up at alleyword.com slash ologies-extras. Nick Thorburn made the theme music and lead editor is the hot-blooded treat, Jared Sleeper, who also has to be married to me for eternity, which pleases me. Oh, and happy, happy birthday to the perfect and amazing Simone Yetch, who is not only an inventor and an artist, but one of the best pals a person can have. And if you stick around to the end of the episode, I tell you a secret. And this time, I'm going to tell someone else's secret because I love it and it's not really secret.

But as you may know, I've become really good friends with Thanatologist Cole and Perry and her husband, Victor, who've moved to LA this year. And we were having cocktails on their patio last week. Victor makes excellent cocktails. We were there with Simone. And in my pants pocket, I found a little cardboard paper tube from a roll of dog poo bags that had run out that day. And Victor thought it was a cigar butt. And I was like struggling to find a word to explain what it was. And Victor said, oh, his family calls any cardboard tube at the end of a roll of something or a dirter. And I was like, what? What word is that? And they call them a dirter because when you put them to your mouth, you can go... Like a wrapping paper roll or a toilet paper roll or a

paper towel roll. All those tubes are called dirters. And this just delighted me. And Cole, who had been in the house grabbing ice, came out and asked... And I asked her, Cole, what is this in my hand? And she went, oh, a dirter. And now they're dirters. And I love them. And I love them for telling me that. Okay, bye-bye. You are a good boy, Vlad. Cut out his heart.