===TRANSCRIPT START=== Astonishing Legends Network. Disclaimer, this episode includes the usual amount of adult language and graphic discussions you've come to expect around here. But in the event it becomes an unusual amount, expect another call from me.

Hey everybody, welcome back to Scared All The Time. I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And this week, we're sinking our teeth into one of the most well-known monsters in the world. Partially inspired by Ed's discovery of an ancient tome deep in the back of a dusty bookshop called, Ed, what's the name of this book?

Vampire Jokes and Cartoons, a Comedy of Terrors.

Fantastic. And so I thought instead of a little intro segment, we'll have a little warm up comedy here. So Ed, if you could, please, the stage is yours, knock them dead.

Oh my God, I haven't really read, okay, I'll flip it open. This is 1974's Vampire Jokes and Cartoons. I'm going to go to the very first page that I just flipped open to. Okay, what kind of clerical work do vampires do? They file their teeth.

Hey.

Why do vampires hang around with their own kind? Oof, this got rough fast.

I don't know, Ed, tell me.

Because blood is thicker than water.

Oof.

Where do you usually find vampires?

In the ground?

Yeah, right. If I fucking met some. In any neck of the woods. This is awful.

All right, well.

Hold on, no. I have to do the whole book, Chris. That's the intro.

No, you're fired.

Here's one. Best-selling vampire books. This is pretty good. I found a page that's worth the house this person probably bought writing this in 1974. Everything you always wanted to know about necks, but were afraid to ask. That's pretty good. You are what you eat. And in old blood.

Wow. Wow.

Yeah.

Well, this show sucks already.

It's even better. You should have written this book.

What are we scared? When are we? All the time. Now it is time for Time for Scared All The Time.

Hey guys, Ed here, just Ed. Chris is sick, his wife is sick, his baby's sick, his in-laws are in town. I don't know what their health situation is, but he's definitely too busy or under the weather to do this. So housekeeping with just me, which is good, because this is a very long episode to begin with. So I'm going to keep this short and we'll do all the usual housekeeping stuff next episode. I think the only things I got to hit are we have a TikTok now. I don't know. It's the thing we're doing. I'm sure you've noticed a bunch of videos from Chris, which you're probably thinking is sick in a different way. Yeah, but no, he's he's been enjoying it, I think. So that's the thing we're doing. We're trying to build the show a little bit, kind of reach a different, not different, but just reach as many people as we can. So I guess that is going to be happening for a bit. I guess another thing is this is an episode about vampires and we recorded it a little while ago. So Sinners wasn't out yet. I know that's like a big giant movie and everyone's really enjoying it and I enjoyed it too. And we don't touch on it at all in this episode. So I've decided to get a little roundtable together of some filmmakers I know, including Jackson, who you'll hear in this episode. And I don't know where that's going to be posted, but it's going to be some sort of bonus that will just kind of drop. So you'll definitely get to hear us talk a little bit about Sinners because, yeah, it's kind of this smash hit movie about vampires. And when I was editing this episode, it felt weird that it's just not in here. So look for that real soon. Other than that, thanks for being here. Check out our Patreon. We have tons of new bonus stuff. New Fear Unlocked has been a blast. We got more of that coming every other week. And additional bonus stuff, who knows? The live show was really fun at the time of recording this housekeeping. It was a night or two ago and it was a blast. So yeah, without further ado, vampires.

Of all the creatures out there stalking through the shadows, the vampire is one of the oldest. And it's also one of the most popular monsters ever put on film, which is why I thought today would be a good episode to bring along one of my best friends and closest cinematic confidants, director Jackson Stewart. You might know him from his cult classic, Beyond The Gates, or one of his many Blu-ray audio commentaries for films like Night of the Creeps and The Stepfather. He's a walking encyclopedia of horror knowledge and a director you definitely need to be keeping an eye on. Jackson, welcome to the show, man.

Ah, thank you, Mr. Cullari. What a lovely intro I did not deserve. It was very sweet of you.

No, of course, of course, man. And we'll do, I guess, just right up top, is there anything that you want to plug?

Maybe Stereo Vision, since it's still sort of doing the Festival Circuit. That's probably, that's a good one.

Okay. Keep an eye out for Stereo Vision, Jackson's new short film on the Festival Circuit, and maybe hitting the Internet someday?

Possibly.

Possibly.

We'll see.

Well, one of the reasons I thought it would be cool to have Jackson on the show this week is that he is actually working on a vampire movie of his own about the hunt for a real-life vampire in England in the late 1960s and early 1970s. We'll get to that a little bit later. First, let's set the table a little bit. We always like to start the show with personal stories related to our fears or the creature of the week. And honestly, I don't have much in the way of vampire stories, so I will start with this. I find it interesting that vampires are probably the first monster we become aware of as kids, mostly because of Count Von Count on Sesame Street, which, if you take that character a single step beyond the pun, is sort of a fucked up character to have on a children's show. Because he does have fangs, and so I guess we can assume he uses them to drain the living of their precious blood.

Also seems objectively OCD, right? Like, he can't stop counting?

He can't stop counting, but you know what? It's good that we teach kids about mental health issues.

And restraint, he's doing both.

And restraint. There's an argument, I guess, I guess, an outside argument that kids might become aware of ghosts earlier because of Casper the Friendly Ghost. But I think that's sort of a generation behind in terms of cultural relevance.

So, I mean, all the breakfast cereals are multiple generations behind at this point. And they still show up every October.

Well, the breakfast...

Boo Berry, Franken Berry.

Yes.

The one with the Dracula.

The breakfast cereals do kind of count, but they don't have much of a cultural footprint outside of the breakfast aisle. So I was going to turn to Jackson to ask, as sort of the the king of media here.

What did you have for breakfast?

No. What childhood monsters am I forgetting? Is there a monster that kids might get introduced to earlier than the vampire on Sesame Street?

Well, yeah. I mean, it's sort of depending when it is, although I do feel like a lot of the stuff for youngsters now is kind of like a carryover from our generation. But I mean, all the kind of classic universal monster iconography of Frankenstein and Frankenstein's monster, whatever you want to call them, the mummy, Dracula. All of them have kind of been kidified, essentially. I was watching some cartoon on HBO Max, and there was a show called Mermaid Vampire or something. It was for little kids, and it was like, yay, I'm a vampire, wee.

There is a CG animated show for kids that's like a monster school or something that I guess is kind of new. I can't remember what it's called.

I think it's called Monster High, but I mean, when we were kids, we had the real Ghostbusters.

Oh, it was the best.

And Count Duckula, I think was one.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

In all the spooky episodes and stuff like DuckTales. And even on that, I can't remember. There was some vampire queen on that show. She's also one of the bosses in the DuckTales remastered game, I believe.

Oh, yeah, there was a vampire type character or something.

Yeah, totally. And so I think all of those were sort of injected into our psyches at a young age to make us a little more comfortable with them.

Or interested in Halloween and buying Halloween-themed stuff.

Yeah.

Buy their costumes, buy their candy.

Well, yeah, it definitely, maybe it's just because we all are of the same generation, but it does feel like there was a slightly more monster conscious awareness running through our generation, both from things on TV and cartoons, but there was Dungeons and Dragons and there was just sort of a general, maybe it was a runoff from that 1970s New Age interest kind of stuff. But it definitely seems like the kids these days don't have it quite as much as we did, although it is still out there. Like Jackson said, I think even if you aren't a Sesame Street kid, by the time you're five years old, you know Universal's Dracula, you know the Bell, the Gosee, Widow's Peak, the accent. He's just such a cultural touchstone that there's no way you could avoid it. I mean, it's like Mickey or Mario or something like you know him.

Totally.

But I feel like if they banned Halloween tomorrow, for some reason, somebody ran on a banning Halloween platform.

Yeah, like in Footloose.

Yeah, basically, yeah. I do wonder. It's probably less than a generation away from anyone ever knowing who Bo La Gosee is. Widow's Peak also would then become outlawed. Not Widow's Peak. What the hell is it called on your head? The Widow's Peak.

It's the Widow's Peak. Yeah, it's like where you're-

Why is it associated with widows?

It's a great question.

It just sounds cool, dude.

I guess it does sound cool.

Oh no, it's a mountain thing, that's why.

Oh, okay. Okay.

I think it is, anyway.

Yeah, I do think a lot of that iconography is, I mean, not to use a vampire analogy, but it's just like waiting until night to come out when that night being Halloween. You don't see fucking monsters in the summer unless it's Monster Squad or something.

Well, you didn't, Jackson and I did. I think you didn't see monsters quite as much as Jackson and I did because you weren't a monster kid.

No.

But this gave me heart. I read somewhere in the lead up to the release of Nosferatu this year, I think it was Robert Eggers talking about it in an interview, that he was surprised to find out that a generation of kids already knew who Nosferatu was because he apparently was a side character in SpongeBob SquarePants. Oh. I've seen, there's one episode I remember from when I was in high school maybe, or early high school, late middle school, where the Krusty Krab was haunted. Someone was flickering the lights at night, and SpongeBob thinks it's Nosferatu, and at one point, they look over and Nosferatu, like a black and white cutout still from the movie is just very quickly flicking the lights on and off on the wall, and I was like, oh shit, that's cool, but I guess they kept him around and he showed up a lot more. Even SpongeBob kids, I guess they didn't realize they were getting their dose of German expressionist horror.

That's a great show, man.

Absolutely.

It really was very funny at times. I mean, I think it maybe got more popular than it ever even deserved, but it was, I think, very funny.

And the kids went crazy for FW. Murnau.

Yeah, the Blu-ray sales of Nosferatu.

Of Metropolis.

Of Metropolis.

Oh wait, that was Fritz Lang, sorry.

That was Fritz Lang.

Whoops, sorry.

Well, look, once you hit that gateway Nosferatu horror, the next thing you know, you're buying Metropolis, you're buying M.

Faust. You're buying.

Faust, yeah. You're buying.

Birth of a Nation, who knows?

Yeah.

Oh my God, guys.

You go deep.

That sounds fucking, stop going that deep.

So all of this, I guess, I bring up just really to ask, and Jackson, we'll start with you since you're the guest, you're the esteemed guest on this program. Who is the first vampire you remember consciously being aware of? And if it was Bell Legosi's Dracula, what was the second?

Well, so I feel like the very first one must have just been a very tertiary cartoon character, because what I really remember crystal clear and still haunts me to this day is an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark called Tales of the Midnight Madness, where they had a very Nosferatu vampire that came out of the screen in that. And that was the first thing I think I properly sat down and watched and had an effect on me in that world. And that's really where this episode idea stemmed from, because it pretty savagely traumatized me.

Oh, wow.

Yeah, it's funny you bring that up because I hadn't asked you. I did ask Jackson. Obviously, this episode is not existing because Ed found a book. That happened to be a coincidence. This is existing because I asked Jackson what he wanted to do. And he said vampires. And my first thought was, I didn't know you were afraid of vampires. But here's the answer.

This is why. Yeah.

Because are you afraid of the dark? Someone submitted for your approval of the Midnight Society, something that would shock you to your core.

Absolutely. And, you know, I mean, I watched the show every week, I think, you know, and it was kind of just like, oh, cool. It's like Ren and Stimpy and Doug and Rugrats or whatever. And that one, it was the first thing I saw that really properly horrified me because there was a sequence which it's just burnt into my mind and will be until I'm on my deathbed where this, you know, they're projecting the movie in this theater and the vampire comes out of the screen. He's black and white and then transforms into color and then comes into the audience. And it was just mind-meltingly terrifying. And I think I was like six or something when I saw it. And, you know, going back, I've been rewatching a handful of the episodes of it. And I was like, God, these are like way, some of these are like properly scary. Like they almost feel like they could be in a Dario Argento film. Only a handful of them. Most of them, it's like they're very much at kid level. And, you know, some of them hold up and some of them don't.

The clown one holds up. I think we talked about the clown one in our clown episode. I forget the clown's name now, but that one was scary.

Yeah, the laughing in the dark, that one.

Yeah, I don't know if we, I've talked in the episodes previous about, there's an episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark where if you stare directly into a flame, like a candle, like a ghost of a firefighter, I don't think it would be a firefighter, but like the ghost of some fire person would like, I don't know, haunt you or do something. He had an ax, which is probably why my brain went to firefighter, but I remember that, like it's funny that how all three of us have an Are You Afraid of the Dark burned memory or like an episode you haven't forgotten.

Yeah.

Yeah. This is why children's horror is so important, I think, because, or if not important, impactful, because I think there's a lot of people, I mean, and God bless them, like the people who worked on Are You Afraid of the Dark were not famous horror directors, they were work-a-day television directors for the most part. And it's crazy the impact that they've had on horror filmmakers, just people in our generation, like images and moments and sequences that they have burned into people's brains that they weren't working at the highest levels of the art form, but it was effective.

Yeah. They have three houses.

Very possibly. But no, that was one where it really like just took root in my psyche. And then, you know, I mean, there were a handful of other things that I came across that just cemented themselves in my brain. But like that episode freaked me out so much that I slept with the covers up over my neck until 40 years old. Until like current day, I still do that.

They have no interest in heads.

Yeah, it's like, I'm like, if I cover my neck, they can't bite me while I'm asleep. And it just was like one of these kind of child logic rules that I, you know, you can invent these things where it's like, oh, if you don't step on these cracks, you won't get any bad luck or whatever.

I grew up in an Italian-American household. There's enough garlic in this blood that they would try it, pal. You can't try it, piece of shit vampire. I'm your fentanyl. Like, this is the last drug you take.

Ed, I looked it up while we were talking and there is, it is called the Tale of the Fire Ghost. So very, very straightforward name there. But what about you, Ed? What about your history with vampires? Was it Morbius? I know you've read a lot of comic books.

I sold, I sold the first appearance of Morbius. It was super high grade, too. Right when the trailer came out, so that was a smart move on my part. No, I don't have a particularly strong vampire anything. I mean, I recognize and nodded along to a lot of the stuff Jackson said. I remember there was like that, you know, the Duck Dracula, Count Duckula.

Count Duckula.

I remember there was that hot one, the one that was the Vampirella Duck. Well, I guess that wouldn't have been, that was a Vampira Duck, I guess. Either way, I guess the important thing, anyone's gonna hear is that I said they were hot. So, you know, I, yeah, I don't know, nothing. I mean, it's always been there. It's always been there. I don't know how it got in there, breakfast cereals, cartoons, what have you. I don't think I would be afraid of a vampire until years later when I read.

Salem's Lot.

When I read Salem's Lot and Barlow and all that shit, and there's so much imagery in that book that's so fucking crazy. And what's funny because it's imagery and craziness that 80s movies ran with super hard. If you read Salem's Lot later, you're like, oh, I've seen all of this before. I've seen this a hundred times, but you don't realize that it was kind of the first place where all that shit was happening or being done. And I remember being real scared of a lot of shit in that book. Oh, yeah.

I had a pretty traditional introduction to vampires. I was terrified of Belle Lugosi as Dracula because my grandmother, the one who introduced me to movies, she had actually seen the original Dracula in theaters as a kid. And it just blew her mind out the back of her skull. It was the scariest thing she'd ever seen. So I had it somewhere in my mind, even though I'd never seen it, that Dracula was the scariest movie and that Dracula was the scariest movie monster. I was so scared of Dracula that I remember this was probably like 1997. I remember I was afraid to rent the Leslie Nielsen Dracula parody, Dracula Dead and Loving It.

Uh-huh, I remember that. Yeah.

Because I was so afraid of how scary Dracula apparently was. But once I got over that, I had Bunnicula, which I'm surprised neither of you mentioned. Did you ever read the Bunnicula books?

Oh, ma.

I don't even know what you're saying.

Isn't it a cartoon?

Bunnicula? It might be a cartoon.

I don't know how to pronounce it.

Oh, it's a bunny?

Yeah.

I thought it was a vampire in a bikini.

No. Sorry, Ed. It's not as hot as Vampirella the Duck or whatever.

Again, not Vampirella, it's Vampirella the Duck.

This is Bunnicula, a series of children's books about a pet vampire rabbit that I read and really enjoyed as a kid. But I can handle Dracula now. My wife and I actually watch the original on Valentine's Day sometimes. It's a really good Valentine's Day movie. It's romantic and dark and gothic. When you're not scared of it as an adult, it is a weirdly cozy movie because even if you've never seen it, you know everything in it. Everything in it has become part of something else.

This is a question for you that might come up later in this episode. I'll blow it up top. I've never seen the film. Now, when you say the original, you mean Belle of Lugosi. Is that a silent film?

No.

No.

Hell, no. That's a talkie, dude.

So Nosferatu would be earlier. That's way before we have a Dracula.

Nosferatu was 1920, I think.

Yeah. The funny thing with Nosferatu, and some people might already know this, and actually I didn't have this written into the episode, but it is a good thing to discuss. I always find it so fascinating. So Nosferatu was originally, its life began as an adaptation of Dracula. That was the idea, was to do Bram Stroker's Dracula, because the book had come out in, I believe, the 1880s.

Yeah.

That's when Dracula came out, and so they were going to do an adaptation. They couldn't secure the rights to Dracula. So they made Nosferatu as the asylum version, the B-side version, the fake version of Dracula. And it was so similar that the Stoker estate then sued to have all copies of the film destroyed.

That's a ridiculous request.

They won. And the only reason that we have Nosferatu is because some collector somewhere either didn't know or didn't care and had kept a negative, or not a negative.

A print.

Print of the film. And it was rediscovered at some point that some guy just had this. And that's the only reason we have any remaining copies of Nosferatu.

Most silent films are gone. Like 80 something percent of silent films don't exist. And they're only remembered by the movie posters that often did exist.

Yeah.

Or exist beyond the destruction or losing the print. So we have more silent movie movie posters than we do actual the movies that they're representing.

Yeah.

Because they were considered, I mean, A, they were kind of considered junk. The way that we think of YouTube videos, I think, is pretty much how people thought of it.

Or like newspapers almost. Like you read it for the day and you're like, well, that served its purpose.

Yeah. You're lining birdcages with fucking silent film prints.

Well, you don't want to line anything with silent film prints because the other reason we don't have very many silent films-

Super flammable.

Is it super flammable. Yeah. The silver nitrate can self-ignite, maybe not self-ignite, but under anything but perfect conditions, can very easily catch on fire.

Dude, if I had a fucking silent monster movie or vampire movie, and that I was forced to destroy them all, I would totally make that into marketing and be like, oh, these all lit on fire on their own. They're haunted. They're haunted. Fucking whatevers. It's like there's no more copies because we shot the film with a ghost or whatever.

There is a movie about the making of Nosferatu called Shadow of the Vampire with...

Willem Dafoe. Yep.

That is a story that is looking at the making of Nosferatu with the idea that perhaps Mack Schreck, who portrayed Nosferatu, was in fact a vampire himself.

Oh, hiding in plain sight.

Hiding in plain sight.

Well, my question before all that, my question was, with things like Nosferatu and Bel Lugosi's portrayal of the vampire Dracula, like when do the rules get introduced? In my brain, it's like that's not in Dracula, where you have to be invited in, can't see it in mirrors, all that shit. Like is that in just original Dracula, 1800s Dracula?

Well, I mean, in the book, he gets affected by sunlight, but he goes out and has like a hat, and then I think he has like an umbrella or something to cover himself.

So he's a Ninja Turtle going to see the movies.

Yeah, kind of. And it's like the sunlight thing didn't really come in, I don't think until Nosferatu. Like I think that was the first instance of it, where it's like he gets hit by sun.

Wasn't a big enough change to save the films.

Yeah, right. What I want to move into is how many vampires the world had before we had Dracula, because there were so many and they all had so many different characteristics and traits. And it's crazy to go take kind of a tour through the world of Vampira.

Oh, it sounds hot.

But I did, as I was researching all this stuff, I did come across the weaknesses of Bram Stroker's vampires, or not even the weaknesses, but I guess the rules and the weaknesses.

All right, so we're going to get to that. I got you.

Well, no, I didn't. I just remember reading it. I don't actually have it written into the episode anywhere. But Bram Stroker's vampires, the rules were, and he may have been borrowing this from existing folklore. I don't know that he invented these rules, but-

It was a guy?

What do you mean?

My whole life for some reason, I thought it was a lady, Bram Stroker.

Dude, you're thinking of Mary Shelley.

I'm thinking of Mary Shelley. Thinking of Mary Shelley. You know what? There were more women working in the business then.

You're thinking of an animated duck, Ed. That's the problem. You can't shake her.

People at home don't have a video component, but you guys can see that my eyes became too like tux agree heart-shaped.

So Bram Stroker's vampires, Bram Stroker, the guy, the man, the author, his vampires-

Shit, dude.

Have to be invited into one's home.

Okay.

They have to sleep in the ground or on the earth from their homeland, and they do not have reflections in mirrors.

Oh, they can't travel.

Well, no, they can travel, but the reason he had to be transported in his coffin with earth filled from his home was for that reason.

Oh, it's a workaround.

It's a workaround.

It's a fucking loophole, dude.

Yep.

And as Jackson said, sunlight is not fatal to Dracula in the novel. That actually was a detail, I believe, again, invented for the Nosferatu movie to destroy him at the end.

Yep.

Was what introduced that idea.

Oh my God. Someone in that room was pitching, like, we have to have a big enough changes. We don't want the fucking Bram's people coming after us. And then it was like the one big change they have basically makes a sequel impossible.

Well, they weren't thinking.

Don't be too sure. If we get into the Hammer movies, you will see just how wrong you are about them.

So, there was a world full of vampires prior to Dracula. Many of the rules that Dracula had were pulling from these vampires all around the world. Now, you can literally take college courses on the topic of the history of vampires around the world. Tufts offers one. So does the University of Wisconsin. You can take Vampires 101.

Jesus, we used to be a country.

So consider this your correspondence college course in vampire history around the world. They've gone by many identities and many names, but the idea that there are creatures in the dark that prey on the living by drinking their blood or their life force, depending on your culture, stretch all the way back. Life force! There's a baby. Yeah, it's a great vampire movie.

You can't get around babes in this topic.

Well, sexuality and vampires have long been interlinked, which is something else that I sidestepped in this episode because I feel like so many literary scholars can probably tackle that subject better than we can.

Yeah, but will they have the reactions that I have?

It's another reason that I think vampires are hard to introduce to children because even though they are scared-

Or your parents.

True. Yeah, I would never bring one home. But they do have, culturally, in Europe and in America, there is a romantic sexual aspect to the vampire that is a more modern- Well, not always. In many cases, it's a more modern detail.

All right, well then tell us more about these disgusting ghouls before they got hot.

Well, it's interesting, Ed, that you use the word ghouls because in pre-Islamic Middle East, they invented the idea of the ghoul, a creature said to dwell in cemeteries and other uninhabited places. A male ghoul is referred to as ghoul, while the female is called ghoulah. All right. So maybe that's-

That's, we can get behind that. That's easy, that's an easy way to remember.

Scholar Dwight F. Reynolds identifies the Arabic ghoul as a female creature, sometimes called mother ghoul, um ghoulah, or our aunt ghoul, or a similar relational term, in tales told to girls and young women. In these tales, the ghoul appears to men as a long-lost female relative or an unassuming old woman, only to lure this hapless character, usually a husband or a father, into her home where she can eat them. The male characters who die, their female relatives often see through the illusion and warn them of the danger. And in these stories of ghouls, the men survive if they believe the women and are eaten if they do not. So, once again, hashtag believe all women. Your life may depend on it.

Wow.

The next vampire on our stop is an Egyptian, I call it an Egyptian proto-vampire. I guess ghouls are proto-vampires as well. But the ancient Egyptians had the goddess Sekhmet, the daughter of Ra. She acted as the vengeful manifestation of Ra's power, or the Eye of Ra, and was said to breathe fire.

He's a sun god, right?

He's the sun god, yeah.

Yeah, so he's the enemy of vampires.

Well, now, post-Nosferatu.

Oh, true.

But she was sort of his vengeful right hand. She's believed to cause plagues, although weirdly, she's also called upon to ward off disease. So I guess maybe it was just sort of a general connection to her control over disease. But importantly, for our discussion of vampires, Sekhmet also possessed an insatiable bloodlust. And at one point in this story that I found that I love, her insatiable bloodlust was used against her. So check this out, there's this story in a myth about the end of Ra's rule on the earth, I guess before he ascended into the sky to become the sun, where Ra sends the goddess Hathor in the form of Sekhmet to destroy mortals who conspired against him. In the myth, Sekhmet's bloodlust was so intense that it was not quenched at the end of the battle. And this led to her going on a bloody rampage that laid waste to Egypt and almost destroyed all of humanity.

She was hangry, fucking hangry.

She was hangry.

If it came in this shitty book, it would be She-de-fangry. If it was written in this shitty 1970s fucking joke book about vampires.

And I think you should write a sequel to that book.

Well, here's a question before you tell me that big thing you're about to say. I thought it was someone acting, making believe it was her. This other person went in the form of her to battle. So why would any of her like fucking blood withdrawal matter?

I don't know enough about Egyptian myth to answer that question accurately.

You didn't want to read one more page of whatever the fuck you were reading to find out.

But I think in general the idea here is that for all intents and purposes, the goddess Hathor is Sekhmet here. I don't think there was a distinction. I don't think it's her putting on a mask. I think it's her literally.

I thought she was doing it the way you first described it. And it sounds like Ikhmet. What's her name?

Sekhmet. Sekhmet. We know Ed's paying attention when he calls Sekhmet Ikhmet about three seconds after I say Sekhmet. He's definitely not thinking about a new duck.

No, no, no, no. I would never. That's it.

So to stop Sekhmet's insatiable bloodlust that was going to destroy, again, all of humanity, Ra and the other gods devised a plan, and I do quite like this plan. They poured a lake of beer, dyed with red ochre so that it resembled blood, and mistaking this beer for blood, Sekhmet drank it all and became so drunk that she gave up on the slaughter and returned peacefully to Ra.

Oh, wow.

So they used, as Homer Simpson said, the cause of and solution to all of humanity's problems to defeat Sekhmet.

Well, they invented beer, the Egyptians.

They did.

Yeah. And they used it to drug their own, I guess.

To trick and drug their own.

You hear that, Egyptians? Cover your glasses.

There are also mentions of vampires throughout Mesopotamia, Hebrew, Greek and Roman history. I found an article on the archives of Aramco World, which I guess used to be a magazine. Aramco is the Saudi Arabian company that produces whatever percentage of the world's oil. I don't know why they had a magazine.

That dedicated any amount of time to vampires.

Yeah. I mean, I guess you could argue they're sucking the earth dry. That's true. But other than that, it's a very loose connection. So I found this article in the archives of Aramco World magazine that says, quote, the first creatures that actually fit the modern description of vampires appear in the surviving writings from the Fertile Crescent in texts from Assyria in the north and the Akkadian and Babylonian empires in the south, as well as in documents of the earliest known Mesopotamian civilization, Sumeria. Assyria, on the Upper Tigris River in what is now Northern Iraq and parts of Syria, endured from about 2400 to 600 BC and was ruled from Assyria. The Assyrians adopted beliefs from their Sumerian predecessors, including belief in two classes of demons with vampire-like tendencies, the Ikimu and the Utukku. The Ikimu were the angry spirits of persons dead but unburied, prowling the earth until they found rest beneath the ground, which is characteristically what we would consider a modern vampire's behavior to be. And an Utukku was sometimes hard to distinguish from the Ikimu, but generally it was the spirit of a deceased person who had been buried and forgotten, not honored with any offerings at its tomb by family or loved ones. So as a result, the Utukku returns from the Underworld to haunt whoever it encounters and drawing some kind of life from its victims.

That's a poor loser right there.

Every time we don't come in number one on the Apple iTunes podcast charts, Ed tries to find a new person to haunt like an Utukku.

Yeah, shit. I also realized I said poor loser instead of sore loser, and it's kind of funnier.

It is just to twist the knife a little more. Yeah, should have bought some friends to come visit you, you poor piece of shit. These Utukkus, like the vampires of Eastern Europe, are a persistent haunting force that is very difficult to dislodge. And like I said before, sometimes these are blood drinkers, the Utukkus, and sometimes it's more of just they imbibe a human life force.

Like the movie Life Force featuring babes, and I actually have a Life Force poster that Jackson gave me from his short film that if you see it playing anywhere, you'll also see it.

That's true.

So go watch the movie or come to my shed.

Come to my shed. Everything comes back to Life Force.

Absolutely.

Unless you're a studio that funded it, in which case everything ends for you.

Well, Jackson, you would know this better than I, but that was a Goll and Globus movie, right?

Oh yeah, dude. That was-

Yeah. It sure was.

In order to get Toby Hooper to work with them, didn't they give him basically a blank check for a three-picture deal or something, and that was one of the reasons?

Yeah. They wanted to do Texas Chainsaw too.

Right.

So part of that was Invaders from Mars doing the remake of that, and Life Force, and then actually at one point he was going to direct Spider-Man.

Oh, no way.

Wow. Weirdly, with Scott Leva, who was the on-camera Spider-Man for the Marvel comics. If you ever flipped through any issues in the 80s, where there'd be a photo, real human Spider-Man, that was Scott Leva. Oh, wow. I think he did all the public appearances for Spider-Man too, but he was actually going to be him in the Tobey Hooper movie, which those comics were tie-ins for that, and then Joseph Zito took it over. It's a really interesting trajectory with that series where it's all horror directors doing it up until The Amazing Spider-Man, I think.

Yeah, that's true. Well, it is, in a way, it is a body horror transformation movie. It's a werewolf movie or werewolf stories.

You're right. I didn't put two and two together. It was all horror directors for a long time.

Well, yeah, because it was Tobey Hooper, Joseph Zito did Friday the 13th, part four, James Cameron, who, Aliens and Terminator, Sam Raimi. Sam Raimi.

Wow. I'll put this in the chapters as canon film group aside.

So there is a particularly vivid description of a group of thoroughly evil vampire-like utuku known as the Seven Spirits. And this description appears at a 3,000 year old Assyrian cuneiform incantation. And you would be forgiven for thinking that they were modern metal band lyrics because holy shit, these bars go fucking hard.

So this is an incantation you say to get the seven to hang out with you or is it like, are we about to bring seven crazy vampires to life right now?

Let's find out.

Oh shit.

So these are the lyrics. This totally works when they do it at the beginning of Evil Dead. It's not a giant mistake. So these are the lyrics. Seven they are, knowing no care, they grind the land like corn, knowing no mercy, they rage against mankind, they spill their blood like rain, devouring their flesh, sucking their veins, they are demons full of violence, ceaselessly devouring blood.

Is that the end?

That's it. That's the incantation.

Okay, that sounds more like a bio than an incantation. But they don't sound like great dudes.

No, they sound like nasty men.

A real wild bunch.

I was laughing reading this because Jackson knows I directed a music video for a band called Malevolent Creation about 15 years ago at this point.

A band I frequently listened to in high school, by the way.

Yeah, a lot of people loved Malevolent Creation. I only did the video because I had done a video for an emo band, and their manager also managed Malevolent Creation at the time. What a weird pairing. It was a weird thing, but the song was called Slaughterhouse, and it was about a human slaughterhouse where humans were brought to be slaughtered like pigs. When I was reading these lyrics, I was like, damn, I think these are even more brutal than anything in Slaughterhouse. These are really good lines.

They should lift those in one of their new albums.

I mean, we might start this episode with that.

We are going to do this, and we'll cut it into the show right here. We're going to make a metal song with these 3000 year old lyrics. It'll be great. So translator R. Campbell Thompson, in his authoritative tome on the subject, Semitic Magic, notes that these seven spirits reappear later in both Palestinian and Syriac magic spells. A Syriac charm from Christian Times quotes the seven as saying, again, hard as hell, quote, we go on our hands so that we may eat flesh, and we crawl along upon our hands so that we may drink blood. That'll be the chorus maybe of the song.

That sounds like Donna the Dead's rejected taglines or something.

It sounds like a poorly translated Japanese ad line for the first Resident Evil game or something.

Oh, we got these new pages in. This can't be right. We go on our hands.

All your blood belonged to us.

All your blood belonged to us.

Uh-huh. Indeed.

That's the name of the song.

Yep. There we go. Bit by bit, we build the art. So the Assyrian incantations and their successors make it clear that vampirism was really only one characteristic of these demons that also traveled with storms like wind demons and ate flesh like Arabian ghouls or ghoulahs. Now, if we move to Africa, which is not a place that many people in the states, I think necessarily associate with vampires, although I guess most people really only associate Eastern Europe and New Orleans with vampires.

I went to Africa and I didn't see one.

Well, you don't know that. Maybe they were blending in.

I was avoiding all bloodsuckers there, dude, because I had malaria pills. I didn't want anything coming from my blood.

That's true.

I was taking garlic pills for the vampires. I was taking malaria pills for the fucking malaria-ridden mosquitoes.

So in West Africa, the Ashanti- That's where I was. Yeah, you were in Ghana in West Africa. Yeah. Did you hear any stories of the Assan Bosam?

No, I can't say I did. I got a lot of marriage proposals, but I didn't hear anything from these people.

Well, the Assan Bosam is an iron-toothed tree-dwelling vampire. They are described as having pink skin, long red hair and iron hooks for feet so they can attack by hanging in the trees above.

And these people make our cookies? Oh, that's Keebler elves. I'm thinking of Keebler elves.

Ed is incorrect again. You are thinking of a tree house full of cookies, not human organs. These Assan Bosam take up territory in the trees in the forest where they live and feed on people that wander into their home. While being humanoid, these creatures also have bat-like features, including wings that can be nearly 20 feet wide, which is a big pair of bat wings.

That's fucking huge.

Yeah, that is a Thunderbird size. I find these, the Assan Bosam, I find particularly interesting because as far as vampires in my research went, these are the only vampires with any kind of somewhat like almost steampunk elements of iron fangs and feet.

Did they have those funny goggles too?

Yeah, like the jetpack goggles for when their bat wings fly out.

Shit, I guess they might need them after zipping around the sky. They don't want their eyes watering.

Exactly.

There's another African vampire, which is both much more clever and also easily defeatable maybe. The Yu people have the ads, which can shape shift into a firefly and sneak into houses to suck blood at night, which I honestly think is way better than being able to change into a wolf or a bat because people actually want to get close to fireflies. They also could land on you without really disturbing your sleep or anything.

Yeah, but also I feel like you're a swat away from dying. Someone just swats at you and now you're dead.

That's true. You could get put in a jar.

Put in a jar.

In Southern Africa, there's the impundulu, or the lightning bird, which is a vampiric creature in the shape of a huge bird that brings thunder and drinks blood. And Madagascar has the romanga, basically a living vampire who is said to drink the blood and even eat the nail clippings of nobles. Which would have been a very funny trait for a vampire if they'd kept that in Bram Stroker's Dracula.

Oh my God, it's just a freak.

Or put it in Nosferatu to try to differentiate themselves.

That's just a freak who has to use vampirism for their kinks. Truly. Where it's like, oh, so all vampires do this? Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Yeah, for sure. When they get caught.

Yeah. All vampires like to pick their butts and eat their little blood boogers that come out.

We're compelled. We're compelled. It's part of being, it's like, it's the same siren's call of blood for us. One of the- And then another vampire they catch is like, that guy lied to you. You caught him easily because we kicked him out of the group months ago.

One of the monsters in Ah! Real Monsters kept jars of toenails. I don't know if he ate them or not, but he collected them.

I think it was the guy with the eyes.

Yeah, he had this gross armpit hair. I went as him for Halloween one year.

I liked the-

What's his name, do you remember?

Don't recall.

I don't recall. I was going to say, in case you've never looked up a photo of Ed, he's giving you a very low impression of what he looks like.

No, I think I actually have a photo of it. I think I have a photo of it. It was in the backyard here, like me, Pat and Lex went as like, all real monsters.

Oh, I do remember this. I thought you meant as a kid.

No, as a full grown adult.

It's actually a great cheap costume. That's a really good idea.

Okay, you ready for the names of the all real monsters?

Lay them on me.

I think they're all like Grumble and Crumble and shit.

It's Ickus, Crumb and Oblina.

That's pretty good.

You got Crumb, Ed.

I said Crumble.

You said Crumble.

I like Ickus. That was my-

He was a little depressed motherfucker, looked like a-

He looks like Ren from Ren and Stink.

Yeah, he looked like Ren, yeah. But he was always complaining.

So it goes.

Hey, man, that's life.

And then the umbrella shaped broad.

That was, yeah, Oblina or whatever.

Oblina. I thought it was like Violet or something.

She had a fucking crazy voice, like a smoker's voice.

She was probably voiced by Tress Macnall.

I'll let the audience look that up. It'll be in the show notes.

There you go. Asia has a couple of cool vampires too. In China, there's the yangshi, often called a hopping vampire, which is a stiff reanimated corpse that hops with arms outstretched and drains your life energy rather than blood.

What do you mean? Like is your life energy, do you lose it through laughter? Like, are you just sitting there laughing so hard at the ridiculous sight of a hopping corpse?

Well, no, your life energy is your qi, right? So I don't know how it enters and exits the body, but I guess it exits in this case through the yangshi, ripping it out of your neck.

Damn.

Jackson, is there, off the top of your head, can you think of any Chinese vampire movies that portray a hopping vampire?

You know, I think there's one, kind of wish Luke Pietroski was on here because he's seen all of those, but there's, I can't remember what the title is, but one of them has or multiples. If you get into the different mythology there, they have some pretty crazy monsters, much more inventive than a lot of ours.

I mean, a lot of these monsters are a lot more inventive than ours, which is, we'll get to that in a minute, but Ed, the next vampire I briefly wanted to touch on, you'll remember, we talked about the Osswang with the Cryptid Cocktail Guys.

Oh yeah, with the flying, cut in half, flying around?

Yeah, now the Osswang is a vampire from sort of the Malaysia, Philippines part of the world, and we talked about the Osswang with the Cryptid Cocktail Guys because they were doing an episode about how the CIA used rumors of an Osswang on the loose as a way to scare guerrilla forces out of territory that we wanted to claim.

Oh, wow.

It's a great episode. Go listen to it. I poked around a little bit more because I was thinking about the Osswang. We just talked about it and they sort of referenced this in the episode. I couldn't remember if they mentioned these names specifically, but it's a sort of an umbrella term for two different vampiric monsters, the Manananggal and the Peinanggalan.

Yeah, no wonder they came up with an easier umbrella name. Yeah, I'm never saying those two again ever, so let's just call them Osswang.

Just something with a lot less syllables. These vampires are female vampires who by day appear as-

Ooh, gulas. We got the gulas in the house.

Good, good, good. Who let the gulas out? Oh shit. At night, these female vampires detach their upper bodies or heads. The Manananggal rips her torso off and flies around with bat wings, and the Penanggalan detaches just her head and trails her organs below. Both of them, as we did discuss on the Cryptid Cocktail episode, like to hover over houses and use their long tongues to suck the blood of sleeping people or fetuses from pregnant women.

Oh, those are the longest tongues. Yeah. Because you're above the house. It's one story. I mean, it sounds like it's Malaysia in the woods, but it's still a long tongue.

It's a very long tongue, or maybe just their... I don't know how you know the difference between their tongue glazing over you and the tips of one of their entrails, but either way...

It's just like, hey, if you have this ability, maybe travel with some hands. You don't have to go hands-free. You don't have to do everything with your fucking tongue.

It's creepier.

It is creepier, you're right. You're right. When you're right, you're right.

Now, if we turn our gaze to the Americas, there is a whole host of strange blood sucking freaks from around here as well. In the Caribbean, particularly Trinidad, there's the Sucuyant, an old woman who can shed her skin and turn into a fiery ball of light to fly around and sip blood from victims.

Does she go back into her skin?

I assume so.

She has to leave her skin in a bush.

I think she's kind of like the Penanggalan, but a little less disgusting. The light is more joyous way to get around and suck the blood from innocent victims.

Got you, yeah. Nothing joyous about the version of Stand By Me, where the kids just find a bunch of skin.

It's just like a one piece of pajamas.

Yeah. Their scalp looking like a little nightcap.

Yeah.

Native Americans had a few vampire beasts too, although none of them is popular as what most people immediately would think of as skinwalkers, which are more akin to werewolves. But they did have these sort of vampire-like creatures, although again, none of them were called vampires. The Seminole Indians of Oklahoma tell the tale of the Stikini or the Man Owl, who actually seems to share a little bit of DNA with the Oswongs. According to a legend on ancientpages.com, quote, by day, the creature appears as an ordinary human. The Stikini does terrible things at night. It vomits up all its internal organs, hangs them in a tree or hides them elsewhere to prevent animals from eating them.

Just go with what you have. Why are we constantly, all these fucking creatures are having to leave a little stash to come back to and having to hang it in a tree or lock it in a subway locker or whatever. Like, just fucking get some pockets.

Just take it with you, man.

Take it with you. Get a backpack. I want a Jansport filled with organs.

You got to do it like the hiker pledge or whatever, that anything you take in, you're going to leave with. And hopefully don't hide it in a bush in the meantime. Always have it on you. So once it's hidden its organs somewhere in the woods, it can change its appearance into a great horned owl. In this disguise, it flies out, searching for a sleeping person to prey upon. It removes the still beating heart from its victim by pulling it out of his mouth and then takes the heart back to his home. It cooks the heart in an enchanted pot and eats it in secret. And the Stikini needs to consume one human heart each night to survive.

Oh my God, that's a tall order.

It's true.

365, this person needs to eat a heart.

Yeah, sort of like a demonic version of Mario. Gotta collect those hearts.

Yeah, I don't know if you know this, Chris. The human being, we need the heart. Like, we need it.

We do not.

You can't take the heart and then keep moving.

You can't hide our heart in a bush.

There must be discussions amongst these people with whomever is in control, elders or whatever, being like, are you sure we can't do a kidney? Or a spleen.

They can hunt it down. And thank God that it has to vomit up and hide its organs.

Who hunts it down?

The tribes people can hunt it down. Or Jackson, maybe if we pay him enough. We can go hunt a stikini.

Should we do a special episode for Patreon where we go looking?

Where we go hunt a stikini?

Hunt anything, really.

The only way to kill the stikini is to organize a hunting party and find its hidden organs while the creature is still out hunting. And once you've found the organs, you wait there for it to return and destroy it before dawn. So they have sort of an inverse of the vampire legend here, which is usually staking the vampire in his coffin before night. Where here, the staking, you have to wait for it at its hiding spot and kill it before dawn. And there is sort of a stake involved in killing the staking because once you've found its organs and are lying in wait, you can't just kill this thing with any weapon you pick up off the ground. The death blow must be given specifically by a specially chosen arrow decorated with owl feathers, then ritually blessed and dressed with sacred herbs. So, there's a lot that goes into killing the staking.

No, yeah, there's nobody confused about what you're doing when you're leaving the tribe that day. Oh, you got all the staking stuff? Well, I guess we'll see you in the morning. Good luck.

The staking though is not the strangest Native American vampire figure that I found. That honor goes to the Mosquito Man. Now, if you're thinking you've heard of this monster before, I do want to remind you this is not the creature featured in the sci-fi original film Man Sceeto. That is a different monster. This is the Mosquito Man.

I remember that cover from when I worked at Hollywood Video back in 2005, I think.

Yes, the heyday of those direct-to-sci-fi original monster movies.

See, that's the difference. I worked at Blockbuster at the exact same time period, and I'm sure I just never directed anyone down that aisle.

Oh, I think I actively discouraged a lot of people from running that kind of thing.

Yeah, I did too. I took pride in my job. I was like, oh, that? Don't be an idiot. Put that back. Don't be stupid.

You're making a big mistake.

This is our one life. It's our one finite life.

Can you believe these places went out of business?

Because their employees never let anyone buy anything.

Actively sabotaging every selection there.

That's true. Every video store did employ just the surliest 18 to 22-year-old film buffs to drive people away from everything.

This loser is going to rent Bounce with Sandra Bullock? Jesus, I got to save him from himself.

I have physically taken things out of people's hands and put them back in the shelf before, which is crazy. It's just a lot of confrontation for the people we're describing are not confrontational people. They're opinionated about movies, but it's the same reason that anytime someone's like, I didn't remember this late fee, I would just erase it. I don't give a shit about the corporation at all. I was like, oh yeah, maybe it was here. There was a code called FOS, found on shelf, and I would just be like, all right, well, found on shelf was actually us, it was here.

It's hilarious that Ed's definition of customer service is haranguing the customer and being like, no, you don't understand. I'm doing you a favor. I'm placing this back and sending you out empty handed. It's better than renting the remake of Rollerball.

Or How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.

How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.

That's not terrible. That's not a terrible film. I just kept making everyone rent a Night's Tale, which is, I think, an excellent movie.

It is.

I would absolutely.

Brian Helgeland right up.

Yes.

I feel like I should watch the- That's enough to get me interested.

I think he directed it too.

It's a good movie.

So, the Mosquito Man, again, not the Man-Sketo, the Mosquito Man, quote, looked much like a man, except that instead of a mouth, it had a long proboscis it used to suck the brain out of a person's head.

Oh my God.

Oh my God.

What a shit life to have.

As clever as any vampire, the Mosquito Man would only appear in groups of people as they celebrated. In that way, it was able to avoid detection before it had fed.

What do you mean, like, they're drunk enough that no one noticed? It's like, who's this guy with a long, crazy nose mouth?

I assume that he was able to hide that when he was around other people.

Yeah, I would hope.

Sort of like that X-Files episode with the cockroach monster at the office. Remember that episode?

That show was the best.

I love that episode. Anyway, in one Haida legend of the Haida tribe, the Mosquito Man came to a group of brothers who had just returned from a hunt. When the eldest brother's child began to cry, each man tried in turn to quiet it. When it came time for the Mosquito Man's turn, the baby quieted. It was only after he'd passed its body to the next brother that they realized he had feasted on its brain.

Did it or did it not quiet it?

He had one job and I do believe-

And he fucking did it.

He did it. He should be the chief of this tribe.

He's the hero of this story.

He got it done. As someone who's dealing with a crying baby, he is. He is. The brothers attacked the monster who became enraged and slew all except the youngest of them. That man he chased all around until eventually the brother led the mosquito man to the lake. When the creature fell into the water, the Haida tribesmen began to sing and the lake froze, holding the monster with only his head above the ice. The brothers then gathered wood and set a fire over the mosquito man's head.

Oh my God.

The ashes that took flight in the wind afterward became the first mosquitoes.

Oh, wow.

That's the origin story of mosquitoes.

Yes. Now, interestingly, I found a second, even longer, legend from a neighboring tribe that is similar in its description of how mosquitoes came to be, except the creature burned in that story is not a mosquito man. He's a giant who likes to kill and eat humans.

That's not as good at all. There's not even a single, there's no overlap with mosquitoes.

No, but his death is notable, I think, for being even more grotesque than the mosquito man's. The giant in this case is slain by the brothers and carved up into smaller pieces before being burned and transforming into a buzzing cloud of the world's first mosquitoes. The giant's disembodied voice calls out from the center of the cloud, I'll eat you people until the end of time.

Oh, wow, it's a very different ending than the end of Green Mile.

It's a very different ending than pretty much I think any movie, because I don't think anything ends this way except this story.

That's crazy, Mosquito Man. RIP God bless Mosquito Man. I feel like he was done dirty a little bit.

I'll end this episode with I'll eat you people until the end of time so that there is something else that ends the same way.

Okay.

So, before we finish our world tour and switch into vampire lore run rampant in the UK and in the colonial time Americas, I think this is a good place to pause the history lesson and talk a little shop. The three of us, we're all writers and filmmakers, and we've just covered, I don't know, a dozen or more vampiric creatures from around the world, many of which I don't think have ever been seen on film before. So, of these creatures, which do we think would make the best addition to the cinematic tradition of vampires?

Oh, boy. I mean, I do think this like Man-Sketo or Mosquito Man. Mosquito Man.

Yeah.

It kind of reminded me of that. I'm sure this is where they yanked that from in Starship Troopers where they get the pincer and the head and then the bugs start sucking the guy's brain out at the end.

Oh, yeah. I think Starship Troopers must be one of the best bait-and-switch movies of all time for a movie that is pretty much the marketing, the imagery was in line with an Independence Day or something.

Totally.

I mean, that's what satire is.

No, I know, but I mean for kids, I think, because I remember having a very visceral reaction. I was a little bit older when I finally watched Starship Troopers, but between the nudity and the scale of the violence, you think you're getting one thing and you get something else.

My uncle got me a Starship Trooper toy. It was like the bugs, they had toys of the bugs.

I know, and it's a weird thing where like it just, I mean, yes, as a satire, it is definitely off firing on all cylinders, but I think just as a first step into the world of adult film for a lot of kids, I think it was sort of a hidden, nothing about it made your parents think like, oh, that movie is going to have a lot of tits and blood.

A lot of boobs, yeah.

Rico's Roughnecks, man, they knew how to party.

They did. Oh, yeah, we were talking about which vampires here would make good additions to movies. I'm surprised no one's done anything with The Seven Spirits.

Oh, yeah.

The Seven Spirits, because we've done everything else. We've done Seven Samurais, done The Magnificent Seven. We've never done The Seven-

The Seven Deadly Venoms.

Yeah, The Seven Morbiuses. The Seven Morbii.

Hey, wait, real quick about Morbius.

Yeah.

Did you guys ever watch the Spider-Man cartoon in the 90s?

Yeah, of course. Yeah, with Madame Webb.

That Morbius with the little fucking suckers on his hands is so scary. That shit is a nightmare. He has the little mouths on his hand or he's wanting to suck plasma from you.

It's fucking gross.

Ed, was that in the comic books as well or was that an invention for the show?

No, they made it like the network was like, oh, we can't have him biting people. So, they came up with this thing that was like a thousand times more disturbing. It was like Cronenbergian nightmare.

Yeah, I don't recall this being in the comic. I'm looking at pictures of it right now and I'm still going to see that when I close my eyes.

Yeah. Either way, I don't think it made it to the Morbius feature film, although maybe it'll make it into the seven Morbiuses.

No, but the seven Morbiuses, I'd like to see those guys show up somewhere. I'd like to see them summoned like a prostitute hires them, like the Magnificent Seven or whatever that movie is.

Seven Brides for Seven Morbiuses?

Dude.

Famous musical reference. Okay.

Yeah. You should write this fucking vampire jokes and cartoons book, Chris.

So, did anybody else have anything they wanted to throw in about which of these mythological vampires they think would be good on film?

No, because these vampires have too many things that makes the credits roll a lot earlier for me, where it's like, where did I leave the bottom half of my body? Oh, it got taken away by a fox and then credits roll. They have too many, you defeat them too easily. That's why they haven't made it to the big screen.

Right, your iron feet and hooks get rusty.

Yeah, that's why it should be problems you have that require agency of other people to defeat. Someone needs to get a stick and sharpen it. Somebody needs to find out where you live. Somebody needs to invest in garlic.

Ed, you watched some of the Hammer movies, right?

Yeah, I just said that thing.

Did you see Brides of Dracula?

I'm sure they were. If they were babes, I was there.

Well, the second movie in that series is called Brides of Dracula, and there's a bit where Van Helsing gets bit on the neck by a vampire, and you're like, oh, he's fucked. What the hell is he going to do? Then he does something pretty wild to get it out of him.

Oh, shit. Did he have Morbius come suck it out of his hand?

Basically, yeah.

Fuck, man.

Peter Cushing summoned Jared Leto.

All right, I'm going to have to watch it tonight.

Yeah, it's good, dude. It's a great movie.

Can I skip the first one and go straight to Brides of Vampires?

You could. I mean, Horror of Dracula fucking rules, though. You should watch both of them. There's eight of them, I think, possibly nine. They have a very confusing chronology. I'd recommend all of them.

OK, everybody, whoever wants to watch it with us will be on Discord tonight watching it.

16 hours of Hammer movies.

Yeah, check our socials. That might have been canceled by the time this comes out.

So one vampire that we know Jackson is interested in is a much more modern creep, London's Highgate vampire. Now, Jackson, this is the case that you've actually written a script about, right?

Yes, exactly.

And I know there are details that you want to keep top secret. So without giving too much away about what exactly the script is about, is there anything in particular that drew you to this case to use as the backdrop for a movie?

Yes. So, you know, I got really into Hammer movies during the pandemic because I had a lot of extra time on my hand. Sure. I'd seen a couple, like I saw Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires at the New Beverly several years ago, and then, you know, Horror of Dracula and Curse of Frankenstein, Brides of Dracula, a few of those. And basically, like I watched this movie, Dracula AD. 1972, which I loved.

And that's the whole name of the movie or you're giving the year after?

Yes. The whole name of the movie is Dracula AD. 1972.

It's a sick title.

Absolutely. And I read up on a lot of these movies after I finished watching them, just to get little factoids about where they came from. And this was a layer entry in the series. This was the second to last one that Christopher Lee did. They did two more after that. But anyway, I found that it was based on a real case, and it was fairly recent at the time. And funny enough, actually, when I went to London last year for Fright Fest, I decided to take a visit to the Highgate Cemetery where this was based on. And so essentially, where it came from was like a group of kids broke into a cemetery over there and desecrated a bunch of the corpses and then like threw them around.

Jesus.

Yeah, it's pretty wild. I mean, like I learned this when I went to the kids. Well, I mean, like, you know, like 20 something.

Are they are. When you were there, our bodies still just kind of laying out for you to grab and toss around.

No, no, no.

Was there an era when they were like, oh, you're not the grave digging union was like, we're not working. Just lay them wherever loose.

No.

How did the kids even get them out of the ground?

Well, so they were in-

Like mausoleums?

In mausoleums. Oh, jeez. And so they have like this. I went to the area and they showed it to me, but there's basically this circular walkway where it's surrounded by mausoleums. There's the entryway and then every single door on it leads to someone's grave. And basically in the late 60s, early 70s, I can't remember the exact year, these kids broke into a number of these buildings and then threw the bodies around and probably just desecrated them.

Those are shitty fucking kids.

Is that night what the song Let The Bodies Hit The Floors about?

Very possibly. But there were news stories with the people who had gone and done that, where they started getting haunted by this shadowy figure. And it was not a typical vampire. The thing basically just moved in shadow and it looked completely different to each of them. So I think it was four of them or something. But basically one of them found they had weird pinholes on their jugular, where it was someone had poked their veins. And they started hallucinating all the time and seeing this figure wherever they went.

Is the name of your script Fuck Around and Find Out?

Yes, it is, actually.

Good. It's a great title, too.

I mean, kind of for the same reason, I think a lot of people are... I've just seen so much vampire stuff, and I was like, oh, this is like something I haven't seen before, and it really drew me into it. And then, you know, because the way the movie plays it is like, you know, basically they end up summoning the Christopher Lee Dracula for, you know, another round, but this time he's in the then modern era, which was a fun spin. It's a terrific movie, very strong recommendation. But, you know, like reading this story, like, just was so creepy, because you think about, like, these things that you can't, they're not like a tangible threat, and they're more like operating in your mind, almost kind of like Freddy or something like that. And it's shape shifting form that I thought was pretty compelling. And like when I went over there, they basically were just like, oh, yeah, like, you know, the media made a big deal of this. But really, it was like these guys were just like desecrating corpses and stuff. But something I thought was like pretty fascinating, just because it's like so many modern vampire movies, they're just kind of doing like a remix of a lot of the stuff that we've seen before, where it's like, okay, we're going to do another iteration of Dracula, or we're going to do another piece of Dracula, or that, you know, and it's like, they don't get into some of these other areas, like you were bringing up with these different mythologies. And that really fascinated me because it's like I just, I like not knowing what I'm going into. And it's like, you know, I've read Dracula, I've seen a ton of those movies, I've watched tons of vampire stuff, and it was just kind of kind of cool to have something that no one had cracked into. Cool.

Yeah. Well, I tried to run down sort of a historical telling of the facts of the Highgate vampire case, because as you mentioned, there was a lot of, a lot of this got filtered through the media, a lot of the stories of the people getting stalked after being in the, in the graveyard were circulating. And when you say this is a story that is an unpredictable vampire story, I don't know how much of the real story you're using in your script. But by God, is it, is it so weird and so unpredictable? So for those of you who have never heard of the Highgate vampire, according to an article I found in Far Out Magazine, in March 1969, the British Psychic and Occult Society began receiving reports of a tall black apparition stalking the tombs of London's Highgate Cemetery.

From who? Who fucking knows their number? And who knows to go to them with this?

I think probably some of these hooligans. Oh, maybe. The Jacksons. So to set the scene a little, Highgate Cemetery. Now, Jackson, you've been there, so you can fill in some details, but it's pretty big, right? I saw the-

Yeah, it's huge. It's massive.

It's 37 acres with over 170,000 bodies interred in around 53,000 graves.

Oh my God.

Yeah.

Which those numbers, some of those graves are looking a little cozy if you have 170,000 people put in 53,000 graves, but-

You can fit a lot more people if you use the ground.

Yeah. It was initially designed by architect, the Highgate, the cemetery was initially designed by architect Steven Geary for private company looking to make money off of the increasing number of the dead as London's population doubled from one to two million between 1800 and 1840. A bunch of large graveyards were built all around the city at this time, and the idea of Highgate was to tempt customers with the splendor of its architectural features and beautiful landscaping or as one architect called it, a great garden of death.

Oh my God. Wow. These are some beautiful gardens we've built. People who were probably not going to die, they've decided to die now to get buried here. That's the way they talk about it with the increasing number of the dead.

It's a really stunning cemetery. Yeah.

It's not like your little town's graveyard with rows of headstones. The pictures I saw of it looked more like somebody dropped a maze of mausoleums into Central Park.

Yeah, exactly.

It's a big, lots of trees, hidden nooks and crannies. It's beautiful during the day, I'm sure, much more imposing at night.

Absolutely.

Highgate Cemetery is the resting place of such luminaries as Karl Marx, Douglas Adams, and more recently, Aleksandr Litvinko, who was the guy-

Was poisoned.

Yeah, with polonium, and he is buried in a lead coffin.

That's interesting.

In Highgate Cemetery.

A lot of Russians they let in.

Yeah.

Upwards of two of the three examples, Russians they let in.

Up until World War II, the graves in Highgate grew more and more ornate, until the place fell out of favor as a burial ground and fell into disrepair throughout the 1960s. Its resurrection came as a shooting location for a variety of vampire films like From Beyond the Grave and Taste the Blood of Dracula, and maybe Dracula 1972 AD.

I actually don't think they shot there, which is weird, but they used it as the basis. But yeah, Taste the Blood of Dracula shot there. I think House of Dark Shadows or something, one of the Dark Shadows movies, I'm pretty sure shot there.

Yeah. Well, I think all this Dracula vampire movie shooting is what really whet the public's appetite for the wild stories that emerged later. So in any case, after the British Occult Society reviewed all these stories they received in 1979, or 1969, again, years after they'd already been shooting vampire movies there, so people had vampires on the brain, they found that most of these stories were regurgitations of local gossip. They did turn up one story that seemed to have a little more meat on its bones. A man who claimed to have had a firsthand experience with what came to be known as the Highgate Vampire. He recalled having been, quote, hypnotized by something lurking in the shadows of the cemetery, testifying that when he began to make his way for the exit, he found himself lost and disoriented. As he stumbled around in the night, he began to feel the presence of something behind him. Spinning around, he saw a tall black figure which abruptly vanished. Not long after, two teenage girls who had been walking home along Swain Lane claimed to have witnessed the spirits of the dead rising from their graves. An elderly woman also claimed she had been frightened by a tall dark man with glaring eyes while walking her dog inside the cemetery gates. So a number of stories they found to have a little bit of truth to them in some manner. On top of all of that, a number of foxes were found in the area with deep lacerations to their throats. The media claimed that this was proof a vampire was on the prowl. One of the British Occult Society's investigators, a man named David Ferent, took issue with that, initially claiming that it was more likely the foxes had been used in satanic rituals. More likely.

You've done enough satanic panic episodes to know that's no more likely.

Yeah.

As the story took off, David Ferent launched an investigation with his team and changed his tune, and then also got embroiled in a battle with another spiritualist of the day.

I'm sorry, we have competing occult groups who are like receiving letters and openly working actively?

In just a few minutes. Hang tight. Hold that thought.

Okay.

In a letter to the Hampstead and Highgate Express, Ferent claimed that he and his team had captured evidence of both satanic activity in the cemetery and evidence of the vampire. Though David Ferent remains steadfast in his belief that the vampire was actually an apparition and not an actual vampire.

Doth protest too much. Man, I think this guy's a fucking vampire.

He invented, he said it's the ghost of a vampire basically, not a vampire.

We're gonna find out at the end of the story that guy's a fucking vampire.

Shortly after, Ferent's team was invited to give a personal account of his investigation for an independent television program. The British Occult Society denied the request as it forbade any release of information about ongoing investigations, like they're the fucking cops.

Yeah, about to say. Here at the like spectral Scotland yard, we don't tell you shit.

We can't go on TV and give sensitive details of our investigation. The vampires might find out.

Yeah, they watch, this news comes out at night.

And your Sequel to the Vampire Jokebook is going to be a classic.

Guys, I just signed a deal.

It's happening.

I got a $7 advance, so we're all going to Norm's to split one appetizer.

David Ferent, on the other hand, was happy to recount his own personal encounter with the vampire. In his book, Beyond the Highgate Vampire, Ferent claims he was careful to avoid using sensationalist terms like vampire during this interview on television. So he had no problem using sensationalist terms like satanic cult activity.

Yeah, and then naming his book Vampire, the book.

But another interviewee, Sean Manchester, would soon become his nemesis. Now, Mr. Manchester, a self-proclaimed exorcist, vampire hunter, and bishop of the old Catholic Church, which I had to look up. Not that it really matters. I didn't know much about the old Catholic Church as a designation of Catholicism. So I looked it up and it turns out it's an umbrella term for several groups of Roman Catholics in Austria, Hungary, Imperial Germany, and Switzerland, who ended up rejecting the Roman Catholic dogma of papal infallibility, which was first declared at the first Vatican Council in 1870. So these guys basically said, hey, we believe the Pope can be wrong. We're going to go form our own church and call it the old Catholic Church, where I guess the Pope was still allowed to be wrong.

Interesting.

So Sean Manchester was a bishop of the old Catholic Church and a media whore. Described in this article that I'm pulling from as a somewhat theatrical character, who had been pestering local newspapers looking for publicity since he had first become aware of the investigation. He claimed that the phenomenon was in fact, quote, a king vampire. And after producing a crucifix and homemade winning steak, announced that to exercise a vampire, one must first drive a steak through its heart with one blow, chop off its head with a gravedigger's shovel and burn what remains.

He said this before he went out.

Yes.

This is a man who was like, whatever happens tonight, just know I thought it was a vampire.

He announced his intentions. So this is why Sean Manchester and David Ferent, for years, really up until Ferent's death in 2019, became embroiled in a battle between each other. Basically because David Ferent believed the Highgate vampire was a specter, and Sean Manchester believed that it was an actual vampire in the Bram Stoker tradition. And Sean Manchester kind of sullied David Ferent's name by claiming that Ferent, who, because he had previously told a reporter that he was prepared to take any means necessary to rid Highgate of this, I guess in his mind, harmless ghoul, Manchester said that Ferent was going to join him on this extremely violent excursion, and David Ferent was mad that he got wrapped into these shenanigans. The article says, if Manchester's comments were designed to create maximum publicity, he certainly succeeded. The night following the TV broadcast where he announced this plan, hundreds of people armed with wooden stakes and shovels converged on Highgate Cemetery to take part in a vampire hunt.

People will, you're saying that there's approved condoned violence? Just tell me when. Like that's how people act. They're just like, yeah, they might stop one guy with a stake and a shovel. They're not going to stop 50 of us.

This is like when, did it a few years ago, like 10,000 people gathered at Area 51 to go Super Saiyan or something.

Yeah, storm the gates, but they were going to do the Naruto rush.

The Naruto run, that's what it was.

This is the original, the OG that.

Yeah. After breaching the police cordon and storming the cemetery, several of the vampire hunters scrambled back to safety, having spotted something, quote, crawling in the dark.

Oh my god, these guys are not prepared to encounter. It sounds like they set out to find.

I think they spotted a police officer waving a gun at them.

They don't have guns in England.

That's true. That's true. Whatever. So waving a Shalali in the direction. In an interview with the London Evening News, one Mr. Anthony Robinson recalled, quote, I walked past the place and heard a high pitch noise. Then I saw something gray moving slowly across the road. It terrified me. I've never believed in anything like this. Now I'm sure there's something evil lurking in Highgate.

Wow.

And then it gets a little crazier. After a period of drop-offs and sightings, the vampire returned with a vengeance. According to this article, quote, in August of 1970, two school girls, different from the ones we met earlier, yeah, from the ones we met earlier, I think, stumbled across a 100-year-old corpse of a woman who had been dragged from her coffin, decapitated, staked through the heart, and left in the middle of the pathway.

Dude, they got to 100 years old, or the corpse was 100 years old?

No, the corpse was 100 years old.

Oh, okay, about to say, I don't think people live past like 58 then, not England. Let the bodies hit the floor. Let the bodies hit the floor. It sounds like there is a time period where it's like, is anyone going to do anything about high gay? Every time I walk by, bodies are just thrown around. They're in the fucking streets now.

Yeah, this gruesome discovery did spark a police investigation to, quote, do something about it. And, no, that quote is made up. But it did spark a police investigation and a resurgence in vampire fighting with one woman claiming she had been thrown to the ground by a tall, pallid figure cloaked in black.

He thought I was a corpse.

David Ferrant was troubled by this development. Past sightings had led only to frightening encounters. This was an act of aggression. The incident seemed to prove that the creature posed a real threat, so the British Occult Society agreed to conduct a psychic seance in Highgate Cemetery. Quote, if successful, a rite of exorcism could then be performed to banish the entity from the earthly plane. David Ferent is quoted as saying, I kind of feel like, let the cops have guns.

Because without guns, they were like, what are our options? I guess get the society of fucking seancers to come in and let them be our bullets.

Without guns, yeah, silver bullets not going to do you much good. I guess silver bullets are werewolves, not vampires. On August 17th, 1970, Ferent and other society members entered the cemetery and walked to the site of the initial sighting. They drew a large circle upon the ground, which they sealed with protective symbols, salt and holy water. A second circle adorned with burning candles and incense was laid around where the demon was expected to appear. But no sooner had the seance commenced than human voices were heard in the distance. It was the police. The occult paraphernalia was quickly bundled together and everyone, including David Ferent, made a dash for the nearest exit where, unfortunately, Ferent was quickly spotted and arrested.

So they weren't working with the police. These were rogue occultists.

Yes. The police were investigating, I believe, how this poor woman's body ended up slung up on a bench in the middle of the park, and the occultists were going to try to exercise the vampire.

That's how Edgar Allan Poe died.

It's true. Slumped on a bench.

Slumped on a bench.

Isn't that how Bill Finger died too?

The creator of Batman?

Yeah. I think he died on a park bench. I'm not joking.

This is before they put all those like, keep the homeless away spikes on benches. So you can just like die like a fucking person with class on a bench.

Well, yeah, because somebody was like, man, if only we'd had these, we'd still have Edgar Allan Poe.

I don't know. He had a drinking problem.

Though belief in the Highgate vampire waxed and waned over the years, the animosity between David Ferent and Sean Manchester remained at a fever pitch, like I said, until the former's death in 2019.

The number of people in their lives who were like, nobody even cares about this, who must have said that to them fucking weekly is crazy.

You got to love a petty grudge though.

It's so crazy.

Get this. This petty grudge got so bad that in 1973, which was a year before David Ferent was jailed for desecrating a grave.

Oh my God. And a year after Dracula came back.

Yeah.

Ferent and Manchester decided to settle the score with a magical duel on Parliament Hill in Hampstead.

Oh my God.

Now, it may not surprise you to learn that this melee was eventually called off because I don't think either of them wanted to spend the afternoon shooting invisible fireballs at each other.

They didn't want to LARP? LARP on the hill with me?

Yeah. But the pair did continue for the rest of their lives, putting their efforts into writing and the odd political project. Like in 1978, when David Ferent ran in Hornsey, the appropriately named Hornsey, as the sole candidate for his Wicca Workers Party, which advocated nudity, free sex, the restoration of the Wiccan creed, the establishment of state brothels, outlawing communism, and leaving the EU common market.

Okay, where do they leave time to work in all of that?

I mean, what I'm hearing is you could have made Brexit a lot cooler if you'd established, if you'd kept his platform.

Shit, man.

Now we're talking.

He's like, I'm stepping over famous communists every time I go into highgate. We gotta get rid of those communists. Our love of communists and burying them.

His grave is getting in the way of having all this sex in the graveyard. So, Jackson, feel free to use any of that in the film.

Oh, the slender man roughing up old broads is not getting in the way of you fucking in this graveyard? It's Lennon's grave?

My God.

So, I thought we would end tonight's journey through the land of vampires with a goddamn red, white and blue all American vampire panic. Now, this is not nearly as modern. This took place in the colonial Americas in Rhode Island. And well, actually, I guess this was later than colonial times. What am I saying?

This was, this was 1986.

There were a number of vampire panics in the Americas throughout colonial times, mostly because as we will get into in this story, tuberculosis was a seemingly almost vampiric disease. And over the years, it caused many panics and stories of outbreaks of vampirism all over the country. But this case actually happened much, much later, which is part of why it's so interesting. This happened in Exeter, Rhode Island, and it's the story of Mercy Brown.

I remember that sitcom. It's Murphy Brown. It's Murphy Brown.

Mercy Brown would actually, as you'll see, make it's a family story. It's about the shenanigans one family gets into in Exeter, Rhode Island. And when you put it that way, it sounds like a winner. So Mercy Lena Brown lived in Exeter, Rhode Island or deserted Exeter as it was dubbed or simply one of the border towns. It was largely a subsistence farming community with barely fertile soil. Rocks, rocks, and more rocks, says Sheila Reynolds Boothroyd, president of the Exeter Historical Association, which is, man.

I'm glad the president loved the town so much to describe it as such.

Talk about a classic name for a president of Historical Association. I feel like Sheila Reynolds Boothroyd would have made it up for a movie. Farmers heaped stones into tumble down walls, and rows of corn swerved around the biggest boulders. In the late 19th century, so we're talking the late 1800s here, Exeter, like much of agrarian New England, was even more sparsely populated than usual. Civil war casualties had taken their toll on the community, and the new railroads and the promise of richer lands to the west lured young men away. By 1892, the year Mercy Lena Brown died, Exeter's population had dipped just 961 from a high of more than 2,500 in 1820. So Manhattan this was not, but they had some economy for a while. Farms were abandoned, many of them later to be seized and burned by the government.

Get them out of here. It was all rocks, I heard.

Some sections looked like a ghost town, Reynolds Boothroyd says. And tuberculosis was harrying the remaining families. Consumption, as it was called, had started to plague New England in the 1730s, a few decades before the first known vampire scares. By the 1800s, when the scares were at their height, the disease was the leading cause of mortality throughout the Northeast, responsible for almost a quarter of all deaths. Now, tuberculosis, if you're not familiar with it, was a terrible end, and often drawn out over years of suffering. You'd have a skyrocketing fever, a hacking bloody cough, and your body would visibly begin to waste away. Quote, the emaciated figure strikes one with terror, reads one 18th century description. The forehead covered with drops of sweat, the cheeks painted with a livid crimson, the eyes sunk, the breath offensive, quick and laborious, and the cough so incessant as to scarce allow the wretched sufferer Time to tell his complaints.

Wow, I think one of my grandparents, one of my grandpas died from tuberculosis or alcoholism. It's definitely a coin flip. I want to say it's a coin flip, but I think it was something where I was told it, and I was like, tuberculosis was still around, but I guess it was.

They're nearly indistinguishable from one another.

Yeah, and I don't know if there's a cause and effect at all there, but yeah, and this is a grandparent that died well before I was ever born, so.

Oh, wow.

I think in pre-Prohibition America, it was probably a 50-50 what you were dying from.

Sure.

If you were a laboring man.

Ed confirmed that his grandfather had TB, but could not confirm if that was the cause of death due to receiving another call he had to take.

Indeed, symptoms progressed in such a way that it seemed like something was draining the life and blood out of the victim. People dreaded the disease without really fully understanding it. Though Robert Koch had identified the tuberculosis.

His name is Robert Koch head?

No.

That's what I... Jackson, did you hear that?

No, I said though Robert Koch had identified...

There it is again.

Though Robert Koch had identified the tuberculosis bacterium in 1882.

Nobody believed him because he was fucking doing so many rails. Couldn't be trusted. He never slept. Kept grinding his teeth.

News of the discovery did not penetrate rural areas for some time. Even if it had, drug treatments wouldn't become available until the 1940s, which that kind of reminds me. I think of tuberculosis, the consumption, the wasting disease as an old disease that none of us have ever had to deal with. But Jackson, aren't the flashbacks in Pet Sematary? Isn't that a woman who is suffering from tuberculosis?

God, great question. No, I think she has, it's not spinal meningitis or something.

I don't know, maybe it's not a consumption.

Well, like I said, I was surprised to learn when I found out that tuberculosis may have been one of 30 things that killed my grandfather I never met, I remember going, wow, that seems late.

Yeah.

I'll put in the show notes.

It'll put in the show notes, RIP my grandpa, sorry for talking shit.

No, I didn't talk shit, I didn't know him. For all I know, he would have loved the show, and if he would have hated it, then let's say more shit about him. Yeah, I'll put in the show notes what he died from if I can find it, or at least I'll leave a couple of, I'll let you guys choose one of 10, and whoever, the first eight people to choose it right get like a key chain.

If eight people guess what your grandfather died from before you ever know for sure, I think that would be extremely impressive.

Yeah, key chain worthy, some would say.

True.

Ed, the non-researcher of the bunch, did not want to look up ten diseases for this, so he'll figure out a different key chain game down the road.

So, the year that Mercy Brown died, one physician, relatably here, Ed, blamed tuberculosis on drunkenness.

Okay, see, I'm not this- They could be the same thing.

And want among the poor. 19th century cures included drinking brown sugar dissolved in water and frequent horseback riding. Which I feel like is the 19th century version of just like, move to Florida, the air is great for you, kind of a thing. If they were being honest, Bell says, the medical establishment would have said, there's nothing we can do and it's in the hands of God. So, the Brown family was living on the eastern edge of town.

This is a name they got from all the brown sugar and water they were consuming?

Yeah, desperate to stay alive. They were living on the eastern edge of town on a modest homestead of around 30 acres and the entire family began to succumb to the disease in December 1882. Mercy Brown's mother, Mary Eliza, was the first to go. Mary Brown's sister, Mary Olive, a 20 year old dressmaker, died the next year. A tender obituary from a local newspaper hints in which she endured, quote, the last few hours she lived was of great suffering, yet her faith was firm and she was ready for the change.

Wow.

Which is kind of a casual way. Ready for a change is what I say when I like get tired of the scented candle in the bathroom or something. Not dying from tuberculosis, but I guess that is a change from being alive to being dead.

It's a big time change for sure. You know who moved because of tuberculosis is I think Stanley. The Stanley Hotel that they based the shining on and everything. The Stanley family, he moved there and built that at the high elevation because he had tuberculosis, and they thought that that would help. They thought the higher elevation would help with his tuberculosis.

Within a few years, Lena's brother Edwin, a store clerk whom one newspaper columnist, I think unnecessarily described as a big husky young man, got sick and left for Colorado Springs, hoping that the climate would improve his health.

There you go. That's also my grandfather's name. He maybe died from tuberculosis.

Was he a big husky young man who was mocked in the paper?

I mean, he was a war veteran. Why would they mock him?

Lena or Mercy Brown, who was just a child when her mother and sister died, didn't fall ill until nearly a decade after they were buried. Her tuberculosis was the galloping kind, which meant she might have been infected but remained asymptomatic for years, as opposed to what I thought the galloping kind of tuberculosis was, which is the kind that would have been cured by horseback riding. So her tuberculosis was the galloping kind, which meant that she might have been infected but remained asymptomatic for years, only to fade fast after showing the first signs of the disease. A doctor attended her in, quote, her last illness, a newspaper said, and informed her father that further medical aid was useless. Her January 1892 obituary was much terser than her sister's, quote, Ms. Lena Brown, who has been suffering from consumption, died Sunday morning. The obituary did not mention whether or not she was ready for this change.

RIP, God bless. I don't mean to laugh, but.

RIP, God bless. As Lena was on her deathbed, her brother was, after a brief remission, taking a turn for the worse. Edwin had returned to Exeter from the Colorado resorts in, quote, a dying condition. So I guess that fresh air didn't do him much good. And, quote, if the good wishes and prayers of his many friends could be realized, friend Eddie would speedily be restored to perfect health, wrote the newspaper. Some neighbors, likely fearful for their own health, weren't content with prayers. Several approached George Brown, the children's father, and offered an alternative take on the recent tragedies. Perhaps an unseen diabolical force was praying on his family. It could be that one of the three Brown women wasn't dead after all, instead secretly feasting on the living tissue and blood of Edwin, as the Providence Journal later summarized. Oh, wow. If the offending corpse, the journal uses the term vampire in some stories, but the locals seem not to, was discovered and destroyed, then Edwin would recover. And the neighbors asked if they could exhumed the bodies in order to check for fresh blood in their hearts. And George Brown gave his permission. So on the morning of March 17th, 1892, just a little over a hundred years ago, a party of men dug up the bodies. And after a decade, they found that Lena's sister and her mother were basically just bones. Lena though, had been dead only a few months and it was winter time. So the body was in a fairly well-preserved state, wrote one later correspondent. They wrote, the heart and liver were removed and in cutting open the heart, clotted and decomposed blood was found. During this impromptu autopsy, the doctor again emphasized that Lena's lungs showed, quote, diffuse tuberculosis germs. Undeterred though, the villagers burned her heart and liver on a nearby rock and fed Edwin the ashes.

That's not what you eat, people don't eat ashes.

Well, they were trying to cure his tuberculosis or his vampirism, but it did not work and he died less than two months later.

Probably from ash disease.

Yeah, he choked on it. But even at the time, so you read this story, you go, Jesus, 1892, they were feeding this guy the ashes of his sister's heart because they thought maybe she was a vampire. That seems real like primeval stuff. And even at the time, New England's vampire panics did strike onlookers as a baffling anachronism.

It's like the idea of onlookers being like, let's keep moving, Janine. This is foul. We thought you guys were cooking something. We came down. We thought maybe, you know, barbecuing and I see you're burning hearts and I'm fucking off. All they're serving is ash here. This sucks.

Yeah, they did not like what they found. And from the Smithsonian article that I'm quoting here, the late 1800s were a period of social progress and scientific flowering. Indeed, many of the Rhode Island exhumations occurred within 20 miles of Newport, which I visited with my grandparents when I was younger. And Newport, Rhode Island.

The big houses?

Yeah, it's the big houses. They're called the article calls them I've been high society summer nucleus, where the scions of the Industrial Revolution vacation.

It's all mansions. It's fucking stunning. It's a stunning place.

Yeah. This was not the backwoods of the world. This was really relatively close to where the masters of society were. Probably being vampires, if I had to guess.

100 percent. Those guys are like, what do you mean they killed an Edwin? I had three Edwins on my fucking grocery order this week. We need their blood to keep the gears of industry working.

Yeah. At first, only people who'd lived in or had visited the vampire-ridden communities knew about the scandal. Quote, we seem to have been transported back to the darkest age of unreasoning ignorance and blind superstition instead of living in the 19th century and in a state calling itself enlightened and Christian. One writer at a small town Connecticut paper opined in the wake of an 1854 exhumation.

Goddamn, nutmeggers are out there writing articles.

Yeah. They were complaining that this seemed backwards like 50 years before this most famous case. So they had long felt that this was not an appropriate way of dealing with what was obviously a medical mystery.

Sure.

The article notes that the particulars of vampire exhumations vary widely. In many cases, such as Mercy Brown, only the family and neighbors participated. But sometimes, town fathers voted on the matter, or medical doctors and clergymen gave their blessings or even pitched in. Some communities in Maine and one in Plymouth, Massachusetts would simply flip the exhumed vampire face down at the grave and leave it at that, instead of going the full burn the heart and eat it.

Open and shut case. There you go.

In Europe, some beheaded suspected vampire corpses and others bound the suspected vampire's feet with thorns. A lot of times these rituals were clandestine, but in Vermont, we know, they were quite public and festive. One vampire heart was reportedly torched on the Woodstock, Vermont town green as late as 1830.

Wow. Wow, wow, wow.

In Manchester, hundreds of people flocked to a 1793 heart burning ceremony at a blacksmith's forge. Quote, Timothy Mead officiated at the altar in the sacrifice to the demon vampire, who it was believed was still sucking the blood of the then living wife of Captain Burton.

Whenever you got to tell the cops. You know, Vermont's the only state in the union, I believe that has witch windows in their homes.

Oh, really?

Have you ever seen those? Witch windows are purposely askew windows that are on the house, where it would be at like a 45 degree angle. It makes no sense. And apparently, they're called witch windows because, I mean, it's probably not this, but like something about how their broomsticks get stuck or something. I don't know the lore exactly. But it's something about how they're confused, like they can't get in because it doesn't make sense.

I see. I see.

But it's the only state where they're found in Vermont. There's no other state where that's on any homes.

Huh, I'll have to look into those. That's an interesting...

Yeah, I think they're called witch windows.

Well, the rumors of all these stories from America spread, and before long, even members of the foreign press were offering various explanations for the phenomenon. Maybe they suggested it was the neurotic modern novel driving New Englanders insane.

Jesus.

Which was, I think, their version of blaming it on Marilyn Manson. It was just like there was too much for these people to handle. It broke their brains. Some suggested that local farmers may have been pulling the family's leg. A writer for the London Post declared that whatever forces drove the Yankee vampire, it was an American problem and most certainly not the product of a British folk tradition even though many families in the area could trace their lineage directly back to England. In the Boston Daily Globe, a writer went so far as to suggest that perhaps the frequent intermarriages of families in these back country districts may partially account for some of their characteristics. So inbreeding.

Don't love it.

So the reason I wanted to end this episode on the story of Mercy Lena Brown is because her story became so famous that one 1896 New York World clipping even found its way into the papers of a London stage manager and aspiring novelist named Bram Stoker whose theater company was touring the United States that same year. His Gothic masterpiece Dracula was published in 1897. So there is a chance, an outside chance that this story inspired some elements of the Dracula that we know today. Some people say there wasn't enough time for the news accounts to have really influenced the manuscript that much. But others see Lena in the character of Lucy, her very name attempting amalgam of Lena and Mercy. And they see the story of this consumptive seeming teenage girl turned vampire as something very similar to what Bram Stoker wrote in his book. So it's possible that that's part of the origin of Dracula.

Huh, hell yeah.

And with that, I think it's time for us to turn to the fear tier and give vampires a placement on the ranking system that you've all come to know and love. So I guess, Jackson, you're the guest. Where would you place vampires on your personal fear tier, one being not scary at all, ten being having a bucket of hot piss and shit dumped on your head?

If it's that psychic specter vampire, that's a solid ten. If it's kind of like a doddering Nosferatu, I'm giving that a solid 7.5.

Oh, wow. Still both pretty high.

Yeah.

Ed, how about you?

Going pretty low on this one. I think vampires are real because...

Ed's thrown enough corpses around his local cemetery to know.

To know that none of them were vampires. I think a good thing that I like about the Fright Night remake is that it's Vegas, and there's just a lot of people who work at night, and you would never think anything of it. People who were up all night and sleep during the day. I'm just like, we're right there. Then we got, that's such a good...

It's a great cover.

Cover. I'm putting them at a 6 because I think they exist, and I look pretty scrumptious. I'm type O negative. That's a rare blood type.

And a great band, too.

Yeah. And a great band, good blood type. I can just see, I can see a vampire picking me out. I'm definitely slow. I can't run fast. I have what must smell fantastic in terms of blood pheromones.

But we've already discussed, you have garlic running through your veins, so...

Shit. Well, then I guess I'm a honeypot, aren't I?

You're the bait.

And the only reason they're not higher is in the event that the rules are accurate. I'm just not gonna invite you in. I'm just gonna wait till daytime. So that's what keeps it from going at like an eight or nine or ten.

I'm gonna put them at a three because the co-hosts of this show, I can easily put in front of me, it sounds like. So...

Or outrun.

Yeah, or outrun. So I guess I'll be fine. No, I don't know. I mean, I think there's some very scary portrayals of vampires in film. I think certain ideas surrounding the vampire are scary, but I don't often have nightmares about them. I don't see myself doing much with them creatively, and I don't spend much time fearing them. So I'll put them at a three.

All right.

Well, Jackson, thank you so much for joining us. Folks, if you aren't familiar with Jackson, familiarize yourself with his work, go rent Beyond The Gates, go listen to some of his commentaries, and keep your eyes out for his latest short film Stereo Vision coming to a film festival near you, and hopefully hitting the internet sometime in the future so you can all see it. Until next time, I'm Chris Cullari.

And I'm Ed Voccola.

And I'm Jackson Stewart.

And together, we want to suck your blood.

No. Scared All The Time is co-produced by Chris Cullari and Ed Voccola.

Written by Chris Cullari.

Edited by Ed Voccola.

Additional support and keeper of sanity is Tess Feifel.

Our theme song is the track Scared by Perpetual Stew.

And Mr. Disclaimer is...

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Tonight, we are in this together. Together. Together.

I'll eat you people until the end of time.

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