Fangthology

Ever wondered what Kayleigh and Catherine sound like without a script? Well, listen in as we finally do our ranking of the most attractive Draculas.

Quality of text and faithfulness of adaptation is not a factor. We’re completely shallow here.

Want to play along as you listen? Use the Tiermaker we made and used during the recording of this ep.

Lord Byron, the peer, poet, and great social animal, was one of the leading writers of the Romantic movement and maybe its most notorious. While his poetry remains influential and popular, it is his legend that has taken greater root in the mainstream imagination. He’s influenced everything from poetry to cinema to fashion and beyond. He’s also a key figure in the evolution of the pop-culture vampire myth.

Not to mention an epic-level douchebag.

• Was Lord Byron England’s 1st Vampire? John Polidori & the Birth of the Literary Bloodsucker – The Serpent’s Pen
• “A Fragment” by Lord Byron
• “The Vampyre” by Polidori
• The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori: 1816, Relating to Byron, Shelley, etc.

We introduced our podcast to the world of the living and undead with a deep-dive into Dance of the Vampires, one of Broadway theatre’s most notorious musical flops. That show will forever stand tall as one of the industry’s costliest errors, a mish-mash of bad ideas, micromanagement issues, and clashing egos that turned a beloved European hit into the laughing stock of New York City. Dance of the Vampires would also go on to become example number one as to why vampire musicals don’t work on the stage, at least in the English language. Of course, that didn’t stop people from giving it another try. Dance of the Vampires was based on an obscure Roman Polanski movie, one that didn’t exactly come with a lot of name brand recognition. As Broadway moved more towards familiar properties for adaptation purposes, from The Lion King to The Producers to Monty Python’s Spamalot, it made sense to stick to what audiences knew. And if you’re that set on making a vampire musical, why not take on one of the most iconic vampires in literary history? Not that one, although he does have his fair share of musical ventures. The other one. Lestat.

• Lestat the Musical @ Wikipedia
• Musical trailer
• Lestat on Broadway- AnneRice.com
• Lestat page at Playbill.com
• TalkingBroadway.com
• “Musical ‘Lestat’ to get a makeover” – Los Angeles Times
• “Ready for Broadway’s Jugular, Lestat Swoops In; Elton John Discusses Recent Revisions” – Playbill.com
• “Elton John’s vampires die a painful death” – The Guardian
• “Elton John’s ‘Lestat’ musical panned by critics” – CBC
• Drew Sarich discusses Lestat (and vampire fangs) at “Musical Meets Opera 2” 2011. (German with English subtitles) – Youtube.com
• “After All This Time” performed by Drew Sarich (possibly the Radio Air recording, but only full professional, non-John-performed-demo we’ve found from the show).

Vampires have never felt themselves restricted to one mere genre, let alone a single form of media. Aside from the thousands of novels in more than a dozen genres (and even more combinations of genres), vampire tales are told through film, television, animation, comics and graphic novels, music, and even theatre. (Although if you listened to our first episode you’re already well aware of how well that last form of media does.)

The undead are even part of the ever-growing multi-billion dollar industry that is gaming. They’ve been featured in platformers like Castlevania, point-and-click adventures like Dracula: Origins, and modern action role-playing games such as Vampyr. There’s even Dracula Unleashed, a 1993 full motion video game where you play as a Texan businessman who has come to London in 1899 to find the truth surrounding the mystery of his brother Quincy’s death.

But those aren’t the games I’m talking about in this episode. Instead I’m talking about the cult classic RPG that really should have died not long after it was released, but with the aid of a group of devoted followers refused to meet its final death.

• Bloodlines @ Wikipedia
• Bloodlines @ Fandom Wiki & White Wolf @ Fandom Wiki
• IGN Review
• The Cult Classic that is ‘Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines’ and all the Bad Blood Surrounding its Sequel – Hollywood Insider
• Vampire: The Masquerade – Bloodlines has aged like a fine wine. Here’s why – Games Asylum
• Retro Review: Vampire the Masquerade – Bloodlines – Grimdark Magazine
• A terrifying glitch – SometimesaTom @ Twitch

• Bertram Tung (Dee Bradley Baker)
• Gary Golden (Neil Ross)
• Jeanette Voerman (Grey Griffen)
• Prince Sebastian LaCroix (Andy Milder)
• Smiling Jack (John Dimaggio)
• Cabbie (André Sogliuzzo)
• David Hatter (Fred Tatasciore)

Vampires on the big screen come and go, the trend never fully dying out. After the glut of post-Twilight paranormal fiction tired out the general public in the late 2000s to early 2010s, Hollywood seemed to embrace zombies over their undead brethren for a while. Now, it feels like they’re coming back in style. Vampire YA is in the headlines thanks to books like Renée Ahdieh’s The Beautiful series, Caleb Roehrig’s The Fell of Dark, and, of course, Stephenie Meyer’s return with Midnight Sun. Netflix has the French horror series Vampires, and the BBC adapted Dracula once more, albeit not very well. Indeed, there are more Draculas on the horizon, with female filmmakers like Karyn Kusama and Chloe Zhao at the helm, as well as planned films about the Demeter crossing from the novel and a spin-off focused on Renfield. But this isn’t the first time this century that Hollywood has tried to revive the fortunes of its classic horror creatures. The studio that made its name from iconic monsters hoped to bring them back for a new era of blockbuster filmmaking. The result, however, was one of the decade’s biggest cinematic missteps. This is the story of the rise and fall, but mostly fall, of the Dark Universe. 

• Who Dares Edit The Wolfman? – Kotaku
• How Universal Plans to Bring Its Monster Movies Back to Life (EXCLUSIVE) – Variety
• Tom Cruise in Talks to Star in ‘The Mummy’ Reboot (EXCLUSIVE) – Variety
• Inside ‘The Mummy’s’ Troubles: Tom Cruise Had Excessive Control (EXCLUSIVE) – Variety

Few films have defined cinematic horror as fully as Nosferatu, the 1922 silent film by German director F.W. Murnau. Widely believed to be the first ever vampire movie — or at least the earliest surviving example of one — its influence can be found looming overhead in the genre in the century that followed its release. Its imagery remains iconic and the impact it had on vampire mythos as a whole is indelible. And yet it’s a miracle that Nosferatu is even with us today, not only because the vast majority of silent cinema is missing or presumed destroyed, but because efforts were made to actively erase it from history. A major legal battle bankrupted the company that distributed Nosferatu and ordered that all existing prints of the film be burned due to copyright infringement. By all rights, Nosferatu should not exist in 2021, but now, you can find multiple free-to-view versions on YouTube in less than five seconds. The story of Nosferatu is one of legal strife and perhaps the only widely agreed upon case of plagiarism as a beloved work of art. 

Content warning: Mentions of animal abuse and grave-robbing.

• Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens
• Nosferatu: Phantom der Nacht 
• Shadow of the Vampire
• Vampire: The Masquerade / Vampire: The Masquerade: Bloodlines
• What We Do In The Shadows / Wellington Paranormal

• Dracula vs. Nosferatu: A True Copyright Horror Story – Plagiarism Today
• The Nosferatu Story: The Seminal Horror Film, Its Predecessors and Its Enduring Legacy – Rolf Giesen
• The Story Behind “Nosferatu” – Matt Ford
• Six Degrees of Nosferatu – BFI

For many centuries, death was a mystery, and dying a fearful force devoid of explanation. Some causes of death were deemed to be rooted in the supernatural or some sort of invading demonic force. Many who suffered from wasting diseases, anemia, tuberculosis, or cholera, for example, were misdiagnosed as the victims of vampiric attacks. After all, the symptoms fell in line with those superstitions: weight loss, coughing up blood, immense suffering. And then there were the epidemics of illness. Whole cities of people were wiped out in the bubonic plague. Outbreaks of cholera and flu decimated countries. Venereal diseases became widely feared and terrifyingly common across Europe and beyond. In the 1600s, as the plague claimed millions of lives, the cause was unknown, although we now know that the disease was carried by rats and fleas. The myth of the vampire, as a result, grew all the more foreboding. What else could claim so many lives in one fell swoop but an inhuman creature of immeasurable evil?

Content warning: Discussions of illness, death, and disease.

• The Coldest Girl in Coldtown – Holly Black
• Dracula (2006) – BBC
• Daybreakers – Lionsgate
• Nosferatu the Vampyre

• Polish ‘Vampires’ May Have Actually Been Cholera’s First Victims – Newsweek
• A village still in thrall to Dracula – Guardian
• The ‘secret’ source of ‘female hysteria’: the role that syphilis played in the construction of female sexuality and psychoanalysis in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – Sage Journals
• TV review – Dracula (2006) – The Kim Newman Website
• Extracts from the history and medical properties of garlic – US National Library of Medicine
• The real-life diseases that spread the vampire myth – BBC.com
• Sex, Blood and (Un)Death: The Queer Vampire and HIV – Journal of Dracula Studies
• The Living Dead: A Study of the Vampire in Romantic Literature – James B Twitchell
• A Disease with a Bite: Vampirism and Infection Theories in Bram Stoker’s Dracula – Xavier University of Louisiana

Consistently in print for over 120 years, Dracula has been translated into dozens of languages, and it is one of those translations that we’re here to discuss today. What we expect from a translation is a stridently faithful process, nothing changed aside from the words themselves. In reality, the politics of translation are far more complex than that, with heavier questions of historical and cultural context to consider – more a more tangled process than simply going from one language to another. It’s a gateway to reinterpretation and even total recreation of the tale in question. In the case of Dracula, one translation of the novel was so different that it took on a life of its own. In essence, it became one of the first true literary bootleg novels. This is the story of Dracula in Istanbul.

• Neon Harbour – Purchase your copy here
• Watch the film on youtube
• Deja View: Dracula in Istanbul – Neon Harbour
• Your Daily Dracula – Drakula Istanbul’da (Dracula in Istanbul) (1953) – Kim Newman
• Mondo Macabro : Weird & Wonderful Cinema Around the World – Peter Tombs
• Cinema in Turkey: A New Critical History – Savas Arslan
• The Hollywood Meme: Transnational Adaptations in World Cinema – Iain Robert Smith
• Turkish Cinema: Identity, Distance, and Belonging – Gönül Dönmez-Colin
• Turkish Cinema, 1970–2007: A Bibliography and Analysis – Kerem Kayi and Ekkehard Ellinger
• “What’s in a Name: Tracing the Origins and Trajectory of Turkey’s Nationalist Version of Dracula through an Onomastic Lens“
• “The origins of Turkish Gothic: The adaptations of Stoker’s Dracula in Turkish literature and film” – Tugce Bicakci

Vampire musicals never work. It’s one of the deep-seated rules of Broadway theatre. There are many examples that prove this assertion, but today, we’re taking a look at the one that started it all. What happens when you take one of German-language theatre’s biggest hits and add a hefty dose of Broadway egos, bad puns, feuding producers, and lifelong grudges? You get one of the biggest financial flops in musical history. This is the story of Dance of the Vampires.

• The Fearless Vampire Killers original trailer (2:03)
• Overture – Tanz der Vampire (Original Vienna Cast Recording) (3:30)
• Total Eclipse of the Heart – Bonnie Tyler (7:07)
• Totale Finsternis – Drew Sarich & Diana Schnierer (Die Drei Grafen) (7:12)
• Overture – The Phantom of the Opera (Original London Cast Recording) (10:39)
• “I Am The Count…” – Michael Crawford (14:52)
• Dance of the Vampires TV spot (17:50)
• Einladung zum Ball – Steve Barton (Tanz der Vampire – Original Vienna Cast Recording) (21:56)
• Invitation to the Ball – Michael Crawford (23:41)
• Bücher, Bücher! – Gernot Kranner (Tanz der Vampire – Original Vienna Cast Recording) (28:40)
• Books, Books! – René Auberjonois & Michael Crawford (29:04)
• “Madame von Krolock!” – Michael Crawford, Ron Orbach (30:17)

• Dance of the Vampires @ Wikipedia
• Dance Of The Vampires Is The Best And Worst Vampire Musical Ever Made @ SYFY (also by Kayleigh)
• “Phantom Crawford to be revived as £20m vampire” – The London Times
• Q&A with Jim Steinman
• “‘Within Fifteen Minutes, It Became Unbearable’: The bloody Broadway mess that was Dance of the Vampires“ – Vulture.com
• Dance of the Vampires @ Playbill.com
• Dance of the Vampires review @ Variety
• “Vampires: New Musical Blood” @ NYPost
• Hate At 1st Bite: How ‘Vampires’ Got Drained Of Its Blood
• Review @ Talking Broadway
• The 20 Worst Broadway Musicals Of The Millennium @ Talking Broadway

• Das Kultmusical kehrt heim! – a 20 year retrospective including scenes from the original production, Germany, Paris, Russia, and Japan
• Ronacher Second Revival Trailer (with Drew Sarich as Graf von Krolock)
• Moscow production trailer (Ivan Ozhogin as Krolock)
• St Gallen production trailer (Thomas Borchert as Krolock) – a short, non-replica run starring a number of seasoned Tanz der Vampire actors
• Japanese production trailer (Yuichiro Yamaguchi as Krolock)
• Copenhagen production trailer – another non-replica production, this was cut short by the Covid-19 pandemic.
• “Cette Nuit Restera Eternelle” – Rafaëlle Cohen & Stéphane Métro
• “Кромешная тьма” – Elena Gazaeva & Ivan Ozhogin