Premium Episode 139: Vampires Are Getting Sexier (Sample)
Jake Rockatansky returns with a spin on the cryptid series — about the increasingly sexy vampires who nonetheless are based on bloated corpses unearthed and staked through the heart.
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Welcome, listener, to Premium Chapter 139 of the QAnon Anonymous podcast, the Vampires episode.
As always, we are your hosts, Jake Rokitansky, Julian Field, and Travis View.
Vampires.
One of the most infamous and alluring myths of human civilization.
Throughout history, the idea of an immortal being that feeds on the blood of the living has permeated both historical texts and popular culture.
It appears that just about every culture has their own interpretation of the vampire.
From Latin America's Chupacabra to the feared Dybbuk of Jewish folklore.
Throughout each of these myths, one trait remains constant.
The vampire is a creature of the undead.
As we dive in deeper, however, we'll begin to discover that the vampires of popular culture share very little in common with eyewitness accounts throughout history.
That many of the facts that have fueled these beliefs are merely misunderstandings about the very process of death itself.
We'll also be examining how these myths have fueled modern-day violence and persecution of various cultures.
Join me as I impale myself on a spear outside Vlad Dracul's castle on a stormy night and serve as a grim warning to all who pass by.
I like this.
I'm getting some great History Channel feels from one of the most infamous and alluring myths of human civilization.
Thank you.
Let's get dirty!
Boys, it's been a while since one of these Pure Jake episodes and people have been begging.
We are going to have a good one, I think.
Well, I hope I don't disappoint.
I'm pretty proud of this one.
I actually read a whole book.
Yeah?
Last time you said that, you then later admitted it was a PDF.
Well, this was also a PDF, but only because I didn't have time to ship the book to my place.
But I had a whole PDF, 250 pages.
I read the whole book.
Feel good about it.
Let's get into it.
Vampires in Popular Culture Bram Stoker's Dracula The quintessential fictional text on vampires has got to be Bram Stoker's Dracula.
The book was released in 1897 and was judged favorably by critics at the time.
The original story is told through letters, journals, and newspaper clippings, without any sort of real central character.
Despite the book being now regarded as a classic, Bram, short for Abraham, didn't really gain any amount of success from it.
When the book was first published by Archibald Constable and Company, it only cost six shillings, and Stoker for some reason had agreed to not earn any royalties until the book had sold over a thousand copies.
He was long dead by the time it became considered an iconic Gothic text.
As we'll see later in the episode, the Count Dracula portrayed in the book shared little in common with actual vampire folklore.
Despite taking hundreds of pages of notes, researching myths from both Wallachia and Bulgaria, Stoker presented a vampire far more romanticized and mysterious than the eyewitness accounts that spanned across Eastern Europe.
For example, in the book, it's never actually discussed how Count Dracula became a vampire.
There is vague allusion to him learning dark magic through studying the occult, but it's never properly explained.
In the 1992 film of the same name, starring a very young Keanu Reeves, Anthony Hopkins and Gary Oldman, Dracula's origin is explained through his denunciation of God after his wife, played by Winona Ryder, dies by suicide, believing that her beloved has been killed in battle.
I will say, the movie is pretty interesting, and I was definitely not allowed to watch it when it first came out.
I was also not allowed to play the Sega CD game that accompanied the film when it was released, despite the fact that it appeared to have revolutionary graphics.
I remember this one being too sexy for, yeah, my parents.
They were like, no, this is not for you.
But yeah, kids today, they'll never know the thrill of seeing full motion video, or FMV as it was called at the time, in a video game.
Yes.
It was absolutely mind-blowing.
Yeah, especially a video representation of Keanu Reeves in the game.
I mean, they used his likeness.
It was, I wish I could have played it.
Maybe one day I will.
We need to do like a history of video games starting with Keanu Reeves appearing in the FMV of this game until Cyberpunk.
Oh, that's a good idea for an episode.
My next weird one.
Sure.
Bram Stoker's Dracula itself is packed with sexual tension and homoeroticism.
Which some literary historians believe was Stoker grappling with his own sexuality.
It's well documented that Stoker wrote lengthy letters to his literary idol, Walt Whitman, that contained passages like this.
Go ahead, Travis.
Sure this isn't a Julian passage?
Okay, maybe it's a Julian passage.
No!
Absolutely not.
No, no, no.
Travis's face when you point it to him is enough for me.
If you are the man I take you to be, you will like to get this letter.
If you are not, I don't care whether you like it or not and only ask that you put it into the fire without reading any farther.
This is like every single DM I receive on the QAA account, by the way.
But I believe you will like it.
I don't think there is a man living, even you who are above the prejudices of the class and small-minded men, who wouldn't like to get a letter from a younger man, a stranger across the world.
A man living in an atmosphere prejudiced to the truths you sing and your manner of singing them.
Nice.
Beautifully said.
Yeah.
It's very going in defensive.
Oh, if you don't like this, I don't care, because you do like it, actually, because it's good.
In actual vampire folklore across many cultures, it was rare that vampires would drain their victims via their neck, but instead it was usually described as being through their chest cavity.
This would be the first step in a long tradition of writing the vampire as a sexual creature, but we'll get to more of that later.
Wait, so how did the chest get punctured?
Teeth?
Teeth.
Oh, interesting.
Despite there being no reference to it whatsoever in his notes, many insisted that Bram Stoker had drawn the inspiration of Dracula from the real-life Vlad Tepes III, also known as Vlad Dracul, or also known as Vlad the Impaler.
For those unfamiliar, Vlad was an infamous voivode, or prince, in the region of Wallachia in Romania during the mid to late 1400s.
His father, Vlad II, was given the surname Dracul, coming from the Latin word for dragon, due to his induction into the Order of the Dragon.
Now this was a military fraternity created by the Holy Roman Emperor Sigismund, and was intended to protect Christianity from the Ottoman Empire.
Vlad was a notorious asshole and a mercilessly violent leader.
He became famous for not only constructing horrific torture devices for his enemies, but also his propensity to impale his victims on long poles and plant them outside of his kingdom.
During one battle in 1462, he impaled thousands of dead soldiers in a field in an effort to deter the pursuing Ottoman armies.
He also boiled people alive, Impaled mothers along with their babies, and worse.
In Historia Panonica, Antonio Bonfini tells this frightening account.
Turkish messengers came to Vlad to pay respects, but refused to take off their turbans according to their
ancient custom.
Whereupon he strengthened their custom by nailing their turbans to their heads with three spikes so that they could
not take them off.
So, I mean, surely someone this evil had to be the basis for Stoker's villain, right?
But according to historians, there is really no evidence to suggest that Vlad served as the main inspiration for the
Count.
Stoker claims he named the character Dracula because he wrongly believed that Dracul was the Romanian word for devil.
Oh boy.
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