Within an hour of opening for enrollment last spring, professor Tomislav Longinovic’s pilot course on vampires hit capacity. The course was designed in part to drum up interest in UW-Madison’s Slavic languages program, which struggles to attract students. Loosely modeled on the few existing vampire courses offered around the country, Longinovic wasn’t surprised by how fast the class filled up. People, he said, have a thing for the folkloric demon.

Vampires might not come to mind when considering scholarly pursuits, but in 1995, while working on a Slavic literary history project with a Canadian research group, the vampire’s broad metaphorical reach became obvious to Longinovic. Last year he published his seminal Vampires Like Us (ed. note: clicking the link will open a pdf file of Vampires like us: Gothic imaginary and "the serbs"), an expose on the conceptual transformations the vampire has undertaken as a figure of global imagination. The book is also the first academic inquiry into the vampire’s role as a nationalist icon, Balkan nationalism in particular.

Born and raised in Belgrade, Longinovic holds degrees in creative writing, psychology and has his Ph.D in comparative literature. He came to UW-Madison in 1990, where he has taught Eastern European history and the incredibly-difficult-to-learn Slavic languages. Not only do Slavic languages use a different alphabet, the languages are inflected and nouns take on 13 forms. Considering this semester’s success of his Vampire in Literature and Film, he hopes to grow the class into a lecture course and open it to a wider cross-section of students.

Longinovic sat recently with Dane101 to discuss the folkloric roots of vampires, how they entered Western popular culture and why they’re such alluring figures for filmmakers and writers.

Dane101: Where does the vampire originate?

TL: Vampires are basically a mythological legend, a cultural artifact. The belief in them dates from 17th and 18th century Europe, the Balkan region mainly. And there are tons of doctoral dissertations, treatises and books written about them in the beginning of the 18th century, in France and Germany especially. And they were taken to be a serious phenomenon. It wasn’t something inside of an imaginary or fantasy world, because in the folkloric belief of the Slavic and Eastern European peoples, they were somehow associated with certain diseases and plagues. If there was a plague in the village, people would start accusing the people recently buried as being a vampire, coming back to take these people and their blood. So, they would perform this ritual killing of the corpse, you know, staking it and burning it. We can say at least within the European imaginary, it started there. But you can take this to Ancient Greece and Rome where there were beliefs in the lampreys, which, in Greek mythology, were these blood-sucking female demons. You can find all kinds of predecessors to the vampire in all kinds of cultures around the world, but not as specific as we have in the what eventually becomes the Gothic vampire.

Dane101: How significant a figure was the vampire in Balkan folklore?

TL: In the folklore it was one of the main kinds of demonic presences besides other types of witches and werewolves. They were blamed for all the events in the village. If they couldn’t rationally explain them, then these beliefs would be then placed on this demonic figure. So, they were pretty dominant, especially during those years. What I find fascinating in terms of European intellectual history, is the fact that in the 18th century, when Europe is emerged in this new philosophy of the Enlightenment, it is also the time when in Eastern Europe you have the appearance and sort of violent entrenchment of the forces of darkness.

Dane101: How did the vampire find its way into popular culture?

TL: Basically there was one event that was probably decisive for the development of this image of the vampire in Western popular imagine and also for the horror genre in literature, and then later in film. There was an event in the summer of 1816 on the shores of Lake Geneva in Switzerland, with Lord Byron and Percy Shelley, the two famous Romantic poets, alongside with Mary Shelley and John Polidori, who was Byron’s personal physician. On a rainy night, Lord Byron suggested they have a competition in writing the best ghost story that they could. And so they set out to work and obviously this was a just a competition between Byron and Shelley, because they were the big Romantic poets of England at the time. But it’s interesting that what came out of it was John Polidori, who was a personal physician of Byron, wrote The Vampire, with a main character called Lord Ruthven, who was modeled on a sort of romantic seducer like Byron and then Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein. So, out of this one evening, we have basically two huge images that will then loom large in the Western imaginary. In many ways this is how the whole Gothic idea kind of creeps slowly into Romantic literature and we have the occurrence of more and more people trying to emulate and write like Polidori. Then, in the 1830s and 40s, there was the proliferation of the cheap penny dreadfuls, which were these cheap serialized novels and one of them, Varney the Vampire, came out in 220 chapters that were sold for a penny in England and, in this way, became part of the popular imaginary that was now available to the larger reading public. In a sense, this turned literature into a popular artifact, not just an elite occupation that it was before that. Then, in 1897, Bram Stoker publishes Dracula, which is the most famous vampire of all time.

Dane101: How did he arrive at calling the vampire Dracula?

TL: He himself was sort of a historian of Eastern Europe and the Balkans and so he basically heard the story of a historical figure of Romania named Vlad Dracul, who was extremely cruel, basically a sadistic torturer and murderer who had these huge, bloody feasts in which, while his guests ate, he would impale people. He was remembered as a very cruel, but just ruler. Dracul from his name got conflated to Dracula, so, violence became sort of the link between the two images. He conflated the folkloric vampire with this aristocratic figure from Transylvania. That’s how he came about.

Dane101: How did the vampire’s reappearance in Romanian literature in the 1930s retool the image as a cultural artifact?

TL: That’s interesting. I forget his name, but there was this guy in the 1930s who basically used the vampire to reinforce Romanian nationalism, to talk about how this is the spirit of Romania. Vitality and strength was expressed in Vlad, and all the great rulers. And this of course was a time in which Romania and all of the Balkan nations were undergoing this kind of right-wing government and this transformation in which they needed some point of identification. It’s really funny that some of the writers picked up on this violent image to identify with.

Dane101: What are some of the more prominent ways the vampire has been used as a metaphor for nationalism or political movements?

TL: I think my book is the first to explore it in the way of nationalism in the Balkans and in these latest wars. But then I give the connection with the cult of the heroic and how in a sense the whole notion of heroism if predicated on this idea the mother gives birth to the son, but that son is almost already dead because he’ll be sacrificed to the nation. He just needs to die physically, and among these small nations with oppressive rule this is a common idea, that the blood has to circulate within the nation and mothers are just there to donate blood to the huge vampire of their own nation. I kind of played around with that idea. Karl Marx used it as a metaphor in the Capital, in 1867, to talk about capitalism as a blood-sucking fiend that sucks the labor out of the working class. A British writer used it in the early 17th century to talk about the State and taxes, how government sucks money out of the people. It was used in popular discourse a lot.

Dane101: What makes the vampire such an alluring template for writers and filmmakers?

TL: We’ve created a genre out of it and the genre already has its own rules. But I think there are several things that are probably appealing to the collective imaginary of humanity. First of all, it’s a metaphor for blood, of life giving sustenance, as something that’s always circulating through the community. There is also the boundary between human and animal that is challenged in many ways. The vampire is a predator or somebody with these animal-like qualities, and that is also very interesting and peculiar and mysterious. And that is the main thing, is that kind of secrecy, that mystery that’s associated with it. It’s always a good driving force for the plot. Vampires are also figures of transformation, because they’re a creature between life and death and can cross the boundaries, unlike us. This is also an idea that is very appealing, that you can die and come back to life. It’s inverting Judeo-Christian beliefs in a resurrection. This is a demonic reversal of that.

Dane101: I’ve noticed with vampires in films that they’re always portrayed as these emotionally complex and tormented characters. How in Slavic folklore does the vampire differ from, say, the werewolf?

TL: In some beliefs they’re so close together that there isn’t much difference. In some folklore it was said that if a man was a werewolf during his life, he will become a vampire when he dies. So, it’s like a continuum. In Romania, the werewolf is believed to be the so-called “moon eater.” In the eclipses of the moon, supposedly the werewolf climbs and chomps part of it. It’s not like the vampire so much, for example. But it seems that all of these demons and witches and so on are formed in a continuum in the folkloric imaginary, because that’s not so clear-cut in the classifications. We can’t impose a scientific rule; it’s magical in folklore and everything can morph into each other.

Dane101: What are some of your favorite movie vampires?

TL: We just watched in the class Nosferatu, from 1921, by F.W. Murnau, which is really great. It’s a silent film, but you can see how much that one influences our representations of the vampire. Murnau really defined it visually for everyone who’s going to come afterwards. I’m really quite fascinated with that one. I enjoyed Bram Stoker’s Dracula a lot and also the Coppola film. I’m going to show that one. Then Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu from 1970s. It’s excellent. And Andy Warhol has his own Dracula, which is kind of bad, but it’s about the New York scene and the junkies. Really interesting, but weird. Then, Roman Polanski did a really good one called The Fearless Vampire Killers from 1967, which is a parody of vampire movies and is extremely funny. It was Sharon Tate’s last movie before she was murdered by Manson. I’m going to show that one, too. In the films, like you’re describing, this complexity becomes interesting that vampires really aren’t bad guys. So, among the kids now, with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, it’s gaining complexity and is about otherness, and the vampire’s internal life becomes much more out in the open.