Interview With a Vampire Expert

Author Eric Nuzum surveys (and survives) the secret world of bloodsuckers

David Weigel | October 29, 2007

Like most people who find themselves wrestling with vampires—Jonathan Harker, Robert Neville, Buffy—Eric Nuzum was leading a perfectly normal life until the monsters came along. He was an audiophile and pop culture journalist with an expertise in how the state and cultural watchdogs try and trammel creativity. In 2001 he published Public Advisory: Music Censorship in America, a civil libertarian's history of musical nannyism from the Beatles' "butcher baby" cover to the Gore family's war on the heavy metal band W.A.S.P. Nuzum's next project was going to be a history of the American burlesque show.

But vampires got in the way. As Nuzum crunched Count Chocula one morning in his Washington, D.C. home, he flipped on his TV and caught President Bush warning against the soft fascism of plugging in too many appliances and becoming an "energy vampire." Flipping through a magazine, Nuzum saw a model with fangs and a cape enticing him to buy some vodka and "drink in the night." He had his project. "If the vampire is ubiquitous," he wondered, "how did this happen? Why did this happen? I wanted insight."

The result was The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula. Nuzum encountered neither of those fiends, but his reporting ping-ponged him around the Western world, to a vampire bar tour in San Francisco, to a fetish night in New York, to Bram "Dracula" Stoker's old stomping grounds in the English town of Whitby. He accompanied sickly vegetarians and Munsters star Butch Patrick on a fact-challenged tour of Vlad the Impaler's Transylvania. He Netflixed more than 200 vampire movies, hating most of them. (Nuzum argues that the John Malkovich-Willem Defoe thesp-fest Shadow of the Vampire is the best the genre has to offer, and that 1994's Interview with the Vampire was the last to impact the culture in a real way.)

Two years and 240 pages later, what did Nuzum learn about the secret world of the vampyr? It was both weirder and less shocking than you'd imagine. The vampire myth itself is ancient, indelible, and didn't come out of Transylvania. Most civilizations actually have a fantasy creature who sucks blood, and Christendom's version started with Greek churches telling parisheners that their dead relatives would rise up and start drinking the red stuff if they misbehaved. And followers of that myth, the people who call themselves vampires, are generally sort of nice. Some are reclusive, some are younger than they say they are in chat rooms, and none of them will prove to a journalist that they actually drink blood. (Nuzum drank some of his own and got very sick.)

"All of the vampire folks I met," Nuzum writes, "are all at least marginally aware of the darkness in their own lives. The only difference between them and us is that they've styled their physical world to match their inner one."

reason spoke with Nuzum in a bar not far from his NPR office in Washington, D.C.

reason: This seems like a strange follow-up to your first book. What's the connectivity between music censorship and vampires?

Eric Nuzum: There's much more than you'd think, if you buy into my central premise. Vampires are the perfect metaphor. You use them to express things you fear, things you find exciting. Music plays the same role in some people's lives. When you look at some of the issues around music censorship, you're controlling what someone can and can't listen to, or what they can and can't say.

reason: And you write about some of the frenzy from parents who think vampire mythos are turning their kids weird.

Nuzum: It's the same situation that comes up with music—people will say "Ozzy Osbourne is responsible for my kid shooting his head off," or overdosing, or killing himself. Ozzy must be the problem! But the reality's that Ozzy is a symptom, not a cause. People who are of extreme emotions, who hold extreme views of the world, pick extreme music to represent that. I write in the book about "Vampire: The Masquerade," this full-on role-playing game that has been blamed for driving kids to violence. Well, no. That game did not turn otherwise good kids into bad kids. It was just another example of many things that were wrong with their lives.

reason: It doesn't change their behavior?

Nuzum: No. That argument is just like how Marilyn Manson is responsible for Columbine. It's silly. If you look back to Tipper Gore and the PMRC, everybody remembers three of their four areas of concern. They remember drugs, they remember violence, and they remember extreme sexuality. And there was a fourth category—the occult. Nobody remembers that, but at the time it was a commonly held belief that musicians were devil worshippers. If we look back now it seems unbelievably silly. So we've decided that one of those pillars was complete nonsense. What's that mean? Probably that all of those pillars were nonsense.

reason: You visited a fetish club called the Court of Lazarus, this darkly lit place that serves blood-colored cocktails, where people watch murder simulated onstage. Is their obsession is making those people more dangerous?

Nuzum: If it wasn't vampires it would be something else. They'd be running around in diapers whipping each other with a cat o' nine tails. Nefarious Wrath, the main guy in Court of Lazarus, kept saying over and over to me that "this is an archetype for us." And I totally believe that. Many of people who I spoke with really couldn't answer deep questions about why they liked to play this way. They'd say: I look at this, and it makes sense to me.

reason: But as you point out, there are surges in the amount of vampire literature or films when people are worried about disease. The last big spike was during the height of the American AIDS scare. Why would people choose this as their fantasy?

Comments

lunchstealer|10.29.07 @ 4:13PM|#

OK, so Zombies replaced the passe' ninjas, who had replaced the appallingly stone-aged pirates. So does this mean that vampires are the new zombie? Is that what the tragically hip are dressing as this year?

|10.29.07 @ 4:18PM|#

I can't get over the fact that someone ran for office on the "impale evildoers" platform. Really, that is weird and worthy of ridicule.

That said, at least vampires have much flashier wardrobes than zombies.

Beware the Mahdi|10.29.07 @ 4:18PM|#

"While it's easy to dismiss that-hey, the guy thinks impalement is a good way to curb crime!-it's not much of a step from saying "that guy believes in vampires" to saying "that guy believes in Allah! That's weird." If you create a culture that just mocks those ideas or mocks the people who believe them then you're in dangerous territory."

I'd say the opposite is true. Moral equivalency is far more dangerous! All beliefs are not created equal. Allah is not the God of Judaism or Christianity. There is nothing wrong with saying that someone is crazy for believing something or that they are wrong. Why should that form of disagreement be "dangerous territory"?

JasonL|10.29.07 @ 4:18PM|#

Did the tragically hip ever actually dress as zombies?

|10.29.07 @ 4:20PM|#

I hate vampires. Especially this one!

I love vampires. Especially this one!

|10.29.07 @ 4:29PM|#

Beware the Mahdi,

Yeah? Well my Level 37 Vampire Paladin would kick any god's ass!

Eric Hanneken|10.29.07 @ 4:31PM|#

For a brief history of vampire mythology, I recommend Vampires: Restless Creatures of the Night, by Jean Mariony. It covers thousands of years, going back to ancient figures like Lilitu .

Beware the Mahdi|10.29.07 @ 4:33PM|#

Well, your level 37 vampire paladin dresses like a girl. And you're stupid.

See everyone? I disagreed with AND insulted Taktix and the world did not end!

|10.29.07 @ 4:48PM|#

See everyone? I disagreed with AND insulted Taktix and the world did not end!

Jeez! Give me a minute. Armageddon take time, man...

Brian Sorgatz|10.29.07 @ 8:14PM|#

I don't know about vampires, but zombies are crucial for certain philosophical thought experiments about how a material universe can form sentient (as opposed to merely intelligent and emotive) beings at all.

Those with a stake (no pun intended) in the debate over God's existence should pay especially close attention here.

BakedPenguin|10.30.07 @ 2:22AM|#

Yes, but the real question is, do Vampires have any songs named after them as cool as this?

Mad Zombie Max|10.30.07 @ 3:53AM|#

Am I the only one who didn't know this tidbit from the zombie article:

"George Romero, a Pittsburgh-based director of TV commercials and occasional segments for Mr. Rogers' Neighborhood . . ."

It's a beautiful day in the neighborhood
A beautiful day for a zombie
I want you alive
I want you alive

I'll devour your flesh, because it tastes good
Then I'll slurp your insides like spaghetti
And you'll die slowly
And you'll die slowly

I always wanted to make a meal out . . . of . . . you
I always wanted to come to your neighborhood
And eat you
So . . . let's have some fun on this beautiful day
As I'm devouring you I will hear you say
Won't you please
Won't you please
Please, Zombie Rogers
Kill me quicker.

|10.30.07 @ 4:25AM|#

"If you create a culture that just mocks those ideas or mocks the people who believe them then you're in dangerous territory."

He was speaking of an entire culture here - I think he is talking more pervasive than the largely impotent or repressed "mockers" in America today. Of course having some of us be xenophobic is kind of a fact of life; in this way, we are balanced, having some uncomfortable things like Guantanamo, but knowing these are the exception to the rule. Yet soon we approach having a majority of the populace treating people with mockery, which quickly escalates into physical form à la Spanish Inquisition or, you might argue, the War on Drugs.

dbust1|10.30.07 @ 9:29AM|#

I think drawing a parallel between the Spanish Inquisition and the war on drugs is a bit much, but more power to you if you can make it stick. I'd like to hear your take on it.

What concerns me is this idea where it's all of a sudden dangerous to mock a person or group for their beliefs. There isn't anything wrong with thinking someone is crazy for believing something. When those thoughts are put into action in order to silence, oppress or harm someone then that's dangerous. But to assume that thoughts inevitably lead to action is ignorant. At least twice on my drive to and from work I want to kill someone who cuts me off or almost causes an accident. But even if I had a gun in my vehicle I wouldn't pull it out and try to kill them. Thoughts are not dangerous, speech is not dangerous. Actions can be, but are not inherently so.

|10.31.07 @ 11:42AM|#

There are plenty of politicians who would run on an "impale evildoers" platform if they thought it would bring in the votes. As it is, they cloak the same sentiment in being tough on crime, cleaning up the streets and protecting the country.