Original subtitles

NARRATOR: The Kingdom of Serbia, 1725.

In the village of Kisiljevo, people are dying.

And no one knows why.

FERN: This really is a moment where fear rules every moment

of your life because you don't know

who can give you the answer.

NARRATOR: Lacking any explanation,

suspicion turns to one of their own: Petar Blagojevic.

STANLEY: People were complaining

that he was appearing to them in the night.

NARRATOR: But Petar has been dead for weeks.

And now, villagers believe he's returned as a vampire.

JOSEPH: People believe in these vampires.

These are the living dead.

They come out of their graves and kill you

and drink your blood.

NARRATOR: This is the truth behind the myth of the vampire,

and how it's evolved over the centuries.

1725, in the quiet lowlands of northeastern Serbia

in the small village of Kisiljevo,

a close-knit farming community of roughly 200 people

is grappling with the terrifying possibility

that a rash of recent deaths has led them to suspect

local farmer Petar Blagojevic.

FERN: Blagojevic is a Serbian peasant.

He's probably in his sort of 50s, 60s,

and he's died unexpectedly.

And this is a suspicious thing in communities at this time.

STANLEY: It was probably one of a number of very common things

which today with our medical knowledge would not strike us

as anything unusual. But we're talking about a time period

here that various things that could happen randomly

would be interpreted in sometimes magical ways.

This is something in Slavic folklore that we refer to

as an unclean death.

NARRATOR: For centuries, unclean deaths were associated

with vampirism.

JOSEPH: There was a logic that these people hadn't lived

full lives yet, they weren't prepared to die,

they died suddenly.

And so, these are the type of people who might not rest

in their graves, who might return as the undead.

NARRATOR: And now, villagers believe this is

what is happening with Petar Blagojevic.

STANLEY: Roughly a few weeks after Petar Blagojevic

was deceased, people are all experiencing illness

within that village.

FERN: Suddenly, far more terrifying things happen.

A number of people claimed to have been visited by him.

JOSEPH: Petar's widow says, "He appeared at my door at night

and said, 'Where are my shoes?

Give me my shoes.' And then he tried to strangle me."

STANLEY: His son claimed that he came back asking for food

at one point and he gave his father food.

And then when he came back again, he denied him,

and then later the son dies.

JOSEPH: Nine people say, "I had this experience.

I woke up in the middle of the night,

and Petar was on top of me, strangling me."

FERN: He strangles them, he bites them,

he drinks their blood.

These are terrifying things that they're saying

Petar's corpse is doing to them.

JOSEPH: Within eight days, all nine of these people

have also died. And so, this is a situation

where a community thinks they have a vampire in their midst.

NARRATOR: Vampires have long haunted our nightmares.

DAN: This is a tale that keeps getting told because

it touches on some of our most basic fears.

There's something especially grotesque about

the idea of having your blood sucked by a monster.

STANLEY: Ghost stories and horror films and cemeteries,

and the vampire is just part of all those traditions.

NARRATOR: Across the Slavic world, belief in vampires

has deep roots.

STANLEY: This is Pagan belief that goes back centuries

and centuries. The oldest record we have of the vampire

in Slavic writing is 1047 AD.

And that word is usually translated into English as upir.

Upir means, literally, the thing that is present

at the sacrifice. It's essentially a euphemism.

An indirect way of referring to the thing we call a vampire.

NARRATOR: Steeped in this ancient folklore,

the villagers of Kisiljevo become convinced

that a vampire is behind the deaths.

For this deeply religious community, these fears

conflict with their Eastern Orthodox faith.

JOSEPH: In many ways, vampires are a mockery of the promise

of Christianity.

Christianity says that you will have eternity in heaven.

Vampires have eternity here on earth.

STANLEY: So essentially, if it got involved, that would mean

the Church was verifying the vampires actually exist.

NARRATOR: Left with only their ancient superstitions

to guide them, they decide to stop Petar Blagojevic,

who they believe is now a vampire,

before he strikes again.

STANLEY: If there's not something done about this,

then the whole village may be wiped out.

NARRATOR: But in the 18th century,

what the villagers are more likely facing is disease,

spreading unchecked throughout Europe:

rabies and bubonic plague.

STANLEY: Although people would've understood

what disease was in general, symptoms and things like that,

they still lacked a knowledge of how it really spreads.

DAN: Nobody knew about germ theory.

We didn't understand viruses, we didn't understand bacteria.

STANLEY: So, if you have something that becomes

a pandemic, there's a need to explain why it continues

to spread.

NARRATOR: Of the nine villagers who died after reporting

deathbed visitations by Petar, all claimed to have felt

a crushing weight on their chest, a possible symptom

of their illness.

DAN: There's a phenomenon that we understand very well

now medically called sleep paralysis.

STANLEY: There's still lots of debate about

why sleep paralysis actually happens,

but we do find it with people that have chronic illnesses.

JOSEPH: When you sleep, your motor neurons

normally switch off. If they didn't, then you would be

moving while you were asleep and you would act out your dreams.

If you're having sleep paralysis, people wake up

and they're conscious, they're awake,

but their motor neurons haven't switched back on yet.

On top of this, they often feel a sensation of pressure

on their solar plexus.

So, it can feel like someone is attacking you.

DAN: We understand it today in the context of brain science,

but at the time we didn't have any explanation

for what was going on.

STANLEY: The vampire functions as an essential

primary scapegoat for disease as a whole.

It essentially takes the place of knowledge of viruses

or bacteria.

NARRATOR: For generations, the remote community of Kisiljevo

has faced what locals believe are vampires

without outside intervention.

Now, following the signing of the 1718 Treaty of Passarowitz,

Serbia is under Austrian rule.

And troubling rumors coming out of Kisiljevo are attracting

the attention of authorities in Vienna.

JOSEPH: And so, the empire, which has this sophisticated

system of officers and messengers, begins recording

the information and the folklore about vampires.

NARRATOR: And in Kisiljevo, what they record is chilling.

Villagers sharpening stakes, gathering shovels,

and preparing to exhume Petar Blagojevic.

STANLEY: They want to dig up Petar Blagojevic's body

to see if he actually has signs of vampirism.

FERN: And local authorities say, "Okay, well wait until

we'll go to the government authorities if this is allowed."

And the villagers come back and say, "If we wait that long,

we're all going to be dead. You have to let us do it now."

NARRATOR: The Austrian officials sent to investigate allow

the exhumation to proceed.

JOSEPH: The villagers unfurl the shroud

and there is blood around Petar's mouth.

It's fairly common as a body decays for body gases

to form inside the body, which then create pressure

which pushes blood out through all of the openings in the body,

including the mouth.

DAN: And if you see a dead body that clearly you can see

has blood in its mouth, you might conclude

that it's been feeding on the blood of something else.

And so, you're going to believe in vampires.

FERN: But how are they going to stop this vampire

from coming around again and hurting the community?

Well, they stake it.

NARRATOR: Though its origins are unknown, local folklore

holds that staking the heart stops the supernatural force

that keeps a vampire alive.

DAN: When scary things are happening in your village,

and if there isn't any science to help you understand it,

you're going to turn to the supernatural.

You're going to turn to stories like vampires

to help you understand it.

NARRATOR: As far as the villagers are concerned,

the staking of Petar Blagojevic is a success.

STANLEY: According to sources, the attacks stop.

JOSEPH: So they believe that they have, they have killed

Petar for good, they have put his spirit to rest,

and peace is restored to the village.

And all of this is written up by this officer in his report,

and it's sent back to Austria as an official record.

FERN: You would think this might be a moment

where rational thinking dominates, but it doesn't.

NARRATOR: When the investigation's findings

finally reach Austrian authorities in Vienna,

they don't dispel the vampire myth, they help legitimize it.

FERN: They feel that they have no choice but to rubber stamp

that this is absolutely a vampiric infestation.

This is crazy. This is the government saying,

"Yes, vampires are real." It's, it's mad.

NARRATOR: On July 21, 1725, the report, one of the first

documented accounts of vampire belief in Eastern Europe,

is published in Austria's Viennese journal,

and quickly translated across Europe.

FERN: What changes this from a one-off occurrence in a small

Serbian village is that rumors and reports spread.

You have to remember, this is the time of an emerging

print culture. So not only have we had the invention

of the printing press,

but now we're starting to get newspapers for the first time,

pamphlets that can be taken from town to town

or village to village. And this is how Petar's story spreads.

NARRATOR: It kicks off the hysteria known

as the Great Vampire Epidemic of the 18th Century.

A year after the story of Petar Blagojevic begins to spread,

nearby villages are on high alert.

STANLEY: Once a story gets out that we have a creature

coming back from the grave to attack people, that story

is going to spread rapidly from village to village.

NARRATOR: For generations, Serbia has been caught

between the Hapsburg monarchy and the Ottoman Empire.

But in 1718, the Treaty of Passarowitz redrew

the frontier, ceding parts of Serbia to Austria.

STANLEY: And so, the constant attempts to control

this region led to rampant poverty and people living

in very isolated communities in a lifestyle that really

hadn't changed much for several hundred years.

NARRATOR: One of these is the village of Medveda,

130 miles away from Kisiljevo, where locals believe

they're being hunted by yet another vampire.

STANLEY: This is the case of Arnold Paole.

He is actually an Albanian Serb.

There's a very large population of ethnic Albanians

that live in that region.

He was a hayduk, almost like a mercenary,

and he was helping the Serbians fight against the Ottomans.

When he comes back home to his village, according to sources,

he is somewhat aloof, socially awkward.

There seems to be some sort of looming presence

or fear hanging over his head.

NARRATOR: He confides in his wife and others

that something truly horrifying happened to him

on the road home from the war.

JOSEPH: He tells people this strange story about

how he was attacked by a vampire near Kosovo.

STANLEY: The details that we have, according to the story,

is that he was attacked by a vampire and fought it.

And after he beat it, he then ate some of its grave soil

and drank some of its blood.

This is actually a facet of Slavic folklore

that's often referred to as doubling,

where if you have something negative that happens to you

that could potentially lead to a curse falling upon you,

by doing more of the negative thing, doubling it,

you essentially then assist it in being removed.

NARRATOR: But despite the doubling, Arnold Paole's

return home is short-lived.

FERN: Shortly after he's told these stories

to this frightened community who's already aware

that a vampire panic has happened nearby,

he falls off a hay wagon and breaks his neck.

JOSEPH: He breaks his neck, and he dies.

NARRATOR: His death, like that of Petar Blagojevic,

is deemed to be suspicious.

An unclean death.

STANLEY: This is unclean because it's an accident.

It's thought in Slavic folklore in this era that death

is not going to be sudden or unexpected like this.

There's going to be a sickness at least, or something's

happening to indicate that the person is going to die.

FERN: Over the course of the next month, a number

of other people in the village start to die.

JOSEPH: And they begin to suspect maybe Arnold Paole

didn't actually save himself from becoming a vampire

the way that he thought that he did.

FERN: And you can just imagine that this Serbian village

who's aware there's been a vampire nearby recently

is sitting there going, "Ah, someone in our village

has just died, they came in contact with a vampire,

and now other people are starting to die."

And this hysteria grows so fast.

STANLEY: And then similar to the Petar Blagojevic case,

supposedly Arnold Paole is coming back and visiting

people in their sleep.

And strangling them and smothering them.

JOSEPH: People begin dying.

STANLEY: We have four so-called victims at this point.

FERN: Villagers are determined not to have to suffer

this violence and this fear.

So, they decide to dig up Arnold's body.

STANLEY: They need to see if he is indeed a vampire.

JOSEPH: And they dig this body out and the body is remarkably

well-preserved. It doesn't really seem

to have been decayed.

DAN: That would be very frightening.

That would be taken as evidence that this thing

wasn't truly dead.

And that would feed the vampire myth.

NARRATOR: But science tells a different story.

DAN: Decomposition actually takes a surprisingly long time,

especially if the body is in a place with low oxygen

or if it's cold. It could be several months that have gone

by and it's still going to have a lot of flesh attached to it.

NARRATOR: But with only folklore to guide them, the villagers

conclude they are indeed dealing with a vampire.

STANLEY: They stake his body.

And according to sources, he actually released an audible

groan when this occurs.

DAN: The minute we die, bacteria start to digest the human body.

And as they do that, they release gasses.

By stabbing the heart, you're compressing the thorax,

you're forcing air out, and you're going to hear a noise.

It makes perfect physiological sense.

But if you're in a certain mindset, you're going to think

that you just heard a vampire calling out.

NARRATOR: But unlike Petar Blagojevic, whose staking

brings peace to his village, Arnold Paole's story takes

a far darker turn.

5 years after he's staked, others in Medveda

mysteriously are dying.

FERN: 10 to 20 people die.

And so they apply to the government,

"Help us. Launch a formal investigation."

NARRATOR: Austria complies, dispatching a team

of investigators who, once onsite, decide to exhume

the bodies of all the victims.

FERN: They look at the bodies bloated with blood,

and what looks like fresh blood, and so they are absolutely

convinced that these are all signs of a vampiric death.

NARRATOR: Unlike Petar Blagojevic, Arnold Paole

is believed to not only kill his victims,

but also to transform them into vampires.

A part of the myth that still endures today.

In their report, Visum et Repertum,

investigators support that claim,

tracing the pattern of deaths back to the man

they describe as the original vampire: Arnold Paole.

STANLEY: And these stories begin to spread in local

newspapers again.

So, the vampire goes viral, so to speak,

over roughly an eight-year span.

It enters academia. People in various areas and various

cities are talking about this, wondering if it's possible

for the dead to come back from the grave.

NARRATOR: But science is about to transform the vampire myth.

1732 As stories of vampires continues to spread

in local newspapers,

fascination with the myth sweeps across Europe.

STANLEY: People begin to talk about the vampire in ways

which had never occurred before.

And this is what truly inspires Western Europeans

to understand and learn more about the vampire.

NARRATOR: As they delve deeper into the myth,

they uncover a vampire account that stretches back more

than a century, to 1590.

A macabre story set in a castle on a secluded hilltop

in what is now Slovakia.

The residence of Elizabeth Bathory.

FERN: Elizabeth Bathory is a Hungarian countess.

She's a noble, aristocratic, powerful woman.

JOSEPH: She married a count who went on to lead the armies

of Hungary against the Ottoman Empire.

And while her husband was away,

she assumed a great deal of power.

So she was overseeing multiple castles and properties.

STANLEY: After her husband dies, she eventually gains control

of the family estate and various land that falls under his name.

This puts her in a position of power,

which is not typical for women of her era.

FERN: Lots of peasants, lots of minor nobility come

to Elizabeth to solve their daily problems

and to look after them.

JOSEPH: She created a finishing school to help

educate young women.

STANLEY: Bathory supposedly was gathering young girls

from local peasant communities that she controlled

and was taking these young girls back to her castle

to teach them what she called court etiquette.

NARRATOR: But according to legend, aided by her servants,

she tortured and murdered as many as 80 young women

within her castle.

JOSEPH: And the legend was that Countess Bathory

wasn't just killing these girls, but she was harvesting

their blood so that she could bathe in it.

STANLEY: This is why she's referred to today

as the Blood Countess.

KINITRA: In the vampire lore, blood represents life.

It is literally the lifeblood of our bodies.

It is what gives eternal youth to vampires,

and it is what feeds them.

Bathory wanted to bathe in the blood of her victims

because she wanted to stay youthful.

But this also made her a monster.

A monstrosity that we often give to the vampire itself.

FERN: Blood is an incredibly powerful thing.

So, turning Elizabeth Bathory into the Blood Countess,

someone who bathes in the blood of virgins to stay young,

is just really playing with the vampire myth

in a way that people would connect the dots.

NARRATOR: But in reality, the story of the so-called

Blood Countess may have been less about blood

and more about money.

STANLEY: There are many scholars today that suggest

the entire story itself was actually fabricated to shame

and basically publicly smear the Bathory family

so that Elizabeth would lose her power.

NARRATOR: Bringing down Elizabeth Bathory

would benefit both the Habsburg court in Vienna,

and King Matthias II of Hungary.

KINITRA: The court owed her money, the king owed her money.

And so turning her into a monster served the needs

of the patriarchal powers of the day.

The Elizabeth Bathory story is meant to keep women in line,

particularly women who are independent, particularly

women who have money and of means.

Like, "Stay in line, or we will make you a monster."

NARRATOR: Austria, 1740.

Fueled by the rediscovery of older tales like

that of Elizabeth Bathory, fascination with the undead

continues to grow.

And following the death of Austria's ruler, Charles VI,

his daughter Maria Theresa takes the throne, bringing

a new perspective on the vampire myth: science.

DAN: This is the Age of Enlightenment and science

is making huge progress in understanding

how the human body works.

STANLEY: We have this cultural progression

happening in sciences and the arts and technology.

This is something that culturally is not happening

in Eastern Europe.

So, you have people in Eastern Europe who are living

in basically a medieval state of existence.

NARRATOR: For the first time, Eastern Europe's long-held

beliefs are examined through this lens of scientific reason.

STANLEY: Once Western Europe starts to enter this period,

this makes an idea like the vampire something

that needs an explanation.

Is it possible that the dead can come back from the grave?

Is this something scientifically possible?

NARRATOR: Questions that reach the rational-minded court

of Maria Theresa, who is determined to shut down

the vampire myth.

JOSEPH: So, she appoints a physician named

Gerard van Swieten and says, "Do an investigation to all

of this, figure out what is going on."

NARRATOR: His focus is a case from 23 years earlier.

That of Arnold Paole.

STANLEY: Van Swieten is a good representation

of the Enlightenment Period.

He founded the Viennese School of Medicine.

He also is essentially the top of his game in medical

knowledge in that particular era.

So, he understands things like decomposition.

He understands disease for the medicine of that time.

JOSEPH: Van Swieten reports back and says,

"I've interviewed people who think they're dealing with

vampires, and all of this is explainable by science."

STANLEY: Using the knowledge he has at the time, he's able

to explain how these so-called signs of vampirism and these

various beliefs about vampires in Eastern Europe are,

in most cases, simply misconceptions concerning

decomposition and disease.

JOSEPH: And so, Maria Theresa passes a law in 1755 and says,

"These practices where people are digging up bodies

and mutilating the dead, this must stop."

So, this kind of sets the stage for where vampires

are regarded as something that only superstitious

people believe in.

NARRATOR: And for those who continue to believe,

the vampire myth is about to spread from the Old World

to the New.

Since the 17th century,

waves of immigrants from across Europe have crossed

the Atlantic in search of a better life in America.

Many already familiar with the vampire myth.

Some of these settle in Exeter, Rhode Island,

where the vampire myth finds new fertile ground

in the tragic life and death of Mercy Brown.

JOSEPH: The story of Mercy Brown begins

in a very rural area, and a lot of people are getting sick

with tuberculosis which at the time was called consumption.

NARRATOR: In the late 1800s,

in the northeastern United States,

roughly a quarter of all deaths are attributable

to tuberculosis.

DAN: The fact that it was caused by a bacteria,

and that it was transmittable, and that it infected

your lungs, all of that had only just been discovered.

And that information might've been commonplace

in the big hospitals, in the big cities.

But if you go out to, like, rural Rhode Island,

people don't know all of that stuff.

It's still very much a mythical, strange phenomenon.

NARRATOR: Leaving the people of Exeter to turn to the ancient

beliefs they brought over with them from the Old World.

JOSEPH: Science could offer an explanation,

it couldn't offer hope.

And so they relied on superstition and folk ways

to explain something which they had no ability to understand.

NARRATOR: One Exeter family desperately searching

for answers are the Browns.

JOSEPH: Over the past decade, George Brown has seen

his family die one by one. First his wife in 1883.

Then his daughter the following year.

Then his second daughter, Mercy Brown.

NARRATOR: In his grief, George Brown is approached

by neighbors with a chilling solution.

JOSEPH: They suggest that maybe there's a cause to all of this,

that maybe one of his dead family members is inflicting

this illness from beyond the grave.

This is unmistakably the logic of vampirism.

NARRATOR: According to his neighbors,

George must act quickly.

Whatever has taken the rest of his family is now coming

for his son, Edwin.

JOSEPH: By this point, George Brown is at his wit's end.

His son is coughing up blood.

So, they exhume the family bodies.

The wife and the older daughter are badly decomposed

as you would expect.

NARRATOR: But that's not the case with George's youngest

daughter, Mercy Brown.

JOSEPH: When they examine her body, her skin has not even

decomposed. She seems to be perfectly preserved.

DAN: When they look at the corpse and they see blood

around the mouth, they didn't expect to see blood around

the mouth after death like that.

STANLEY: And they now make the determination

that she is indeed the one that's coming back

and actually killing the family,

and could potentially kill others.

DAN: Tuberculosis does make you cough so hard that blood

ends up in the mouth.

And that fully explains why Mercy Brown had blood

in her mouth.

NARRATOR: As for Mercy Brown's preserved appearance?

STANLEY: Mercy Brown is actually buried above ground

in January because it was too cold to bury her in the ground.

So, she's going to be more intact than the other

relatives who are buried at different time periods.

DAN: They expected more decomposition.

And so they turned to their supernatural beliefs

to help them understand what to do.

JOSEPH: The solution is to reverse that process

and try to have the living suck the life force back out

of the dead. They remove Mercy Brown's heart, they burn it,

and they combine the ashes with water to make a potion.

Which they then make Edwin drink, hoping that

this will somehow cure the illness that's killing him.

NARRATOR: A variation on the same ritual Arnold Paole

was said to have used to protect himself

from what he believed was a vampire's curse.

STANLEY: This idea that somehow utilizing

this thing that is a contagion to eliminate

what it's caused to you.

JOSEPH: But tragically it does not.

And two months later, Edwin is dead.

This story is significant because Mercy Brown

is the last, quote-unquote, vampire of this era

as tuberculosis comes to be a curable disease.

NARRATOR: As science dispels the vampire's association

with disease, the fear it inspires is transformed

into entertainment for the masses.

By the late 19th century, the vampire myth is poised

to reach an unprecedented audience through the power

of the printed word.

FERN: Throughout the 19th century,

we've seen this massive growth in literature,

especially from the 1870s onwards in England,

where we've had education acts come in to make sure

that everyone can read.

And this is a massive shift.

NARRATOR: And what they're reading drips with darkness

and horror.

FERN: The things we all like to read about,

the things that really grab our imagination are the things

that scare us. And that's why people are captivated

with blood and death and gore and fear.

The vampire is something that people want to read about.

NARRATOR: And an Irish writer by the name of Bram Stoker

is about to feed that appetite with a story

that will transform the vampire forever.

JOSEPH: Stoker was fascinated by descriptions of folklore

and superstition.

He took all of the different elements of vampire lore

from all these different countries,

and he combined them in his story of Dracula.

NARRATOR: The result?

A new vampire for a new world.

SCOTT: Gone is the large, bloated, bloody corpse

shambling around villages and frightening villagers.

Instead, we get an aristocrat.

Tall, thin, elegant, who lives in a distant castle.

NARRATOR: Dracula popularizes the classic tropes

that we all know today.

JOSEPH: Like not casting a reflection in a mirror,

and all these equipment that you see for vampire

hunting in movies.

STANLEY: One of Stoker's ideas was to root the vampire

into a time period that people understood implicitly

because they were living within it.

JOSEPH: This is the Victorian Era, and any discussion

of sexuality is considered impolite and even shocking.

And with Dracula, the entire story is drowning in

forbidden eroticism, and this becomes part of its appeal.

NARRATOR: Published in 1897, it takes the world by storm.

JOSEPH: Dracula becomes this amazing character that cements

the idea of what vampires are in the popular imagination.

NARRATOR: But by the early 20th century, a new way

of telling stories emerges: the moving picture.

In celluloid, the vampire takes on a new life.

JOSEPH: F. W. Murnau creates an adaptation of the Dracula

story called Nosferatu.

It was a silent film.

NARRATOR: Like Dracula, Nosferatu adds new layers

to the vampire legend.

STANLEY: For example, he's not called Count Dracula.

He's called Count Orlok.

KINITRA: We begin to see the sun as a threat to the vampire.

JOSEPH: In Nosferatu, the heroine has to offer herself

to keep Count Orlok in her bedroom until the sun rises,

and the sun destroys the vampire.

KINITRA: The sun is this purifying light that has

the ability to burn the corruption that is

the monstrous vampire.

JOSEPH: This adds something new to vampire lore because

it's always been said that vampires come out only at night,

but the idea that they crumble to dust was new.

After Nosferatu, this becomes a common trope and we see over

and over again in movies, vampires getting staked

or beheaded, and immediately reduced to piles of ashes.

NARRATOR: In 1931, nearly a decade later,

Dracula is back on the silver screen.

This time with a big Hollywood debut.

COUNT DRACULA: I am Dracula.

JOSEPH: People absolutely loved this film.

Bela Lugosi is unforgettable as Dracula.

KINITRA: This is a figure who is considered a count,

someone who is of European blood,

dresses in a cape with a pointy collar,

who has the widow's peak with the pale skin.

STANLEY: Lugosi himself had this way of presenting

the character that gave it this sexuality that Lugosi

claimed that something like 90% of the fan mail he got

was from women who were in love with him for playing Dracula.

KINITRA: This will lay the visual groundwork for

what Dracula would represent throughout the 20th century.

NARRATOR: But nearly 40 years later,

the line between fiction and belief blurs once again,

sparking a modern day vampire panic.

By the 1970s,

faith in institutions has been shaken by war and civil unrest.

STANLEY: So, we have this new younger generation

that's engaging in all this counterculture.

NARRATOR: Questioning authority, many begin

exploring alternative beliefs and spiritual practices.

STANLEY: What we have is a sort of anti-authoritarianism

that's leading a younger generation, interested

in things that are of the occult, mysticism and spells

and rituals and things of this nature.

NARRATOR: A dark fascination reflected in increasingly

visceral horror films.

FERN: We have the incredible Hammer horror films

coming out doing Dracula.

Rosemary's Baby is coming out.

So culture at this time is absolutely consumed

with the supernatural.

NARRATOR: In this climate of renewed fascination

with everything from poltergeists to occult rituals,

the supernatural begins to feel plausible once again.

Even in London, at Highgate Cemetery.

FERN: It's this beautiful old Victorian cemetery

full of alleyways on a hill, really ornate,

kind of wonderland type of graveyard.

JOSEPH: By the 1970s,

there started to be rumors that something strange

was going on at the cemetery.

FERN: A letter appears in the local newspapers from a young

man who claims he was walking back late one night

through Highgate, he passed the cemetery,

and coming towards him was a grey figure.

Something that absolutely terrified him.

So, he writes the local newspaper to see

if anyone else has experienced the same thing.

And very quickly, letters begin to come in.

Other people have experienced something terrifying

around Highgate Cemetery.

STANLEY: They claim that they saw a vampire in there

dressed in Victorian clothing.

FERN: And rumors start to be said that this is a vampire

living in Highgate, feeding on the community around it,

terrifying them.

NARRATOR: What begins as a local rumor quickly becomes

headline news.

FERN: It was one of the biggest news stories of the time.

NARRATOR: The story turns into a full-on media frenzy.

MALE: Our first report indicated that there may be a vampire

in Highgate Cemetery.

FERN: Within a few months, people from across London

congregate in Highgate Cemetery. They're a mob.

They break graves apart.

They run amok through this graveyard hunting

for this vampire.

JOSEPH: And it gets to the point where crypts have been

ripped open by excited mobs, and there are even human

remains left strewn about the cemetery.

NARRATOR: As the frenzy grows, police cordon off the cemetery.

Arrests are made to stop trespassers from causing

further destruction.

FERN: And gradually over time, there's less of a fascination

with the Vampire of Highgate, but you'll still find

people today who claim that he's still there.

JOSEPH: It's a bizarre episode that shows the compelling

image of the vampire can still affect people.

This was a full-blown vampire panic,

but it wasn't happening in the 1700s,

it was happening in London in the 1970s.

NARRATOR: As the decades pass, the vampire keeps evolving,

reshaped by each new generation.

KINITRA: Vampires are about the societal anxieties

of that time. And because of this,

each generation begins to redefine who the vampire is

and what the vampire represents for their time.

STANLEY: It reflects on what's happening in human experience.

NARRATOR: The success of the Twilight films taps

into the young adult market reflecting their anxieties

about identity, love, and self-control.

KINITRA: In the Twilight series, the monstrous vampire

becomes a heartthrob.

NARRATOR: Bella falls deeply in love with Edward

despite knowing he's a vampire.

EDWARD: I've never wanted a human's blood so much

in my life.

BELLA: I trust you.

KINITRA: He is dangerous but not too dangerous.

And the danger becomes not physical, but emotional.

And this is a great departure from the

monstrous takes of the vampire.

LESTAT: Be my companion.

KINITRA: In the case of the recent series, Interview

with the Vampire, we get the queering of the vampire.

Two men who fall in a very problematic love

with each other.

NARRATOR: Interview with the Vampire becomes one

of the first mainstream television adaptations

to feature a gay relationship.

JOSEPH: Sinners is a fascinating film that really

has a fresh take on vampires.

STANLEY: One of the things that makes Sinners unique

is the incorporation of racial identity into the overall plot.

NARRATOR: But that identity comes at a steep price.

KINITRA: You get this push and pull of who one really

wants to be.

The idea that liberation sometimes requires

the feeding upon others.

The Black Southerners begin to prey upon their own people

because of their association with Remmick,

the white vampire.

This is the threat of whiteness.

And this goes against the idea of black empowerment being

about everyone coming together to lift each other up.

NARRATOR: For more than three centuries,

from unexplained death and disease,

to anxieties around power, identity,

and social change, the vampire has always evolved to embody

the fears of its time.

JOSEPH: They're creatures that found basic categories

that we use to understand the world.

FERN: They show the parts of ourselves that we want to deny,

or we don't want to be accountable for.

KINITRA: Vampires take us out of our boring little lives

of following the rules and present an alternative.

What happens if we choose not to follow society's rules?