Stanley Stepanic has been fascinated by vampires for most of his life.
"As a kid I was always just sort of interested in creepy things," he explains. "I always really liked Halloween and ghost stories. I liked spooky movies and things like that. When I turned six, for example, I had a Halloween-themed birthday party. At that birthday party, I actually dressed as Dracula."
Now, as a professor of Slavic languages and literature, he knows a great deal about Eastern European vampires.
"In the vast majority of cases, the Slavic vampire is a re-animated corpse that comes back to assault the living in some way," Stepanic says. "It could be to drink blood, but they didn’t necessarily need to do that originally. Sometimes they just collected blood. Sometimes they were just annoying. Sometimes they spread disease."
It’s interesting, he says. Japan might be the only country that does not have a vampire-like creature in its folklore. They’re found around the world, from the Americas and the Caribbean to Europe, Africa and China.
"That is very similar to the Slavic vampire, and we don’t know of any cultural connection or transferring of information that would lead to these two very similar images, or you could look at the Haitian zombie for example. There’s lots of debate about where it came from, but it’s definitely rooted in West African beliefs. There’s obviously some kind of universal human need that these things satisfy."
In the days that preceded our understanding of bacteria and viruses, they were blamed for sickness, and in popular culture they appeared at times when people were concerned about immigration.
Stepanic has written a textbook on the subject, and his course at the University of Virginia is one of the most popular.
"One year for example, I think it was 2018 – I had about 495 students, which for a humanities course is way beyond what most people usually see. Most courses like that are usually about 30 students.
Stepanic’s latest book is a work of fiction about another kind of vampire – a young, dark-haired beauty who seduces and ruins reputable men. It’s set in the early 20th century in Fredericksburg.
