This evening I had the pleasure of attending a talk about vampires by University of Virginia assistant professor Stanley Stepanic, Ph.D., M.A. He teaches a course there called “Dracula” which is a deep dive into the evolution of vampires and what they have represented to humanity throughout the centuries. His talk was part of the creepy, crawly series of October discussions offered by Profs and Pints, an organization that brings college faculty members into off-campus venues to share their knowledge.

And what a fun talk it was! I’m a vampire freak and have been since I was turned, er, for a few decades now–enough so that two of the three novels I barfed out for National Novel Writing Month back at the turn of the century were about vampires–and even I learned a few things.

For one thing, now I get the joke in What We Do in the Shadows where Guillermo throws a bag of rice to the floor to test whether Laszlo and Nandor have an irresistible urge to count the grains. The legend springs from the Polish practice of throwing poppy seeds into a coffin on the theory that it would take so long for a vampire to count all the seeds in the dark that the sun would come up before he or she was finished counting.

Right away I thought, “So is that why The Count on Sesame Street loves to count?”

But no dice there: Stepanic explained that The Count’s love of counting was purely coincidental, as by the time Sesame Street introduced the character, that bit of lore had all but disappeared from popular culture.

I came away from the talk feeling a bit vindicated, as well. I’ve long felt that the portrayals of zombies were really portrayals of vampires. I’ve had debates about this with fans of zombie apocalypse series like The Walking Dead, and lo and behold, Stepanic used slides from The Walking Dead to explain that yes, pop-culture zombies like the ones Daryl Dixon shoots with his seemingly endless supply of crossbow arrows are really vampires.

See, vampire lore began not with sex and sparkle, but the resurrection of partially decomposed corpses that preyed upon the living. Then they morphed into creepy old pedophiles who preyed upon teenage girls. Then they got sexed up a bit with Bela Legosi’s portrayal of Dracula, which apparently landed him a groupie in every port. They got sexed up even further with the introduction of lady vampires in comic books and cinema, vampires that were largely interpretations of Carmilla, the first known lady vamp who appeared in a novella by Sheridan Le Fanu in the early 1870s.

However, I was one of only a few people who seemed to understand what Stepanic meant when he said that there is nothing original whatsoever in the Twilight series of vampire stories–or at least one of only a few people who similarly hate the Twilight series enough to applaud his comments–for who is Edward Cullen if not a creepy old pedophile who preyed upon a teenage girl? The only difference between Cullen’s resurrected corpse and those of the first vampires is that his was all sparkly and minty fresh while theirs were rank with putrefaction and halitosis.

All in all, it was a great talk and probably the best $17 I spent all month, so I’m calling it a huge win.