Transcript [sound clip]: We’ve traced the call. It’s coming from inside the house. A squad car’s coming over there right now. Just get out of that house… [Intro Music] https://freemusicarchive.org/music/william-frederick-davidson/single/dont-look-in-the-boxmp3-1/ Derrais: Welcome to “The Call is Coming from Inside the House,” a podcast that explores popular monsters and the societies that create them. In this episode we’ll be discussing vampires, one of the most enduring monsters in our collective mythology. But, before we get started, let’s tell you who we are. Deanna Koretsky is an associate professor at Spelman College and a shameless fan girl of every vampire who ever unlived. She was raised by Buffy and currently lives near the real Mystic Falls. Harriet Hustis is professor of English with an interest in literary representation of vampires and the gothic, particularly in 19th century Great Britain and the U.S. I'm Derrais Carter, cultural historian, artist, and associate Professor of Africana Studies at UMass Boston. Finally, we have Beth Headrick who is the digital scholarship librarian at Texas Woman's University and a PhD candidate in Rhetoric in the TWU English, Rhetoric, and Spanish department. [music transition] https://freemusicarchive.org/music/audiorezout/sound-design-hybrid-logos-vol1-aggressiv[…]rful-epic-cinematic-electronic-logo-ident-hit-intro-music/ Deanna’s Segment All vampires are gay. We know that, right? But did you know that they’re actually historically and canonically gay? True story. Let’s start at the beginning. In the beginning, there was Lord Byron. British poet. Famous pansexual. “Mad, bad, and dangerous to know,” according to one of his paramours. Byron is where many of our most popular vampire stories come from…well, sort of. Stories of vampire-like creatures exist in nearly every culture in the world. Turns out, blood and death are among the most common of humanity’s common bonds. The vampire we’re most familiar with in the West comes from an abandoned short story that Byron’s doctor, John Polidori, picked up and finished, in an 1819 novella ever-so brilliantly called “The Vampyre.” Both versions turn what had been a monster into a charismatic white man, and both offer some not-at-all-subtle homoerotic innuendo. So you see, vampires are gay. At least, Byronic vampires are. In the hands of nineteenth-century white writers, some vampires are Black. True story. An American writing under the pen name Uriah Derrick D’Arcy published a response to Polidori called, again, ever-so brilliantly, “The Black Vampyre.” An enslaved Black child grows up, takes revenge on his enslavers by turning them into vampires, they turn themselves back and kill him – it’s a whole LOT – but where this author ultimately wants to go (because he says so in a “Moral” attached to the story) is to critique racial capitalism and call white people vampires. The story’s a mess, but the moral makes quite a bit of sense. Unsurprisingly, this is not the vampire narrative that’s stuck around. But wait! Where are all the women? Turns out, nineteenth-century women vampires are both gay and Black! It is not a stretch to describe J. Sheridan le Fanu’s 1872 novella, Carmilla, as old-timey lesbian vampire erotica. There’s even a sub-plot in that story that suggests Carmilla, our lesbian vampire, is in cahoots with a Black woman. So in the hands of this white male writer, lesbians and Black women are monsters. No thank you. And then there’s The Blood of the Vampyre by Florence Marryat (published in 1897, the same year as Dracula). Probably the least well known of any of these, here, the protagonist is a biracial Jamaican heiress who doesn’t even know she’s a vampire. She moves through English society sucking the energy out of those she loves most, starting with a young white mother and her child. Without totally spoiling the ending, things…don’t go well for her. So you see, in the nineteenth century, vampires are gay. And Black. And women. And sometimes all of the above. What I’m wondering is, how did we get from there – where vampires stood for capitalist white supremacist heteropatriarchy’s greatest fears – to Edward Cullen and Damon Salvatore? How and why did vampires become every straight white girl’s fantasy? [transition music] https://freemusicarchive.org/music/Gianluca_Sgalambro/spare-parts-for-humans-and-ai/love-song-1/ Harriet’s Segment In 1897, Irish writer Bram Stoker wrote the novel Dracula, and, in doing so, he basically sets the stage for what we now think of when we hear the word “vampire.” Stoker’s Dracula is the quintessentially suave aristocrat who exudes this mysterious combination of menace and sex appeal pretty much from the minute he arrives on the scene. And also, from this point on and for years to come, the vampire’s victims will be usually (if not always exclusively) female. One possible answer to the question of why the vampire changes from an obviously, if not openly, “gay” figure to one that is implicitly—and at times very explicitly-- this heteronormative embodiment of white, upper-class masculinity is the trial and conviction of one of Bram Stoker’s longtime friends, the Irish poet, playwright, and novelist Oscar Wilde. In 1895, two years before the publication of Dracula, Wilde was famously tried—and convicted—of 25 counts of “gross indecency” and the term “gross indecency” is obviously a very vague phrase but basically what happened is, 10 years earlier in1885, a criminal law was enacted that made it a crime for men to engage in sex acts with other men. During his trial, excerpts from Wilde’s novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, were actually read into evidence by the prosecution, as evidence that he was both promoting and engaging in homosexual relationships with other men and therefore engaging in a criminal act under this 1885 law. Oscar Wilde and Bram Stoker had known each other since childhood. Like Wilde, Stoker was married to a woman but, like Wilde, he also seems to have had sexual relationships with men. In the wake of Wilde’s conviction and imprisonment, it’s possible that Stoker recognized the potential danger that would accompany writing a novel that represented, and might be read as, encouraging or even endorsing same-sex relationships between men. In one of our background conversations about vampires, zombies, and kind-of gothic novels in general, Derrais characterized genre as both a prompt and a protection. On the one hand, genre is a prompt in the sense that it can open a space of possibility for an artist. At the same time, though, when it’s used strategically, genre can also “protect” that artist. Genre can offer a way “out” for a writer or artist. It becomes a way to implicitly tell readers or viewers “hey, if you find any of this here disturbing, don’t blame me, it’s the genre, I’m just improvising on an existing form.” In Dracula, Stoker keeps, but he, you know, kind of very thinly veils and submerges, the homoeroticism of previous representations of vampires and, in doing so, he protects the text—and by implication, himself—by appearing to endorse Western heteronormativity and all of the things that unfortunately go along with it, such as racism, classism, and imperialism, to name only a few. At the same time, though, Stoker’s Dracula becomes the starting point for what we now think of as the “canonical” representation of the vampire because Stoker also opens the genre up to textual experimentation. Basically he offers a prompt for later writers and filmmakers to respond to. In the late 18th century and early 19th century, gothic novels often incorporated castles, letter-writing, and this concept of a “found” manuscript— writers of potentially racy or controversial novels would often claim that they just “found” it somewhere, and that they had no idea who actually wrote it. Even though everyone knew this was a ruse, it was accepted and it seemed to become a legitimate way for writers to protect themselves. In Dracula, Stoker implicitly employees this same ruse while also incorporating elements of late 19th century Victorian modernity. In Stoker’s novel we get letters and diary entries—all the stuff of the late 18th century gothic—alongside more modern forms of communication, such as telegrams, recordings, newspaper articles, you name it. Basically, if podcasts had been a thing in Stoker’s time, Stoker would have put a podcast in Dracula, right? It’s that kind of novel So I think Stoker’s Dracula really opens the door for later writers—and eventually filmmakers—to take the figure of the vampire and adapt it to suit their own cultural and social concerns. And so, on the one hand, Stoker’s novel prompts later generations of writers and filmmakers, even as it protects Stoker himself, and offers him a way to avoid following in the footsteps of Oscar Wilde. [transition music] https://freemusicarchive.org/music/gregor-quendel/ragtime-classics-collection-vol-ii/ragtime-nightingale-1915-joseph-f-lambmp3/ Derrais’s Segment My thinking about vampires and Blackness stems from my childhood fascination with Blaxploitation. For those unfamiliar with the term, it describes this moment in the ‘70s where all of these Hollywood studios were making films geared towards Black audiences. Now, critically, the term was coined by this PR rep and NAACP member, Junius Griffin. He wanted this portmanteau of Black and exploitation to concretely name Hollywood's exploitation of Black talent in the film industry. And so it matters that he’s doing this at a moment when a number of these large studios are going broke. And, as far as I heard, one of them was trying to sell the red slippers from The Wizard of Oz to recoup some of those losses. And so, while studios were losing money, Black artists like Melvin Van Peebles are selling out movie theaters in 1971 with his independent film Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song. Similarly, audiences flocked to see model and actor Richard Roundtree serve private dick realness as John Shaft. Now, Hollywood peeps game and commercial hilarity ensues. For the next few years, they’re targeting audiences–black audiences–left and right because they want to scratch every little, or grab every little dollar they can. But for me, quiet as it’s kept, Blaxploitation is about more, so much more, than Hollywood's sad attempt to capitalize off of Black entertainers. It’s also this delightful moment of vibrant, experimental and irreverent representation. And so, it’s important to me that we think beyond moralistic claims and critiques about, you know, overtly political or whatever kind of claims of the moment, in part so that we can hang out with these creatures of the ‘70s, right? These are, like, The Man with Two Heads, which, there was The Man with Two Heads but then there was the Creature or The Thing with Two Heads, ok? That’s the Blaxploitation version. There’s Dr. Black and Mr. Hyde, there’s Blackenstein, there’s The Zombies of Sugar Hill, there’s Abby (from the Black version of The Exorcist), and for the purposes of our chat today we get to talk a bit about Blacula. So, full disclosure, I hadn’t watched the film in years. So, I figured, I’ll be a good little researcher and dive back in. I’m not going to do a whole film synopsis because I really really hope y’all watch it, but there’s one thing that feels really important to say to y’all, and that is this: Blacula is an abolitionist!!!! Hear me out: the film opens in 1780. African Prince Mamuwalde and his wife Luva are visiting Count Dracula and they ask for his support to end the slave trade. Dracula responds by alleging that slavery has “merit” and then he offers to buy Princess Luva from Mamuwalde. Absolutely bizarre. These two folks, rightfully offended, decide it is time to leave. They came there for allyship and ultimately for freedom. What they were met with was a crude offer, and a nasty vile-ass form of disrespect. But as they leave, Count Dracula has his minions grab them, he bites the prince, locks him in a coffin, entombs the prince, and the princess. But for me there’s this one really, really sick, like, vile, monologue, and it comes from the count. Here, locking the prince in the casket and reassuring Princess Luva that it will be her destiny to starve and suffocate in this tomb as she listens to the screams of her husband. Here’s the monologue: You shall pay, Black Prince. I shall place a curse of suffering on you, that will doom you to a living hell. A hunger, a wild, gnawing, animal hunger will grow in you. A hunger for human blood. Here you will starve for eternity. Torn by an unquenchable lust. I curse you with my name. You shall be Blacula. A vampire like myself, a living fiend. You’ll be doomed never to know that sweet blood which will become your only desire. Y’all, high key, Dracula is unhinged. And now, you know, even as I consider, in yet another watch, I’m wondering even in how that monologue, what we get is maybe an understanding of how Dracula’s answer to their appeal for advocacy is to enslave them in another way. I think about bloodlust, this bloodlust that Dracula wants the prince to suffer with. I think about it in relationship to political rights. I think about Dracula calling Mamuwalde “Black prince.” I think about that in relation to Ozzie Davis eulogizing Malcolm X, who called him a “shining Black prince.” And so, in so many ways, the film is tapping on not just historical but then contemporary references to Black political conditions and social status and culture. And now I’m like “Shit, now I gotta dive back in and see what else Blaxploitation was giving us.” [transition music] https://freemusicarchive.org/music/dj-messagroove/single/bluesy-funky/ Beth’s Segment The cyclical nature of vampire popularity apparently hit a high in the ‘90s. There were more than thirty movies released in that decade that focused on vampires in some way. The one that really hits home for me was just over the line but it feels like it really encapsulates all of the weird consumer excess of that period. That movie, of course, is Dracula 2000. This is where we get Gerard Butler as Dracula, who was actually, according to this story, Judas Iscariot, a Jewish man from 2000 years ago. Gerard Butler is a very conventionally attractive white Scottish actor. He’s not Middle Eastern in any way. But he looked damn good, and he’s hard to resist when he’s walking through the Virgin Megastore in New Orleans, turning all the ladies' heads. He then strolls through the rest of New Orleans during Mardi Gras, watching all of the debauchery with patronizing approval. It’s a place of zero inhibitions, and it’s exactly the kind of world that Dracula is supposed to want to create, but it’s already there, just waiting for him. Having just rewatched this movie, I am actually stunned by the absolute onslaught of product placement and rapid-fire imagery. The plot isn’t great, the dialogue is, well, ok, the dialogue is not great either but what this movie does have is a tight grip on the place of the vampire in modern society. Especially when they tie Dracula to Judas, a figure–canonically, mythologically– who was supposed to have been driven by money. He sold out his best friend for 30 pieces of silver, and now silver is one of the few things that can actually wound him. But he persevered, and went on to create others in his image, blazing a trail that eventually ended in London, where Van Helsing captured him and locked him up. His modern release was due to a team of human thieves looking for, you guessed it, money. One of the thieves, after being killed and turned by Dracula, remarks that it was “better than money.” So, greedy for riches in life and in death, much like their maker. But Dracula is still so damn tortured, y’all. He’s the OG betrayer who wasn’t even allowed to die because God cursed him and made him into a vampire. When he tells–and shows–the young nubile heroine, Mary, his story, he says that he was cursed and never forgiven. She says to him “did you ask?” Which feels like kind of an obvious question, and the look on the actor-slash-character’s face also was like “Ok, this is kind of an obvious question.” So, eventually, shortly thereafter, he does die, and while he is dying, he releases Mary from her vampirism, and, at that point, as he is quote-unquote dying, because we don’t really know for sure, the audience is left to assume that God has also released him. Or has he? Now, this isn’t the first portrayal of the hot-but-tortured vampire. I mean, Anne Rice had that down decades before with the wildly queer dramatics of Lestat de Lioncourt and Louis de Pointe du Lac but it was right around THIS time, in the late 90s and early 2000s, that we began to see Buffy and her angsty beau Angel. Twilight would pop up soon after with Edward Cullen and within a few years of that, we would see Stefan and Damon Salvatore show up in Mystic Falls, or return to Mystic Falls, I guess. Much like Anne Rice’s Louis and Lestat, we end up with a slew of white male vampires who have been hoarding money for centuries so they are extremely rich, but also very heteronormative, very bored, and very tortured because of the lives they have taken but that doesn’t stop them from indulging in bouts of glorious violence, after which they get all angsty and repenty. However, unlike Louis and Lestat, these new white male vampires decide that it will be a good idea to immerse themselves in the rampant consumer culture that is high school. And when they do this, they will be surrounded by nubile young women which will put them in a constant state of torment. The argument could be made that vampires are essentially in a sort-of arrested development, stuck at the age they were turned. They may be hundreds of years old but apparently some of them just could not move past their teen angst, and so they are drawn to people they perceive as being the same age as them. This opens up a whole ‘nother can of worms, of course, about physical versus emotional/psychological aging. And, unfortunately, we just do not have time for that here. No one has time for that here. [transition music] https://freemusicarchive.org/music/beat-mekanik/single/behind-the-moon/ Wrap-up chat [group laughter] Beth: Vampires, what do we want to talk about? Harriet: I was saying that in Derrais’ segment that I was really kind of interested in, in the fact–and it's one of those things where it's like, it's almost like now that he’s said it, I can't unhear it–that idea that Blacula is basically an abolitionist and similarly with your segment, Beth, like thinking about vampires as like, you know, sort of engaged in this, like cultural consumption that kind of set the way that capitalism is sort of infused into… And, you know, from my perspective, I feel like it, that is sort of what Stoker kind of opened up for everybody to kind of, by, by putting all of those odd forms into the, the genre structure of his vampire novel, that that's kind of what he, what he allowed others to start doing. Beth: Well, yeah, because especially with his– because he had the– the wax cylinder, right? One of them was recording his parts in– on the brand new… and Mina was being– Jonathan was making her, he used the typewriter… all of these new forms of communication. And then you end up with Dracula 2000 where he's walking through the Virgin Mega– with girls with “Virgin” in big letters on their, I mean, like really? Deanna: I mean, I think what's so interesting is that every generation thinks they've reinvented the vampire… Beth: Yes! Deanna: …and by and large, every single vampire narrative ultimately comes back to the exact same thing which is just whiteness and homo– I mean whiteness and heteronormativity and toxic masculinity and we can't really get away from that except, Derrais, I think your reading of Blacula is spot on in that, outside of that whole label of Blaxploitation and all of the weight and negativity that comes with the label. There are things that that film and the genre in general can do that are actually resisting and pushing against all of those like white normative narratives and and Blacula, or Mamuwalde, like pushing against Dracula is, is a kind of radical move that we don't actually really see in the genre very much except when you have non-white authors rewriting the vampire. Derrais: Yeah, it's a trip like that. There's this way that, you know, Blacula and even later films like Vampire in Brooklyn, it's like these Black vampires are wrapped up also in the love discourse too, which is a trip. So it's like part of what's happening or part of what I see happening in Blacula. It's like, yes, there is slavery that is there both historically but also in terms of Blacula’s relationship to Count Dracula. But there's also this other dynamic which… most of the film is about Blacula lusting after this woman who looks exactly like Princess Luva, right? And so it's like he is absolutely transfixed, right? So much so that when sorry–y'all spoiler alert–when her character is killed, he commits suicide. Deanna, is it… it made me think about your book, right? Was it your first book? Deanna: That's my only book. We'll see– we'll see if I write another one. Derrais: Yes, yes, yes. So I was like, you know, constantly thought about, you know–it's like slavery, love, attempts for freedom, possibly a discourse on rights–that's wrapped up in, you know, Blacula’s relationship to Count Dracula. But also his push, right, to have this desire not just for freedom, but also political rights, but you know, just like that, that menacing monologue from Dracula took me out. I'm still sitting with it and trying to figure out what the hell to do with it because part of me wants to do what– who's the guy that you mentioned, Deanna, is Uriah Derrick… ? Deanna: … Derrick D’Arcy Derrais: D’Arcy. Like I want to go in and remix something, you know? I… I wanna respond to Count Dracula in that moment, right? But I'm also thinking about how these kind of– these ongoing conversations have been taking place for at least 100 years, which I don't know much about 19th century, right, literature? And so it's like you really kind of brought something in you, you brought something to me that made me want to go down a deep, deep internet hole which… coming soon to a laptop near me. Beth: a podcast, baby. Derrais: So what do you all think? What do vampires tell us about ourselves, culturally? Deanna: Depends on the vampire. Beth: The vampire, the writer, when that vampire was created or turned, you know? Harriet: It's kind of interesting because I mean, in– in Stoker's novel, you don't really get any of Dracula's backstory. Beth: No. Harriet: Like you get sort of what, you know, what the– the villagers say, like what the legends are, but that novel is so… and I think that's part of Stoker really trying to exert control over kind of what the vampire is doing and with whom and when, this kind of thing, because you get a lot much more of like what, what the vampire hunters think the vampire is, or think what he stands for and it's almost like that sort of overreads that text. Like we don't, we don't get to think about really– or we're not encouraged to think about what Count Dracula means. Beth: Do you think he's meant to serve as a cut out for all of the things that they were scared of? The– the bad stuff? Kind of like in a horror movie where you never see, never actually see the monster, so your brain's gonna fill it all in… Deanna: I guess the– the thing that I always, I keep coming back to is to what extent can we actually rewrite this Western vampire that we've been talking about, right? Like… Harriet: I think that's why that's your worry because the call is coming from inside the house. I think one of the ways to think about it is sort of that idea of genre as strategy because it sounds like maybe what, what Deanna is saying is that, you know, they, if they're doing this add on or this kind of grafting onto the existing framework, like, why are we still staying in the house and the call is still coming from the house? And that idea of like, maybe it's time to just sort of break the genre completely, like to be more experimental with the form itself. Yeah. Is there, yeah… Is there too much baggage with that framework? Deanna: I mean, the larger question is, it's a que– I mean, the vampire is, is a symbol of power, right? And the larger question is how do we get outside of like western liberal power structures in telling stories about power? And can we do that with a figure that is so very clearly and very intentionally built in, you know, the image of these powerful white men. Like, Jewelle Gomez gives us–at least as far as vampire narratives go–I think Jewelle Gomez is the one who solves that problem, which is just rewrite the damn mythology like it actually like her vampires are black and indigenous women for the most part and they're incredibly powerful, but they don't exert power in the same way that like these like landowners and these like womanizers and you know, like western figures like her, her vampires drink blood because they have to. But then they give something back to the victim so that the victim is not really a victim. Like that's a completely different take on what a vampire can be. And that is not a powerful–it is powerful–that is not a not popular take, which is, which is kind of where I'm going with it. But we keep coming back to functionally the same kind of vampire because he sells, because he's popular… Derrais: And it’s wrapped up in quite a bit of fear too, right? Because we say, like, the Jewelle Gomez approach, it's like, oh, so part of what we're thinking about is it's not merely a discourse of extraction, right? It's also nourishment, right? There's like a– a cyclical or relational understanding to it that might even break us open culturally so that we have to deal with some things that we get to hide, you know, that we get to hide for the genre to hide behind right over and over and over. Harriet: It's interesting that we don't want to break out of that storyline or that genre because, I mean, it's a storyline that's basically premised on sexual assault. I mean, that's it. That's the baseline of that story that we seem to always keep, like we want to keep returning to that. So it's interesting that when we have female vampires, they are, you know, secondary to the male vampire or they're just sort of like a joke, like, Lily seems like she's got a little vampiric vibe to her or Elvira, right? It's like there's a spoofing of this idea, women as vampires, like, unless they're subservient to this male figure. And, and when they are, the, the implication is that they've all been raped by this male vampire and converted and now they're devoted to him. And so yeah, it's like when you, when you spell it all out, like that's really troubling that we seem so reluctant to kind of move away from that, that storyline. Deanna: I think Beth too, like, we sort of started this whole conversation and came to this idea from you talking about the economics of the vampire, the kind of economic life cycle of the vampire. And I think there's really something to all of that in that we keep coming back to this dream of wealth and power that is fundamentally a western imperial fantasy, right? And that is what the vampire is, right? Because… Beth: … because we're fat, we're, you know, and so something is showing up to, you know, drain our resources away and then we hit that bottom, which is like we talked about where the zombies come in and then we go back up and here comes the vampire again to suck it all. You know, I mean, so it's, it represents something. So yeah, I mean, you know, Harriet: The call is coming from inside the house and the house is Mar a Lago and I am so terrified at this point like, oh my God. Derrais: But I think Harriet, you know, it's a good call to, to have that reminder in large part because part of what we're dealing with is the fact that like we live with these stories, we live with these fears and we project them onto a figure like the vampire to try to make sense of it. Like we're going to externalize it as if right there, right? As if it's not us, exactly right. It's like, well, boo boo, you at home, like I'm at home, we're sitting here like low key terrorizing ourselves to all these cultural narratives. Beth: Our narratives, I mean, that's, but that's a, that's just human. We craft these narratives in order to help us get through the day and if we can place the blame on something other than ourselves… Harriet: It becomes a distraction. Beth: Yeah. Harriet: It's like you don't think about the thing. I mean, it's kind of interesting to think about, like, if I'm sitting at home in 2008, you know, 2009 thinking, gosh, I, I lost my job. I'm not getting another job. Like, what's, you know, like there's a way in which the vampire story is a huge distraction. Deanna: What do you think it says though, about… over the course of 200 years we've gone from, yeah, externalizing our fears and putting them on to these figures to now these figures are who we all aspire to be? Harriet: That's, that's always that sort of danger of doing kind of what Stoker did of, like, embedding all of this culturally resonance– resonant stuff in the narrative. It's like we may have kind of, it's, you know, kind of carried it too, like too far in a way, in that, if you embed so much cultural resonance, people begin to identify with the figure that carries all of that. And so that might be why we've kind of made that turn, because I think that, yeah, in Stoker's novel, it's definitely like Dracula is definitely other, like, there's no question that, that the only person identifying with Dracula is Renfield who's in a mental institution and eats flies and other creatures if they'll let him, so, yeah, so we've come, like, now that's not who identified, you know, that we've changed. And that's sort of, yeah, there's, yeah, there's an appeal to Dracula that's very different or to the vampire figure in general Beth: Danger? Harriet: Yeah. And that's interesting because I think that, that also speaks to what Deanna was saying though about the hard turn from like Dracula because there's the moment in Stoker's novel that terrifies like most of the vampire hunters is when Dracula lands in London and they realize, they kind of like, he blends in, in the crowd and they don't spot him. It's kind of interesting to think about like, like the parts of the story that have changed, right? But– but it's almost like now we wanna kind of present ourselves as sort of the menacing threat. But at the time, it was like that idea that– that the danger was that the threat could go unseen. Harriet: I don't know that we wrapped things up. Beth: No, but I… Harriet: I think we also all agree that none of these films come to any conclusions either, so… Beth: Well, no, but I mean, I think it's just, there's not supposed to be necessarily, it's, it's a myth just like, you know… Harriet: Well, and they’re undead… Beth: Yeah! Well, I mean, you're like… Harriet: The ending has been taken away. Beth: Like, you know, it just keeps going on. I mean, you need that enemy, you need that thing to aspire to defeat or you need that thing to aspire to be because you feel powerless. And so you want to be the scary one with all the power. Derrais: What a time to be undead! [sound clip]: We’ve traced the call. It’s coming from inside the house. A squad car’s coming over there right now. Just get out of that house…