This Class Bites

Bela Lugosi mesmerizing a victim in 1931’s Dracula.

Class by class, lecture by lecture, question asked by question answered, an education is built. This is one of a series of visits to one class, on one day, in search of those building blocks at BU.

On one level, Bram Stoker’s Dracula is the story of an undead Transylvanian count and his bloodthirsty handmaidens lustily chomping their way through London. But there’s more under the surface than coffins, says Jeffrey Vail.

“Like a lot of things we’ve been talking about, it’s about cultural anxieties,” says Vail, a College of General Studies master lecturer in the humanities, who teaches Supernatural Horror in American Literature and Film with Regina Hansen, a CGS master lecturer in rhetoric. “Dracula is obsessed with gender roles—this anxiety of, if women are set free, what are they going to transform into?” Vail says. “And it’s about other cultural anxieties, too, such as the 1890s fear of unrestricted immigration from other parts of the world.”

Um, what century are we talking about, again?

Like vampires, apparently, those cultural anxieties are hard to kill. Especially here in New England. From H. P. Lovecraft to Nathaniel Hawthorne and from Shirley Jackson to Stephen King, the region has been a hotbed of horror. “We could have done a whole course just on New England gothic,” Hansen says before a recent class.

The deeper layers of horror stories—the fears and anxieties the monsters stand in for—add texture to the pulse-pounding tension and scream-worthy shocks. There’s plenty to learn from close examination of the horror genre—for instance, BU HUB course goals like aesthetic exploration, historical consciousness, and critical thinking.

The Supernatural Horror course evolved from a Friends and Family Weekend presentation for parents that the two faculty members have been doing for a few years. “We wanted to do something that talked about horror in the context of American history and American social thought,” Hansen says. “I’m a scholar in that area, and Jeff is a 19th-century romanticist, but he also has a lot of interests in Frankenstein and Lord Byron, who is sort of the progenitor of gothic thought. So we thought we’d merge that stuff.

“It’s not that horror is only American,” she says, noting the able contributions of England, Spain, and Italy to the genre. “But [Edgar Allan] Poe, the American, was the first horror writer. Horror has deep American roots and is interestingly reflective of American culture.”

“I never really expected to learn anything specific about these kinds of things, like Salem’s Lot and the living dead, when I came to BU,” says freshman Harrison Wellner (COM), “but I never really thought about it either. When I saw an opportunity to take a class about that kind of stuff, I took it, since I wasn’t sure if I would get that chance again.”

This weeknight session on the first floor of CGS centers on Stephen King’s 1975 best seller Salem’s Lot, which brought the vampire tale into present-day small-town Maine and was turned into a hit TV miniseries. Students have read the book, and now Vail turns out the classroom lights for a quick YouTube screening of one scene. And the discussion proceeds from the—let’s face it—comical 1970s special effects to the way vampire tales in popular culture have changed since, perhaps reflecting a cultural change in America.

“A lot of the—I guess you’d call them vampire rules—have changed. You see that in a lot of revisionist vampire stuff,” says one student. “A lot of the Christian theology is not even abandoned, but like, subverted. They act like it’s funny, vampires being afraid of a cross and stuff. It turns it inside out and almost mocks it.”

“Why do you think that is?” Vail asks. “It’s still in Stephen King’s novel, that you can hold a cross up to a vampire and it terrifies and burns and hurts them. What is the attitude toward Christianity in the novel? There’s a lot of ambiguity, isn’t there?

“There’s a point at which readers are told it’s not really God chasing off the vampires, but a more generic ‘goodness,’ he says. “And the priest is sort of defeated at the end.”

Religion has been part and parcel of horror in America since the beginning, Hansen notes. The United States started as a theocracy, and the Puritans and the Pilgrims had a lively religious sense of the world as rife with potential evils, demons, and witches. Such trials as tuberculosis, rabies, and starvation-induced cannibalism in remote frontier settlements also gave rise to portions of the vampire legend. The first week of the syllabus featured Rev. Cotton Mather—and the movie The Witch.

It seems the biggest benefit of the course is less in the nuances of the changing vampire genre than in how the students learn to think about it.

“With this class, and my WR120 class about ghosts in the Chinese culture, I have gained a whole new appreciation for the genre, which I thought was just silly and fun before,” freshman Helena Gill (ENG) says.

“I find horror fascinating. People read it to be scared, and it is interesting to explore all the different aspects that creators explore to deliver that feeling to their audiences,” says Faith Perry (Questrom), another freshman.

Last question: Are vampires even scary anymore? Those revisionist tales have turned vampires from terrifying into tragic and even romantic figures. It may have started with Barnabas Collins in Dark Shadows, but the image makeover reached full flower in young-adult lit like Twilight. Driven by cultural and market forces, many vampire stories now offer wish fulfillment instead of terror, the teachers note.

“In Twilight you get everything you want,” says Hansen. “You’re a teenage girl and you get everything you want, including that you don’t have to die.”

And there’s even a counterreformation underway in the vampire world. With TV books and TV shows like The Strain and The Passage, today’s writers are going out of their way to make Dracula’s ilk terrifying again for a new generation.