Items related to The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu...
The Dead Travel Fast is about vampires, death, chickens, fear, things that smell bad, the love of a good woman, and germs... but mostly it's about vampires.
The undead are everywhere. They're not just in movies and books, but in commercials, fetish clubs, and even in your breakfast cereal. If you look, you'll discover that bloodsuckers have gone from guest spots in rural folk tales to becoming some of the most recognizable bad guys in the modern world. Eric Nuzum wanted to find out why and how this happened. And he found the answer in Goth clubs, darkened parks, haunted houses, and... chain restaurants.
Nuzum was willing to do whatever it took to better understand the vampire phenomenon. He traveled across Transylvania on a tour hosted by Butch Patrick (a.k.a. Eddie Munster), sat through Las Vegas' only topless vampire revue, hung out with assorted shady characters, and spent hours in a coffin. He even drank his own blood --just one more step in his quest to understand the weird, offbeat world of vampires and the people who love them.
The Dead Travel Fast is the hilarious result of this bloody, gory, and often foolhardy journey. With his unmatched firsthand experience, Eric Nuzum delivers a far-reaching look at vampires in pop culture, from Bram to Bela to Buffy, and at what vampires and vampirism have come to mean to us today.
And the blood? Let's just say it doesn't go with eggs.
The undead are everywhere. They're not just in movies and books, but in commercials, fetish clubs, and even in your breakfast cereal. If you look, you'll discover that bloodsuckers have gone from guest spots in rural folk tales to becoming some of the most recognizable bad guys in the modern world. Eric Nuzum wanted to find out why and how this happened. And he found the answer in Goth clubs, darkened parks, haunted houses, and... chain restaurants.
Nuzum was willing to do whatever it took to better understand the vampire phenomenon. He traveled across Transylvania on a tour hosted by Butch Patrick (a.k.a. Eddie Munster), sat through Las Vegas' only topless vampire revue, hung out with assorted shady characters, and spent hours in a coffin. He even drank his own blood --just one more step in his quest to understand the weird, offbeat world of vampires and the people who love them.
The Dead Travel Fast is the hilarious result of this bloody, gory, and often foolhardy journey. With his unmatched firsthand experience, Eric Nuzum delivers a far-reaching look at vampires in pop culture, from Bram to Bela to Buffy, and at what vampires and vampirism have come to mean to us today.
And the blood? Let's just say it doesn't go with eggs.
"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.
About the Author:
ERIC NUZUM is a recovering pop culture critic, VH1 pundit, and author of Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America. He writes a lot of inane stuff that falls somewhere between the styles of Ted Kaczynski and Robert Frost, with a dash of inappropriate jokes thrown in for good measure. Nuzum was awarded the 2002 National Edward R. Murrow Award for News Writing and his work has appeared in a few publications you’ve heard of and many more that you haven’t heard of. He works for National Public Radio in Washington, D.C. and lives with his wife in that same general area.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:
Chapter 1
Watching my own blood drip down the bathroom mirror, there’s only one thought running through my head: In a lifetime of questionable decision making, this is not one of my finer moments.
Like many things in life, it started off with the best of intentions. It was an experiment—a quest, actually. When I set out to write about the history of vampires, I decided to pursue three specific tasks. It seemed to make sense—in order to truly understand vampires and what they mean, I’d not only have to do the usual research and reading, but I’d have to find ways to experience vampires as well.
The gore sprayed all over my bathroom was the result of the last of these undertakings: to drink blood. The whole blood-drinking thing, as you can imagine, posed several problems.
Most of these difficulties were rooted in the particulars. In my book, to drink something means to take a mouthful of something and to swallow it—“tasting” or “sipping” wouldn’t be acceptable. This, of course, requires a sufficient quantity of blood.
Even though blood fetishists don’t advertise their gatherings in the Sunday paper, they aren’t particularly hard to find. However, anyone willing to let me drink their blood probably isn’t someone whose blood I should be drinking.
Then I got an idea: I could drink my own blood.
I imagine you are full of questions.
It’s pretty simple, actually.
If you look at every culture, throughout history, they’ve all had some variation on the vampire. Very few have been called vampires, but every culture has some type of a supernatural creature that comes back from the dead and draws its power by preying on the living. Are there such things as actual vampires in the world? I’ve never seen one—nor has anyone I’ve ever known or met. Yet you can go to just about anyone, anywhere in the world, mention the word vampire, or show them a picture of some ashen-faced bad guy with fangs and a long cape, and they’d know what you were talking about.
Vampires are a lot like Santa Claus—each culture morphs the lore to fit its own needs and values. England has Saint Nicholas, Greece has St. Basil, Holland’s Sinterklaas arrives on a ship, French children wait for Père Noël, Italy has the good witch La Befana, and in China, Dun Che Lao Ren brings presents to children every winter. That said, St. Nick doesn’t have a fondness for sucking blood out of the necks of virgins. Well, if he does, he’s done a good job of keeping it on the down low.
This all started one morning during breakfast. I was pleasantly munching on a longtime favorite, Count Chocula, while CNN played on the TV. A story came on about energy costs and President Bush was offering a solution: destroy all vampires. Energy vampires, that is. The president was blasting cell-phone and computer manufacturers who used power chargers that drew electricity regardless of whether the device was actually using or storing it. These were commonly known as “energy vampires” and the president was urging Americans to solve the world’s power crisis by unplugging their cell phones once they were finished charging.
Looking away from the screen and down toward a magazine I was pretending to read, I turned the page and saw a vodka ad featuring a woman with a cape and long fangs. The ad encouraged potential vodka purchasers to “drink in the night.”
Even in my early-morning sleepiness, I stopped to consider this for a moment: Within a five-minute period, I’d encountered three references to vampires, of all things. This might make sense around Halloween, but it was early July.
Why vampires?
As I pondered this over the following days, I began to realize that I saw direct or indirect mentions of vampires everywhere—in an interview in Rolling Stone, during an episode of Seinfeld, a song lyric, a conversation on a plane. Vampires are invoked as metaphors all the time. It’s hard to go through a single day without seeing some reference to vampires.
So if the vampire is that ubiquitous . . . how did this happen? Why did it happen? I wanted insight.
There are two basic ways to experience history.
Basic Way #1: Sit in a dark library and read old, smelly books that put you to sleep. I am not an advocate of this Basic Way; it isn’t very fun. Plus, this is definitely not one of those books.
Basic Way #2: History isn’t static. Most history reverberates through time, making things different than they’d otherwise be. Therefore, it’s important to understand it as it survives and resonates today. According to this Basic Way, to experience living history one needs to . . . live it.
So to truly undertake my quest to understand vampires, I’d have to go out in the world and encounter them firsthand. This required a little prep, which led me to these tasks.
Which led me to drinking my own blood.
Which led me to vomiting all over my bathroom.
Which led me to the first thing I’ve learned in this quest: I am a total fucking idiot. People are afraid of the dark.
It isn’t the absence of light that messes with your head, it’s the possibility contained in darkness. In the shadows you can find anything. You could step right up to a grizzly bear, evil marauder, or four-hundred-foot cliff and never know it’s there. Not knowing is what makes your heart beat faster.
That’s where monsters come in. There is no evidence that monsters exist—vampires or otherwise. Yet despite this, we all cringe in scary movies. Clearly, there is nothing hiding in the closet, but we still make sure the door is closed before going to bed.
Monsters always start off in darkness: a strange noise, a feeling of presence. We imagine them at their most horrific. That’s why good horror movies never show you the monster during the first act—what we imagine them to be is infinitely scarier than what they actually are.
Eventually, the monster leaves the darkness and comes into full view. And what do we see?
Ourselves.
We create monsters for all kinds of reasons. They’re often the result of our own misguided ways. They offer vengeance for our follies. They are metaphors for our worst fears: The Blob represents concerns about pollution and the spread of Communism, the Swamp Thing symbolizes the cultural separations between the North and South, Frankenstein stands in for our fear over the clash between medical innovation, ethics, and religion. King Kong embodies the fear and helplessness of the Great Depression. Godzilla signifies concerns over the danger of nuclear technology. The most ubiquitous monster of all isn’t the one who fills the darkness around us, but the darkness within ourselves: the vampire.
The vampire is the only monster that people actually want to be. You won’t find much desire to be a mummy or zombie. You’ll never experience envy at the powers of the Frankenstein monster. No one ever wants to become a ghost or werewolf. Becoming any other type of monster is a curse, becoming a vampire is a key to power and a way to control what we fear.
When I started on my quest’s first task, it wasn’t fear I felt, but dread.
This questing nonsense started out as an attempt to discover vampires the way that most people do, through movies. I decided to watch every vampire movie ever made—all six hundred and five of them. It surprises many people that not only is Dracula the most adapted story in film history (there have been forty-three sequels, remakes, and adaptations of the story), but Count Dracula recently surpassed Sherlock Holmes as the character portrayed in film more than any other. On top of all those, there are several hundred films and TV movies featuring other vampire characters. All told, six hundred and five—and I planned to watch every one.
I started with the easy choices that everyone knows, Dracula and Nosferatu, along with some more contemporary fare like Interview with the Vampire, Near Dark, and Blade. However, only thirty-six movies into my viewing the quality of the movies was becoming a bit thin, including such gems as The Little Vampire, My Grandfather Is a Vampire, and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. To compound things, as is my usual idiotic style, I announced this task to almost anyone who’d listen. While I may have been able to back out if I’d kept my mouth shut, on this one, I was committed.
Today’s selection: the 1936 film Dracula’s Daughter, which seems appropriate since yesterday’s selection was Son of Dracula (the 1943 ham fest starring an aging Lon Chaney, Jr., as Count Alucard, the son of the infamous count). Dracula’s Daughter was the sequel of the 1931 original Dracula starring Bela Lugosi, literally picking up where Dracula left off. In Dracula’s Daughter, a mysterious countess, named Marya Zaleska, arrives in London to claim Dracula’s now completely dead corpse. When the authorities go to retrieve Dracula’s coffin, it comes up missing. At the same time, bloodless bodies are discovered nightly around London. It’s the countess—who, once discovered, hotfoots it back to Transylvania in a 1930s version of a high-speed chase with Scotland Yard. The countess eventually takes a wooden arrow through the heart and all are safe once again (though no explanation is ever given for what happened to Dracula’s corpse and coffin).
Dracula’s Daughter was one of the original horror movie sequels and is on about the same cinematic level as Halloween 5 or Bride of Chucky. On almost any aesthetic scale, Dracula’s Daughter bears no similarity to the original. Gone are the originality, dark gothic imagery, eerie passages of silence, and subtexts of sexual repression and fear of technology. Replacing it are campy attempts at humor, melodrama, and painfully obvious sexual innuendo. The pacing is slow, with long bouts of over-the-top dialogue. The so-called suspense scenes are anything but, due in large part to the overly schmaltzy soundtrack that gives everything away.
Watching all these films has led to my first major discovery about vampire movies: They suck.
I’m not trying to make some clever use of puns here; by and large vampire films are not good movies when viewed today. Watching almost any vampire movie in a contemporary context, even the 1931 original Dracula or the first vampire film, the silent Nosferatu, is an exceptionally disappointing experience. There’s a reason for this: Vampire films capture the fears, desires, and values of their time in a way that doesn’t age well. It’s like platform shoes or beehive hairdos—things that seem hip and cutting edge at one time, end up looking ridiculous in hindsight. What once was horrifying, now seems overblown, melodramatic, and kitschy.
Vampire films, books, and the undead’s appearances in contemporary culture are the same way. Most vampire lore suggests that vampires don’t cast reflections in mirrors. Yet, vampires are reflections. Vampires reflect our desires, dark ambitions, fears, longings, and despair. Vampires equally represent what represses us and what sets us free. The blood-drinking undead provide a stark example of what makes societies and cultures unique and different. They are the perfect metaphor. As vampire scholar Nina Auerbach wrote, “Every age embraces the vampire it needs.” However, none of these deep thoughts are making Rape of the Vampire any easier to watch.
Rape of the Vampire, along with films such as the 1952 Bela Lugosi stinker, My Son, the Vampire, leave viewers puzzled as to how the movie they’ve just viewed has any connection with its title. In My Son, the Vampire, Lugosi plays an evil vampire scientist building a killer robot to take over the world. While there was a character named Mother Riley, there appears to be no son in My Son, the Vampire. Likewise, in Rape of the Vampire—there is no rape.
I’m not sure what Rape of the Vampire is supposed to tell me about life, culture, or the filmmaker’s view of the world. That is, besides that he must have had a thing for breasts. From what I was able to follow, the film apparently tells the story of a group of beautiful vampire women. These vampires, who feed only from other women, can’t seem to manage a bite on the neck unless everyone involved is naked from the waist up first. One of the vampires falls in love with a mortal man who wants to become a vampire himself. Then it seems everyone is desperately trying to find a cure for vampirism. All this nonsense apparently upsets the head vampire woman, who looks and dresses more like an aborigine than a vampire. The characters run around screaming and crying for a while, and then everyone dies.
It’s a 1960s French film, which should explain everything. My second prevampire-hunting task was to understand what it means to be a vampire. I wanted to walk in his shoes, wear his cape, sleep in his coffin—whatever.
This quest was easy to accomplish, because I’d already done it. I was a vampire, once. Well, for a weekend, more or less.
I was thumbing through the car ads in the paper one late summer morning and a classified caught my eye. It featured a poorly drawn Grim Reaper over the bold-faced headline monsters wanted. It was an ad for the House of Terror, a haunted house located in an unused school building. The want ad promised “fun, excitement, and $$$” for “responsible actors” interested in portraying characters in its facility.
After reading the ad, I went on with my day, but I kept thinking about it. As a kid, I loved going to haunted houses and had always thought it would be awesome to actually work in one. Whenever I’d catch a glimpse of the people working in haunted houses, they always wore chain wallets, Aerosmith or Led Zeppelin T-shirts, and looked pretty mean and frightening even without the masks and props. The coolest of the cool were the kids who played vampires. They got to scare the hell out of visitors by jumping out of a closed coffin, grabbing a hot-looking girl (another haunted house employee), and biting her neck. They were scary and cool, and I fantasized about being one of them. Specifically, I wanted to be the girl-grabbing, neck-biting vampire. Now, more than twenty years later, here was my big chance.
After dinner that night, I fished the paper out of the recycle bin and called the number listed. The recorded message indicated that interested applicants should show up at the House of Terror at exactly 8:00 a.m. on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend with proper ID and a social security card. It informed callers that the process would take the better part of the morning. The message warned that no one would be admitted before eight and anyone showing up late would be turned away. Without discussing it with anyone, I just scooted out of the house that morning and headed over.
I figured that since it was a holiday weekend, turnout would be light. I further assumed that the “responsible actors” would be other fun-loving haunted house enthusiasts like me looking for something interesting to do as well as a part-time paycheck. As soon as I was within sight of the House of Terror, I began to realize how mistaken I was. It wasn’t even 7:30 a.m. and there were at least two hundred people lined up outside the building. To someone driving by, they might sum up the assembled crowd as people you’d expect to respond to a “free tattoo” or “free mullet trimming” offer rather than an employment ad. They didn’t look like vampires, werewolves, and ghouls—the...
Watching my own blood drip down the bathroom mirror, there’s only one thought running through my head: In a lifetime of questionable decision making, this is not one of my finer moments.
Like many things in life, it started off with the best of intentions. It was an experiment—a quest, actually. When I set out to write about the history of vampires, I decided to pursue three specific tasks. It seemed to make sense—in order to truly understand vampires and what they mean, I’d not only have to do the usual research and reading, but I’d have to find ways to experience vampires as well.
The gore sprayed all over my bathroom was the result of the last of these undertakings: to drink blood. The whole blood-drinking thing, as you can imagine, posed several problems.
Most of these difficulties were rooted in the particulars. In my book, to drink something means to take a mouthful of something and to swallow it—“tasting” or “sipping” wouldn’t be acceptable. This, of course, requires a sufficient quantity of blood.
Even though blood fetishists don’t advertise their gatherings in the Sunday paper, they aren’t particularly hard to find. However, anyone willing to let me drink their blood probably isn’t someone whose blood I should be drinking.
Then I got an idea: I could drink my own blood.
I imagine you are full of questions.
It’s pretty simple, actually.
If you look at every culture, throughout history, they’ve all had some variation on the vampire. Very few have been called vampires, but every culture has some type of a supernatural creature that comes back from the dead and draws its power by preying on the living. Are there such things as actual vampires in the world? I’ve never seen one—nor has anyone I’ve ever known or met. Yet you can go to just about anyone, anywhere in the world, mention the word vampire, or show them a picture of some ashen-faced bad guy with fangs and a long cape, and they’d know what you were talking about.
Vampires are a lot like Santa Claus—each culture morphs the lore to fit its own needs and values. England has Saint Nicholas, Greece has St. Basil, Holland’s Sinterklaas arrives on a ship, French children wait for Père Noël, Italy has the good witch La Befana, and in China, Dun Che Lao Ren brings presents to children every winter. That said, St. Nick doesn’t have a fondness for sucking blood out of the necks of virgins. Well, if he does, he’s done a good job of keeping it on the down low.
This all started one morning during breakfast. I was pleasantly munching on a longtime favorite, Count Chocula, while CNN played on the TV. A story came on about energy costs and President Bush was offering a solution: destroy all vampires. Energy vampires, that is. The president was blasting cell-phone and computer manufacturers who used power chargers that drew electricity regardless of whether the device was actually using or storing it. These were commonly known as “energy vampires” and the president was urging Americans to solve the world’s power crisis by unplugging their cell phones once they were finished charging.
Looking away from the screen and down toward a magazine I was pretending to read, I turned the page and saw a vodka ad featuring a woman with a cape and long fangs. The ad encouraged potential vodka purchasers to “drink in the night.”
Even in my early-morning sleepiness, I stopped to consider this for a moment: Within a five-minute period, I’d encountered three references to vampires, of all things. This might make sense around Halloween, but it was early July.
Why vampires?
As I pondered this over the following days, I began to realize that I saw direct or indirect mentions of vampires everywhere—in an interview in Rolling Stone, during an episode of Seinfeld, a song lyric, a conversation on a plane. Vampires are invoked as metaphors all the time. It’s hard to go through a single day without seeing some reference to vampires.
So if the vampire is that ubiquitous . . . how did this happen? Why did it happen? I wanted insight.
There are two basic ways to experience history.
Basic Way #1: Sit in a dark library and read old, smelly books that put you to sleep. I am not an advocate of this Basic Way; it isn’t very fun. Plus, this is definitely not one of those books.
Basic Way #2: History isn’t static. Most history reverberates through time, making things different than they’d otherwise be. Therefore, it’s important to understand it as it survives and resonates today. According to this Basic Way, to experience living history one needs to . . . live it.
So to truly undertake my quest to understand vampires, I’d have to go out in the world and encounter them firsthand. This required a little prep, which led me to these tasks.
Which led me to drinking my own blood.
Which led me to vomiting all over my bathroom.
Which led me to the first thing I’ve learned in this quest: I am a total fucking idiot. People are afraid of the dark.
It isn’t the absence of light that messes with your head, it’s the possibility contained in darkness. In the shadows you can find anything. You could step right up to a grizzly bear, evil marauder, or four-hundred-foot cliff and never know it’s there. Not knowing is what makes your heart beat faster.
That’s where monsters come in. There is no evidence that monsters exist—vampires or otherwise. Yet despite this, we all cringe in scary movies. Clearly, there is nothing hiding in the closet, but we still make sure the door is closed before going to bed.
Monsters always start off in darkness: a strange noise, a feeling of presence. We imagine them at their most horrific. That’s why good horror movies never show you the monster during the first act—what we imagine them to be is infinitely scarier than what they actually are.
Eventually, the monster leaves the darkness and comes into full view. And what do we see?
Ourselves.
We create monsters for all kinds of reasons. They’re often the result of our own misguided ways. They offer vengeance for our follies. They are metaphors for our worst fears: The Blob represents concerns about pollution and the spread of Communism, the Swamp Thing symbolizes the cultural separations between the North and South, Frankenstein stands in for our fear over the clash between medical innovation, ethics, and religion. King Kong embodies the fear and helplessness of the Great Depression. Godzilla signifies concerns over the danger of nuclear technology. The most ubiquitous monster of all isn’t the one who fills the darkness around us, but the darkness within ourselves: the vampire.
The vampire is the only monster that people actually want to be. You won’t find much desire to be a mummy or zombie. You’ll never experience envy at the powers of the Frankenstein monster. No one ever wants to become a ghost or werewolf. Becoming any other type of monster is a curse, becoming a vampire is a key to power and a way to control what we fear.
When I started on my quest’s first task, it wasn’t fear I felt, but dread.
This questing nonsense started out as an attempt to discover vampires the way that most people do, through movies. I decided to watch every vampire movie ever made—all six hundred and five of them. It surprises many people that not only is Dracula the most adapted story in film history (there have been forty-three sequels, remakes, and adaptations of the story), but Count Dracula recently surpassed Sherlock Holmes as the character portrayed in film more than any other. On top of all those, there are several hundred films and TV movies featuring other vampire characters. All told, six hundred and five—and I planned to watch every one.
I started with the easy choices that everyone knows, Dracula and Nosferatu, along with some more contemporary fare like Interview with the Vampire, Near Dark, and Blade. However, only thirty-six movies into my viewing the quality of the movies was becoming a bit thin, including such gems as The Little Vampire, My Grandfather Is a Vampire, and It! The Terror from Beyond Space. To compound things, as is my usual idiotic style, I announced this task to almost anyone who’d listen. While I may have been able to back out if I’d kept my mouth shut, on this one, I was committed.
Today’s selection: the 1936 film Dracula’s Daughter, which seems appropriate since yesterday’s selection was Son of Dracula (the 1943 ham fest starring an aging Lon Chaney, Jr., as Count Alucard, the son of the infamous count). Dracula’s Daughter was the sequel of the 1931 original Dracula starring Bela Lugosi, literally picking up where Dracula left off. In Dracula’s Daughter, a mysterious countess, named Marya Zaleska, arrives in London to claim Dracula’s now completely dead corpse. When the authorities go to retrieve Dracula’s coffin, it comes up missing. At the same time, bloodless bodies are discovered nightly around London. It’s the countess—who, once discovered, hotfoots it back to Transylvania in a 1930s version of a high-speed chase with Scotland Yard. The countess eventually takes a wooden arrow through the heart and all are safe once again (though no explanation is ever given for what happened to Dracula’s corpse and coffin).
Dracula’s Daughter was one of the original horror movie sequels and is on about the same cinematic level as Halloween 5 or Bride of Chucky. On almost any aesthetic scale, Dracula’s Daughter bears no similarity to the original. Gone are the originality, dark gothic imagery, eerie passages of silence, and subtexts of sexual repression and fear of technology. Replacing it are campy attempts at humor, melodrama, and painfully obvious sexual innuendo. The pacing is slow, with long bouts of over-the-top dialogue. The so-called suspense scenes are anything but, due in large part to the overly schmaltzy soundtrack that gives everything away.
Watching all these films has led to my first major discovery about vampire movies: They suck.
I’m not trying to make some clever use of puns here; by and large vampire films are not good movies when viewed today. Watching almost any vampire movie in a contemporary context, even the 1931 original Dracula or the first vampire film, the silent Nosferatu, is an exceptionally disappointing experience. There’s a reason for this: Vampire films capture the fears, desires, and values of their time in a way that doesn’t age well. It’s like platform shoes or beehive hairdos—things that seem hip and cutting edge at one time, end up looking ridiculous in hindsight. What once was horrifying, now seems overblown, melodramatic, and kitschy.
Vampire films, books, and the undead’s appearances in contemporary culture are the same way. Most vampire lore suggests that vampires don’t cast reflections in mirrors. Yet, vampires are reflections. Vampires reflect our desires, dark ambitions, fears, longings, and despair. Vampires equally represent what represses us and what sets us free. The blood-drinking undead provide a stark example of what makes societies and cultures unique and different. They are the perfect metaphor. As vampire scholar Nina Auerbach wrote, “Every age embraces the vampire it needs.” However, none of these deep thoughts are making Rape of the Vampire any easier to watch.
Rape of the Vampire, along with films such as the 1952 Bela Lugosi stinker, My Son, the Vampire, leave viewers puzzled as to how the movie they’ve just viewed has any connection with its title. In My Son, the Vampire, Lugosi plays an evil vampire scientist building a killer robot to take over the world. While there was a character named Mother Riley, there appears to be no son in My Son, the Vampire. Likewise, in Rape of the Vampire—there is no rape.
I’m not sure what Rape of the Vampire is supposed to tell me about life, culture, or the filmmaker’s view of the world. That is, besides that he must have had a thing for breasts. From what I was able to follow, the film apparently tells the story of a group of beautiful vampire women. These vampires, who feed only from other women, can’t seem to manage a bite on the neck unless everyone involved is naked from the waist up first. One of the vampires falls in love with a mortal man who wants to become a vampire himself. Then it seems everyone is desperately trying to find a cure for vampirism. All this nonsense apparently upsets the head vampire woman, who looks and dresses more like an aborigine than a vampire. The characters run around screaming and crying for a while, and then everyone dies.
It’s a 1960s French film, which should explain everything. My second prevampire-hunting task was to understand what it means to be a vampire. I wanted to walk in his shoes, wear his cape, sleep in his coffin—whatever.
This quest was easy to accomplish, because I’d already done it. I was a vampire, once. Well, for a weekend, more or less.
I was thumbing through the car ads in the paper one late summer morning and a classified caught my eye. It featured a poorly drawn Grim Reaper over the bold-faced headline monsters wanted. It was an ad for the House of Terror, a haunted house located in an unused school building. The want ad promised “fun, excitement, and $$$” for “responsible actors” interested in portraying characters in its facility.
After reading the ad, I went on with my day, but I kept thinking about it. As a kid, I loved going to haunted houses and had always thought it would be awesome to actually work in one. Whenever I’d catch a glimpse of the people working in haunted houses, they always wore chain wallets, Aerosmith or Led Zeppelin T-shirts, and looked pretty mean and frightening even without the masks and props. The coolest of the cool were the kids who played vampires. They got to scare the hell out of visitors by jumping out of a closed coffin, grabbing a hot-looking girl (another haunted house employee), and biting her neck. They were scary and cool, and I fantasized about being one of them. Specifically, I wanted to be the girl-grabbing, neck-biting vampire. Now, more than twenty years later, here was my big chance.
After dinner that night, I fished the paper out of the recycle bin and called the number listed. The recorded message indicated that interested applicants should show up at the House of Terror at exactly 8:00 a.m. on the Saturday of Labor Day weekend with proper ID and a social security card. It informed callers that the process would take the better part of the morning. The message warned that no one would be admitted before eight and anyone showing up late would be turned away. Without discussing it with anyone, I just scooted out of the house that morning and headed over.
I figured that since it was a holiday weekend, turnout would be light. I further assumed that the “responsible actors” would be other fun-loving haunted house enthusiasts like me looking for something interesting to do as well as a part-time paycheck. As soon as I was within sight of the House of Terror, I began to realize how mistaken I was. It wasn’t even 7:30 a.m. and there were at least two hundred people lined up outside the building. To someone driving by, they might sum up the assembled crowd as people you’d expect to respond to a “free tattoo” or “free mullet trimming” offer rather than an employment ad. They didn’t look like vampires, werewolves, and ghouls—the...
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- PublisherThomas Dunne Books
- Publication date2007
- ISBN 10 031237111X
- ISBN 13 9780312371111
- BindingHardcover
- Edition number1
- Number of pages256
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The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula
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ISBN 10: 031237111X
ISBN 13: 9780312371111
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The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula Nuzum, Eric
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Thomas Dunne Books
(2007)
ISBN 10: 031237111X
ISBN 13: 9780312371111
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The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula
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Thomas Dunne Books
(2007)
ISBN 10: 031237111X
ISBN 13: 9780312371111
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The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula
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Thomas Dunne Books
(2007)
ISBN 10: 031237111X
ISBN 13: 9780312371111
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The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula
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Thomas Dunne Books
(2007)
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ISBN 13: 9780312371111
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The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula
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Thomas Dunne Books
(2007)
ISBN 10: 031237111X
ISBN 13: 9780312371111
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. New. Fast Shipping and good customer service. Seller Inventory # Holz_New_031237111X
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The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula
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Thomas Dunne Books
(2007)
ISBN 10: 031237111X
ISBN 13: 9780312371111
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: new. Brand New Copy. Seller Inventory # BBB_new031237111X
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The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula
Published by
Thomas Dunne Books
(2007)
ISBN 10: 031237111X
ISBN 13: 9780312371111
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Book Description Hardcover. Condition: New. Seller Inventory # Abebooks581712
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The Dead Travel Fast: Stalking Vampires from Nosferatu to Count Chocula
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Thomas Dunne Books
(2007)
ISBN 10: 031237111X
ISBN 13: 9780312371111
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Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 0.75. Seller Inventory # Q-031237111x
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THE DEAD TRAVEL FAST: STALKING V
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(2007)
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ISBN 13: 9780312371111
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Book Description Condition: New. New. In shrink wrap. Looks like an interesting title! 0.75. Seller Inventory # Q-031237111X
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