Carol Senf sticks out like a sore thumb in her own office in the Skiles Classroom Building. Senf, a professor and associate chair in the School of Literature, Communication and Culture, is friendly and dresses in warm colors. Her office, meanwhile, is something of a shrine to the macabre. Ever since Senf began researching Bram Stoker’s Dracula as a PhD student, she’s accumulated an expansive array of vampire paraphernalia. With bloodsuckers once again all the rage in popular culture, Senf discussed the history of the genre.
Researching Dracula: I am by training a Victorianist. Dracula came in at the end of the Victorian period, so I’ve moved on from Victorian literature and science, which was an interest of mine long before I came to Georgia Tech. And the Dracula stuff stems from my dissertation, which was on vampires in literature.
Fear of feminism: In the 19th century most of the vampires were women. That’s one of the reasons I first got interested in Stoker. His characters so violently do away with the four female vampires. They dispatch them in such a different way, using phallic stakes and beheading them. But the women vampires are so much more sexualized than Dracula, who is a traditional military man.
Vampires as metaphor: I want to make it clear that everything I’ve looked at has been in literary metaphor. I’m not especially interested in people who regard vampires as real. In fact, they kind of creep me out. I get squeamish when I think about blood drinking.
First vampire: The first one may have been something my husband picked up at a flea market, and then it just proliferated. This is the first one. It’s obviously Bela Lugosi.
Vampires as career: Once you write a paper or a book, people are out there asking you to do more. I use the metaphor that I’m haunted by vampires and Bram Stoker. You get to a certain point, and you can’t get away from them — or don’t have the good sense to turn down a project.
Stoker’s writing: I’ve got a book coming out in the fall, and it’s on Bram Stoker as a gothic writer. It gave me a chance to look at everything Stoker wrote. I don’t think he was a great writer. I’m not sure everyone needs to read his minor novels, but they put Dracula into perspective. He also wrote romances, Westerns, science fiction and travel literature.
Vampires vs. zombies: Why I think the vampire is among the most interesting monsters is there’s an attraction. You have to want the vampire to come to you. The zombie’s just out for brains. What you want to do is get the hell out of Dodge.
Historical Dracula: Stoker bases the character on the traditional Romanian national hero [Vlad Tepes III]. I’ve gone to two Dracula conferences in Romania. Romanians do not see Dracula in the same way that people in the West do. We see Dracula as a metaphor. They’re responding, “You’re attacking our national hero.” Imagine if someone were to write a novel turning George Washington into some kind of a monster. And that’s what we’ve done. Historically, he’s no worse than many of those Renaissance figures. They were all pretty brutal.
Castle: I picked these up in Romania. The castle has nothing to do with Stoker. It has nothing to do with Vlad, except that maybe he slept there. In Romania, they’re perfectly willing to capitalize on tourism. They put the monstrous images next to historical ones.
Vampires as parents: When you go back to when people actually believed in vampires, it was a fear of a parent coming back. You feel guilty because maybe you’re happy that mom’s finally crossed over. There’s a great Boris Karloff film by Mario Bava called the The Wurdulak. It’s one of the scariest of the vampire films because dad comes back. He says, “Let me in. Let me in.” I saw that for the first time when I was in high school, a late-night creature feature. I thought, “Oh my God, this is really scary.”
Vampires as gifts: I get a fair number of gifts. I have a birthday that closely follows Halloween. My younger son especially used to pick up all kinds of stuff. It was an easy and relatively inexpensive way to get Mom a present. You can just pick up stuff at CVS in the post-Halloween days.
Sculptures: My older son is a sculptor, so lots of the big stuff he did mostly when he was in school. When I moved into this big office I said, “OK, Jeremy, I will provide gallery space.” He mostly works with metal. This is a class project in which he was asked to work in multimedia.
Stephen King: I think he, like Stoker, has his finger on the pulse of the times and speaks to what we fear most. I find almost everything that King writes is readable. I got invited to write the Dictionary of National Biography entry on King. I thought, do I really want to reread everything he wrote? The really interesting thing is that he does warrant a rereading. And not every popular novelist does.
Preying on fear: Sometimes King could benefit from some editing, and he doesn’t know how to end his books. But he’s particularly good with thinking about the angst we still have with regard to the Vietnam War. He often has characters haunted by the fragmentation that went on during that period.
Cujo as metaphor: King’s also good at zeroing in on unfocused fears. The first time I read Cujo I thought it was kind of silly, this rabid dog. With subsequent readings I came to the conclusion that it was the manifestation of some amorphous evil. I think it works better in Cujo than it does in It, because the creature in It turns out to be some kind of alien spider. It’s so much scarier when you can’t see it.
Vampire evolution: The genre has transformed according to the culture, but I’m not so sure there is a clear-cut evolution. I think it just means we’re afraid of different things at different cultural currents.
Vampires today: There’s a trend right now to have cheerful, good vampires as in the Twilight series. It seems to be pitched at the tweens. It’s edgy enough to have an appeal to 12-year-old girls.
Vampires in class: They’re always more fun to talk about than something that’s purely rational. There’s nowhere to go from something that’s rational. Students here really want to go onto the next step. They’re interested in the process of discovery. There’s the hope that we’ll be able to figure out what that is. To tame it, conquer it and figure it out.
Homecoming poster: The vampire is such an icon, you can even turn Buzz into one. But you can turn Buzz into anything.
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