Podcasts about Bram Stoker

What if the classic fairy tale were laced with complex psycho-sexual drama between the king, the stepmother and the child cosplaying as her dead mum? What if the dwarves were mostly full-sized, scarred outlaws fleeing religious persecution?   What if it starred Sigourney Weaver and Sam Neill and was full of 90s gothic intensity? We're about to find out as we explore 1997's Snow White: A Tale of Terror – an attempt to cash in on the success of Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) that got eviscerated in post-production and dumped on cable TV. Is it a dark, glistening gem that should be rescued from the oubliette or an unsalvageable train wreck? Find out! Follow us on Twitter, Facebook and Instagram Support us on Patreon to nominate future films and access exclusive bonus content

We Make Books is a podcast for writers and publishers, by writers and publishers and we want to hear from our listeners! Hit us up on our social media, linked below, and send us your questions, comments, and concerns for us to address in future episodes. We hope you enjoy We Make Books! Twitter: @WMBCast  |  @KindofKaelyn  |  @BittyBittyZap Instagram: @WMBCast  Patreon.com/WMBCast Episode Transcript (by TK @_torkz) [Upbeat Ukulele Intro Music] Rekka: This is We Make Books, a podcast about writing publishing and everything in between. Rekka is a published Science Fiction and Fantasy author, and Kaelyn is a professional genre fiction editor. Together, they'll tackle the things you never knew you never knew about getting a book from concept to finished product, with explanations, examples, and a lot of laughter. Get your moleskin notebook ready. It's time for We Make Books. Kaelyn: My sister just finished reading the Grisha trilogy. And she was, of course, more of a fan of the Six of Crows after reading that. But one of the things she messaged me- she was like “yeah, the ending was kind of whatever, but it is very clear that this person was reading Harry Potter when they wrote this.” R: [laughs] K: And I said “Yeah, that definitely comes through.” She gave me this whole list of like, book two is basically just The Order of the Phoenix, and the end battle with all of the Grisha and the stand downs, all this stuff, and I was like “Yeah, I guess you're right.” To be honest with you, I kinda limped through the end of that book, I wasn't thinking about that too much. But anyways, it got me thinking about influences in writing and how writers are influenced and how in some cases that's something that we're like “Yes! You can tell that this writer was influenced by such-and-such, and they weave it so beautifully into their story.” And sometimes you get my sister calling me to complain about how she basically just read Harry Potter with Russian witches.  R: So was your sister accusing the author in any way of plagiarism? K [overlapping]: Not plagiarism. R [overlapping]: As a reader I'm curious, like how the reader perceives it when it's that clear when someone's been influenced.  K: I should've asked her before we started recording this - and this is something we'll get to in there - I couldn't tell if my sister was accusing the author of laziness or unoriginality.  R: Okay. K: That's one of the things I wanted to talk about today as we're talking about influence. What is influence, how are writers influenced? How's the best way to leverage and utilize that influence? And when does influence cross into the realm of the negative? When is it no longer praise worthy? When is it, for instance, lazy, contrived, unoriginal, or, in worst case scenario, bordering into plagiarism?  R: Yeah, because that's a tricky thing - if we always wrote a completely original story, you wouldn't have something like Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey. Because we wouldn't have a set format that a story would take. So when somebody accuses a fantasy book of being “Star Wars with elves,” well, Star Wars was a Greek epic in space.  K: Oh, I would've called it a Western. R: Okay fine. [overlapping] I mean, people have called it a Western. K: [overlapping] I mean, both work. Both work. [laughs] R: Yeah, but I'm just saying, The Hero's Journey, Joseph Campbell is, he's studying the ancient literature, so that's why I decided to say Greek. But if we could always write something that was completely original, there would be no way to study literature with comparisons and contrasts. There are always going to be parallels between stories written in a similar culture by people who are writing in a similar society. Like, a hundred years apart, you would not necessarily detect the influence of Harry Potter in the Grishaverse. But they're not written a hundred years apart - it was maybe a decade, probably not. K: I'd be curious to go back and try to time out when these books were being written, and when that coincides with the release of the latter half of the Harry Potter books. But anyways, real quick, I'm big into definitions, so let's talk about definitions. Influence is the capacity of something - a person, a situation, a circumstance - to have an effect on another person, on the development of the situation, on the behavior of someone or something. Or, in some cases, even the effect itself. You'll notice there that influence is kind of framed as both proactive and reactive. You can influence something, or you can be influenced. We're talking today about being influenced.  R: And we're not talking about Instagram.  K: [laughs] Oh, God. You know what's funny? I went through this whole thing and I didn't even think about the concept of influencers, and now I'm depressed. R: Because you didn't or because now you are? K: [laughs] Because now I am. R: Okay. I'm sorry. I take it back, I didn't say anything.  K: [laughs] So, writers don't write in a void. It's sort of a reverse Heisenberg principle, which is “whatever you study will also change.” Whatever you read changes you, or whatever you consume changes you. So, writers don't write in a void. If you took a baby and raised them in a box with no interaction with the outside world whatsoever, well, to be honest I'm not sure they'd be capable of putting together an interesting story because they've had no influence.  R: You know what's funny, that's why I don't have kids. Because I thought about this kind of thing frequently in high school, like “what would happen if you raised a child in a padded room? And you never interacted with them, and they never saw another human?” So you're welcome, world, that I have not raised any children. Those children are welcome because I did not abuse them in such a manner.  K: [laughs]  R: But it's good to hear that someone else has had these thoughts. Although, Kaelyn and I did originally bond over the fact that we're terrified of the idea of raising children.  K: Pregnancy is just - R: And pregnancy. It's not for everybody. I recognize that for some people it's a beautiful process, but for Kaelyn and for me, it is body horror.  K: Yeah. Yeah, I mean, there's an entire nother skeleton in your skeleton. [laughs] R: Yes. And it's growing. [overlapping] It's getting larger.  K [overlapping]: It keeps getting bigger. R: And if you've never seen an MRI of a baby's skull, there's a lot of teeth in there.  K: Yeah, also they're squishy. R: Well, the MRI doesn't necessarily show that. It just shows all those chompers, waiting. Waiting.  K: Yeah. There's a lot of extra teeth in there.  R: Okay. [laughs] Where were we going? K [overlapping]: So for our writing- R [overlapping]: A child raised in a padded cell would probably write a different kind of story than somebody who's been exposed to Harry Potter.  K: Yeah, and if you take out every third word, it's their plan to destroy the world with their laser beams.  R: This reminds me of the book The Artist's Way. I think it's a month-long program designed to improve your creativity and I think maybe even to come up with… it's like NaNoWriMo but it's very classist and elitist.  K: [laughs] R: But the first thing it asks you to do is swear off all media for the month. K: Okay. R: And I put the book down right there. K: [laughs] R: Because I was like, that is literally impossible. I was in art school at the time, so I could not promise that I wasn't going to have to look at media. And also, this was written in 1992, before anybody was logging onto the internet daily.  K: Yeah, it was much easier to walk away from media for a month.  R: And I was trying to read it, I think, in 1999 or 2000, and it was even easier, at that point, to walk away from media than it would be now.  K: Yep. R: But, yes, it's called The Artist's Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity by Julia Cameron. And I imagine that Julia Cameron has a very nice life and is able to unplug from media whenever it is convenient for her to do so. K: Well, in 1992 that meant “turn off the TV.” R: Right, it meant “don't pick up a newspaper” or, you know. K: Yeah. R: In 2016 they re-released a 25th anniversary edition, and I can't imagine they did much to it, but it really probably needed a lot of re-examining to - K: Yeah. It's -  R: - to even be relevant in 2016, I can't even imagine.  K: Now, was the purpose of this to do a detox of influence from your life? R: Yes. That is exactly what it was, to avoid influence for the month and find out what you write, not what the world around you influences you to write. But I think in her case, she was treating world influence and media and current events as a negative.  K: Mhm. R: And I would argue that if you are responding to the world around you, then the politics of your creativity is going to be more relevant and more well-informed. And I think that's a good thing.  K: Well, yeah. And this is something that we can certainly talk about with influence - current influence versus longevity. You'll see a lot of writers that go out of their way to not incorporate things that might later be considered an anachronism in their writing, so that they're not influenced by that.  R: Mhm. K: So that's another good example of influence. So, let's get the elephant in the room out of the way here: influence is not copying. As we were talking about, writers don't write in a void. You're absorbing everything that you interact with and consume every day, and, whether you know it or not, it's influencing and incorporating itself into even your way of thought.  R: You hear that? So if you were following an Instagram influencer, do not copy everything they do.  K: [laughs] Yes. Please don't. But, again, it's the reverse Heisenberg uncertainty principle. Whatever you're consuming changes you. There are entire PhD programs dedicated to studying and understanding the influence that certain parts of literature have had on larger parts of literature. Influence is not a bad thing. In many ways, it's a scholarly pursuit. Go to any Wikipedia page for any sort of well-known novel, and I guarantee you there's going to be a section in there that says “Influence.”  R: Oh yeah, yeah. K: And it's going to be a couple paragraphs talking about the history of the genre, or the subject material leading up to this. Influence is, apart from being an important part of writing, an academic pursuit. So all of that said, we are talking about influence in a very positive way here. We're saying it's great to read things, and to consume and internalize them so that this can help enrich your writing. Something that you really enjoyed, something you thought was maybe unique, or something that you were like, “Oh, what if I applied that to a character that I already have?” That's a good thing. I think it enriches your writing, I think it shows layers and growth, etcetera. K: That said, sometimes influence goes the opposite way. [laughs] Sometimes you've read something and you're like, “this is terrible,” or “this was such a ridiculous ending,” or “I hated that this happened.” And that might compel you to go through your manuscript and scrub absolutely everything having to do with that. The whole point is that whether you mean to or not, you are going to be influenced by external components in your writing. You could never read anything else, and you will still be influenced by things in the world just by existing in it. But we are talking more about influences in writing here, so we'll stick with that.  R: And we assume that you are being influenced by books because, as we say, if you want to be a writer you need to also be a reader. So we're telling you, go read widely in your genre, and part of that is that we expect you to absorb some of those elements and some of those styles. On a conscious level, we want you to look at the covers, we want you to look at the themes and the tropes and everything like that, but we also expect that on a subconscious level that's going to influence you and hopefully make you a better writer within your genre. K: And if you read a lot within your genre, you will start to notice trails of influence yourself. If you read a lot of - especially maybe a really niche kind of fantasy or science fiction genre, you're going to be able to chronologically put some things in order, like “Oh yes, I can see that book A came out at this time, and then three years later this book came out, and there are certainly elements from book A that I can see coming through in book B even though they were written by different authors.” K: So, I was telling Rekka before we started recording–I went down a little bit of a rabbit hole with this, because for reasons unbeknownst to me and possibly the influence of vampiric elements, I, for whatever reason, picked up my copy of Dracula off the shelf and I've just been flipping through random parts. And then we were talking about doing this, and I was like, vampires are a really really good example of influence through literature. They're something that has always been around - the Mayans actually had a god that was basically a vampire, even though they didn't acknowledge that, bat wings and all. And there's something that–I think you'd be hard pressed to find a significant culture of any sort of longevity from history that didn't have some sort of mythological being that displayed vampire-like qualities. K: In the late 1700s, early 1800s, though, there was the vampire craze in western Europe. There were a lot of short stories and things written about vampires, even though they've been codified as part of the mythos for a long time. But even then, they were sort of holding up the folklore and traditions of vampires–they were reanimated corpses, they were bloodsuckers that came out at night to drain people of their very lifeforce. In some cases, actively rotting bodies, hunched back and demonic looking, claw-fingered and fangs and scary eyes. A lot of this was the traditional folklore. Then we start getting into sexy vampires. [laughs] R: [laughs] I was just going to say. K: [laughs] And there were a couple specific novels that did this. In 1819, John Polidori published a short story called The Vampyre, and this was the first one where the vampire was more of a character rather than just a mindless bloodsucking dead creature. R: Right. This was a vampire worthy of Bela Lugosi's eyes.  K: Oh, no one's worthy of Bela Lugosi's eyes. [laughs] R: You know what I'm saying. K: I know, I'm teasing. So, it was very popular. So then, a lot of vampire short stories and short novels were coming out where the vampires were getting a little more sophisticated, and all of these were drawing influence from Polidori's short story. It was a very successful short story. So then, in 1872, an Irish author named Joseph Sheridan [with a mock-French accent] Le Fanu - I'm assuming it's French which is why I did that accent - published Carmilla, which was a fantastic novel. And this is, I would say, probably a turning point where vampires are unabashedly being associated with a sexual element at this point. It has a not-very-subtle vampiric lesbian... stalking, I guess, going on through this book. It's fantastic, it's not that long. If you ever get a chance to read it, it's great. K: And then of course, a couple decades later in 1897, we come to Bram Stoker's Dracula. I should, by the way, say that Bram Stoker and Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu were both Irish. Ireland had a shockingly strong folklore of vampires. In some cases they were fae, which is a whole different category of supernatural elements in Ireland, and in some cases they were just reanimated corpses. Anyways, then we get Bram Stoker, who of course gives us Dracula. And this is considered the preeminent vampire guideline bible, if you will. I think when most of us - granted, Rekka and I are older millennials, but - R: [laughs] How dare you? K: I think the first vampire we heard of was Dracula.  R: Mhm. K: I actually remember, growing up, that there was a kid in my neighborhood who just thought vampires were called Draculas.  R: Yeah. I think that was probably a… Not that I thought Dracula was a noun, but I never expected Dracula to look the same way twice.  K: Yeah. Yeah, Dracula was just like - Dracula, vampire. They were interchangeable.  R: Mhm. K: And that's how synonymous this became. Now, look at all the stuff that lead up to this in order for us to get the seminal vampire novel of the time. Stoker was absolutely influenced by all these novels that came before. Something else that's really interesting that Stoker was influenced by is the sexual component of vampires in this. Like I said, that came through hard and strong. Well, maybe I should say most popularly with Carmilla. Here's something else really interesting about Stoker: he was probably gay. It's difficult and inappropriate to go back and retroactively categorize people these ways, but there's a lot of very strong… I'm trying not to say “homoerotic,” I'm trying to say… There's a lot of very - R: Queerotic? [laughs] K: Yeah, there's a- R: There's not a queer person in the universe that will argue this point with you.  K: Yeah. R: I think the LGBTQIA+ are very, very ready to claim vampirism.  K: [laughs] Absolutely. And that's a great part of the influence of this. Some of Stoker's best friends were Oscar Wilde and Walt Whitman. Actually, I believe Stoker either started writing or finished writing Dracula right after Oscar Wilde was imprisoned, and they were exchanging letters while he was in prison.  R: Mhm. K: You have to keep in mind, this was the mid-Victorian period, there's very repressed sexuality, but there was also this burgeoning underground masculine sexual component to it, where everyone - R: See people, this is what happens when you don't let people reveal their ankles.  K: Yes. Yes, exactly. [laughs] So, one of the things through Dracula is this secretiveness, this sense of penetration. Not only the fangs in your throat, but a lot of them get into your head and screw with you that way. This was not something we saw in previous iterations of vampires, who were gross, for lack of a better term. [laughs] R: [laughs] Yeah.  K: So, this influence comes through in a lot of different ways. And as I'm talking more about Dracula I can say like, “Okay, well there's a lot of very… what we would now consider queer sexual elements that we see in Dracula, coming through with the relationship between Dracula and Johnathan Harker and Dracula and Mina.” But there's also the influence of other writers who were starting to make vampires actually people, rather than Nosferatu-style monsters.  R: Right. K: Dracula, I would argue, then in turn really helped influence the next generation of common horror. At that point we're getting into H.P. Lovecraft and existential horror. Lovecraft, who, by the way, wasn't quite a contemporary of Stoker's, but was very aware and actually wrote some reviews of his writing. He didn't really like a lot of it. [laughs] I would argue that that was probably part of what influenced Lovecraft: it was a hard turn from these very sterile, white-marble, gothic horror novels to a lot of raw, and ocean, and dark mold, steam spaces.  R: You can literally write the sentence “I can't describe this.” and people are like “Woo, that is scary.” K: Yeah exactly. So much of Lovecraft is like, “it's too horrible to describe!” but it's like “Yeah, but can you tell me anyway?” [laughs] R: You mentioned earlier that an influence can be “I don't want to do this.” K: Yes. R: So, here we are. This is Lovecraft saying  “Well, Stoker wasn't racist enough for me, so I'm gonna write my own thing.” K: [laughs] Oh, God, Lovecraft. It's so hard to read some of that stuff. [sighs] Psychologists would be better at trying to figure out Lovecraft's influence than me, I'm certainly not going to. To say the man had issues is an understatement. He was more of a collection of neuroses formed into a human. Anyways, this is just something I was thinking of as a pretty-easy-to-track set of influences. We go from vampires being very loosely defined and having inconsistent characteristics based on what region the stories are being told in, to some stories published that codify certain rules about them, to their evolution from “Eww, it's a rotting, blood-drinking corpse” to “Huh, maybe I'd like date that person.” R: [laughs] Maybe I would like those lips on my bare neck! K: Yes, exactly. Which is a pretty interesting leap that really did not take that long to get from point A to point B. But all of this was just building on influence and influence, after that.  R: Yeah, all you needed was for one author to pick it up and go, “What if vampires, but sexy?” K: [laughs] Yeah. You know what's funny, we have this sort of modern-day depiction of Dracula as a very suave, debonair… what's the word I'm looking for? High-society type person.  R: Sophisticated.  K: Sophisticated, yeah. In the novel, he is those things a little bit, but he is very off-putting and he is... weird to look at, I guess I should say. R: Yeah, there's that first scene where Johnathan is eating in front of him, and you definitely get a vibe that this dude is not right.  K: Like, he's talking about his hairy ears. [laughs] R: [laughs] Yeah. K: His weird skin, he looks ill, as if when he's making his way to the castle all of the peasantry crying and pressing crucifixes into his hands wasn't red-flag enough for him. R: No, no, no. It's just a quaint little village, this is the thing they do. There is the aspect of vampirism having the power of glamour, and I think this is probably the most effective display of it. The way that he's describing Dracula, there's nothing attractive about this man, and yet. K: He's very drawn to him. R: Mhm. K: And he wants to help him. R: As is Mina. [laughs] K: And Lucy, and all of them. So yeah, vampires. Great example of influence in literature over the course of a relatively short time, shaping something that we now consider to be commonplace.  R: Mhm. K: We've even narrowed it down farther. One of my favorite things about Dracula is, there's nothing that necessarily says he can't go in the sun in that book.  R: Right, right. [laughs] K: It's just that he has no powers after noon, I think, or he loses his powers at sunrise. So he can be outside, but he's just a regular guy at that point.  R: Mhm. K: So, obviously things continued to change and evolve there, the “no going out during the day” is held over from the much older vampire myths. Anyways. So, all of that said, how do we see influences in writing? When can we pick these out? One of the obvious is the story itself, the plot. Maybe some story arcs. R: I would argue that people tend to pick it up faster when it's a similar setting. When it's the worldbuilding, I think people notice it more. K: Okay. R: And I think, again, plot arcs and character arcs are things that we do have to recycle.  K: Absolutely. I think it's rare these days to see completely original, never-before-imagined setting. In terms of world-building, both the world itself, and in my notes here I put “world systems.” Anything from the way magic functions, or government functions, or society functions. There's only so many ways you can organize people, essentially. [laughs] So there may have been something that you came across and you're like “Oh, that's interesting. What if I did this instead?” The characters- anything from the archetypes and tropes of characters to their storylines and their redemption arcs, or even just the relationships, how they interact with each other. How the characters are broken out either into family groups or groups of friends or hierarchies within that. I think we see that a lot. With plot, we can kind of go back to what I said at the beginning of the episode: sometimes there are things in there where it's like, “this is clearly Order of the Phoenix.”  R: Mhm.  K: [laughs] We're just seeing it presented a different way. R: And again, an agent loves this, because you can say “this is my list of story comps.” And if they're successful books, the agent can use that to sell the story and then the publisher can use it to sell the book. K: Mhm. R: So even though sometimes it sounds like we are poo-pooing derivative work, if it comes across as fresh, nobody's going to poo-poo that you have a great list of comps to start with.  K: Definitely, yeah. R: And I would like to note that that is the first time we have said “poo-poo” on this podcast. I feel like that should be marked. K: That definitely needs to be denoted for posterity. R: And now it's been said three times. K: [laughs] Then there's two other areas of influence I'd like to talk about that are a little harder to quantify. One is style. And this comes more to writing style, and how you're presenting your story. For instance, being influenced by the way the author just writes in general, their style, I will harken back to one of our favorite examples here. If you've read Gideon the Ninth it is a very very unique writing style, not something I've ever come across before and I'm sure there are a lot of people who are currently in the process of attempting to imitate it; I don't know how successful they're going to be, but I bet they're trying. R: And then there are others who are influenced by it to say “Oh, I can let loose like that?” K: Yeah. Exactly. Or, “I can try something completely different that I didn't think anybody would be interested in, but if they're willing to do this then maybe they would.” Point of view or viewpoint in the book - if you've read the second book in the Locked Tomb series, Harrow the Ninth, a lot of that is written second person. The Broken Earth series, large portions of that are in second person. R: Well, the Broken Earth series, the amazing thing is it's written in all three. K: Yes, yeah. R: So if you haven't read that I can't go any further, I do not wanna spoil that, even though it's been out for years, the culmination of that book is so good that I refuse to ever spoil it. But go read it, if you haven't read it, for sure. It's a big one - K: It's a lot - R: But it is so worth it. I listen to it on audio, and I can recommend that too. K: Yeah. So both of those books have instances of strange, or - R: Disorienting? K: Disorienting's an excellent word. I remember reading Harrow the Ninth and texting Rekka and going like “Is this like this the entire time?” R: And my only response is “Did you get to the soup yet?” K: [laughs] And it was a mentality shift, and once I just was like “Okay, I fixed my brain to a point that it can accept and read this now.” But another style quality is dialogue. How you incorporate and how you use dialogue in your writing is something that I think is very easily influenced by how other people do that. This can also start feeding into the character influence there as well, how the characters talk and interact with each other is very influenced by dialogue. So then the last kind of nebulous part that I'd like to talk about, and this is a little bit different but it is worth bringing up, is historical influence. There are a lot of books and stories that are nominal retellings of either one or a series of historical events. I'll use Game of Thrones here as an example, and spoilers for anybody who hasn't read or watched - R: I don't care if we spoil Game of Thrones. [laughs] K: George R. R. Martin, well first the basis of a lot of this is the War of the Roses, which was the English Civil War. It was also called the Hundred Years' War; it was just a long, bloody, drawn-out battle of constantly changing kings and powerful families trying to get their person on the throne of England. R: And the interesting part is, it is a hundred years, so the people who started this have cast this war upon the generations to follow, and if that doesn't tell you something about where George R. R. Martin is going to be forced to take the end of the books, I don't know what will, because HBO managed to make the show take what, the war take five years or maybe ten years if that? Just the fact that it was ten seasons, right? Was it ten seasons or nine? K: It was eight seasons. R: Okay, so at most, because of the children aging on the show, it was a nine-year hundred-year war. So if George R. R. Martin is following intentionally the framework of the Hundred Years' war, none of the characters that you're rooting for are going to make it. Just in the nature of aging. K [overlapping]: And there's - you can go through and just read a brief history of the Hundred Years' War, and you'll be able to identify characters in there. Like Tyrion has some very clear Richard III vibes to him. But then there's other historical events and groups of people that he took and pulled into this. The Lannisters are such a clear parallel of the Borgia family that it's almost difficult to know that and read this and know what happened to the Borgias. The Red Wedding was based off of a famous event in Scotland where something very very similar happened to that. Some Scottish lords were invited to dinner by a Scottish lord with English leanings, and he killed all of them, to get in good with the English. R: After serving them bread. K: After serving them bread, exactly. But again, historical influence - the concept of guestright is very important in most cultures and especially in Scotland. So there's so many examples of people taking strong influence from either actual historical events or folklore and mythological events, like the Trojan War and things like that, and incorporating it into their writing. There are a lot of writers who decide “I'm gonna do a modern interpretation of such-and-such,” because maybe - for instance the Trojan War, they're very interested in classic Greek mythology and decide “Hey, that's a great story to tell; I'm gonna set it in a different place but still tell the story.” K: So that's some elements of influence, and before we wrap up here, let's address the thing we started to talk a little bit about but should definitely round out. When is influence just becoming copying, at a certain point? This is hard. Because it's really about finesse and originality. It's about taking something that you liked and putting your own spin on it, so to speak. If you're just re-creating the same story and sticking your characters into it, you're going to get called at best lazy, at worst a plagiarist. R: Yeah, there are plenty of books out there - and I have one to include in the list - that are retellings of a classic story. The problem is when you don't approach it as “how do I make this my story?” K: Yes. I'm gonna use young adult genres here because it's a little bit newer and easier to trace through this, and I'm not going to name books in this apart from the first series that I will name because that author is wildly successful. The Mortal Instruments trilogy - you could probably say series at this point, there's so many books in that world at this point - by Cassandra Clare, is one of the early and premiere urban fantasy young adult novels. This was copied so many times. Some of the authors were a little more original with where they were setting it, some of them were a little more original with where they were putting the characters or who the characters were, but the magical teeenagers who are part of a secret society that protects humanity was everywhere. ‘Cause these books were a runaway success. They were very original; no one had really seen something like this before. The Mortal Instruments created so many tropes that I can't and will not try to name them. R: And I think it's, part of that, somebody loves a book that they experienced so much that they want to hold onto that feeling forever, and one way to do that is to create something completely inspired by that same world. And this is where fanfic comes from, and fanfic is healthy, and it's a great way to express feelings of “I don't want to leave this book world.” But when you take it to a publisher and you say “This is going to sell really well because the other one that already did it sold really well,” as they say - don't follow trends in publishing, because you're five years behind. K: Conversely, a lot of people were able to get things like this published because the market wasn't inundated with this yet. R: Right, you had to be among the first to imitate a successful book, which is why they say don't follow the trends, because you won't be among the first. There are so many people out there writing that there are easily 500 people ahead of you in the queue for the publisher slush pile. K: Yeah and I wanna be clear, the first book of this entire - I'm not joking, I think there's over 20 books within this world at this point - the first one came out in 2007. So yes, the Internet was very alive and well at that point; it was not what it is now. Writing communities on the Internet were not what they are now. But all of this is to say that there were people who just straight up copied this genre, this book in some way. Either in terms of setting, in terms of characters, in terms of the magical elements of this, they just straight up copied this and I gotta be honest with you, a lot of them were not terribly successful. [laughs] Some of them were, though, and some of them made some money off of this. R: Well, for other readers who are not writers, when the same thing happens they come out of a book series and they have to wait for the next book, they want more. K: Exactly, they were looking for more. R: This is not unlike when the animation company puts out a very similar cheap animation to the latest Disney release. I worked at Blockbuster, and I saw this all the time. You'd have a big animated Disney release, and you'd have this tiny company out of who-knows-where that put together an animated copy, and they rely on parents and grandparents to grab the wrong one. This is not like trying to give the kids more of what they want, this is like “If we are gonna be next to this Disney movie on the shelf, someone will pick us up by accident and we will make money.” K: Well I always remember because a lot of Disney's classics, like the Disney renaissance movies, they were all like public domain stories. So they would just make that and they could get it out on VHS faster than Disney could - R: Yeah, they were made direct to video. K: Because Disney left it in - like everyone knew what the upcoming Disney movies were. So if you knew there was gonna be Aladdin, well, the story of Aladdin is public domain, you start making Aladdin right away. [Brief interlude of car noises] R: I literally believe that Mike's apartment is built on an overpass. K: No, just next to a road with a lot of people who drive like idiots. R: Well that was like a garbage truck, but anyway. K: That was a motorcycle. R: That was a motorcycle?? It sounded like it had at least 16 wheels. K: Yeah. R: Alright, sorry, so Aladdin - K: So everyone knew what movies Disney was making well in advance, and of course these would take years after they were announced to actually be finished and put in theatres. So if Disney says “we're making Aladdin” - R [overlapping]: Before it's in theatres! K: - well then, another small studio can also make Aladdin. The animation isn't gonna be great but then Aladdin's gonna be in the theatres and then a week later the imitation Aladdin are going to be on shelves, and grandparents are gonna go “Oh my grandchildren want to see -” R: Or “They've been talking about this movie and here it is on VHS,” and they don't know how theatre releases work and so they grab it and buy it, and they spend $18 or $15, seems like a really good deal on a Disney movie, and the animation studio makes their money back. So they do it again. K: So don't be that cheap animation studio. Don't be the person that's taking something that somebody put a lot of time, thought, and creativity into, and churning out the cheap, fast, easy-to-consume version of it. R: Yeah and I don't think, when it comes to writers - I mean I'm sure there are people out there who go “Okay this is the newest thing, I am going to behave like an algorithm and I am going to make another version of it and then release it, and I will make lots of bucks.” There are those writers that–they do that on purpose. So don't be them. But I don't think any of our audience are going to be them. And if you were thinking that that was a great way to make a successful book, let us correct you. But if you are inspired by Gideon the Ninth, or by Mortal Instruments, or anything like that - take the time to develop a story just like you would a completely inspired out of left field story, and take the time to put it together in a considerate and thoughtful and unique way, and then we approve. You get our approval. We're not promising to buy the manuscript, but we are approving a heartfelt influenced work, not an imitation that is intended to ride the wave of success of someone else. K: Exactly. R: Now when we're saying “copying,” are you talking about the publishing houses out there who literally lift the copy and try to sell it on Amazon, and just do it again and again and again as they get caught and cancelled? K: [laughs] No, no. Copying has, I think the way I'm defining it, more to do with not adding any creativity or original elements of your own, just saying “I liked what this person did, I'm going to do it too.” And listen - it's a fine line. One of the things that's really interesting about plagiarism is it's either very obvious - somebody had too many parts in a book, a novel, a poem, that are clearly just from another book - or, you've gotta go through a whole process of proving that somebody had access to something you were working on and directly lifted elements from that and put it into their book. Plagiarism is either very straightforward or very difficult. R: And, with plagiarism, they have plagiarism checkers on the Internet; I think a lot of teachers appreciate that because they can't read everything. So they can run an assignment from a student through a plagiarism checker, and that plagiarism checker can do its best with whatever it has access to in its database to catch - K: Plagiarism checkers are very good now, by the way. R: But we're talking word-for-word plagiarism. Sometimes what we refer to in the publishing world as plagiarism is actually trademark infringement. K: Yes. R: And that is difficult because if you write a story with Harry Potter in it, but you change his name and all the words are your original words, how do we run a plagiarism checker against that? K: Yes. So it's like I said, either very easy or very difficult to prove plagiarism; there's rarely a middle ground there. R: Although there are books that have been caught lifting a paragraph or two, from different books. So like the entire thing is plagiarized, but it's plagiarized from different sources. K: Yeah. You see instances of plagiarism tend to show up more in academic and scientific publishing than in fiction and genre-writing. It definitely does happen, though. R: Yup. Because, again, there are people out there who are confused about what is allowed and what is advisable in writing.  K: There are some really significant seminal works in American literature especially–I'm sure globally but I just happen to know the American ones–that are just plagiarized in certain places. And a lot of them were written in a time where it wasn't as easy to check this, so we- R: Find out much later, when it is easier, how much that was widespread. K: Yup. Exactly. R: There are nefarious people. I was referring, in my last statement, to the innocent, naive new writer, who just does not understand what is and isn't acceptable. Or, they didn't intend for it to go widespread, and they wrote a little thing for fun and end up finding out that they are not welcome and doors are being shut in their face because they crossed the line and it got noticed. K: Yeah, exactly.  R: That's the thing, a little baby writer learning about things the very hard way. It's a shame. That would be someone that you would hope would find a mentor who would guide them in the right direction before that kind of thing gets shot in their face. But with a pen name you can be reborn, as long as you reiterate yourself in better forms than the previous mistakes that you made. K: Yeah, and plagiarism should be very easy to avoid. R: Mhm. K: If you're looking at somebody else's work and saying “I wish this was mine, I'm going to make this mine,” don't do that. You should never be copying text from somebody else. Everything should be written on your own.  R: Yeah, don't go, “How did that person write it? I loved that so much.” Well yes, you did, but that's not your voice. So write it yourself. And I would say that if you close a book and you go, “Oh, I'm so inspired to write,” and you sit down and you start writing right away, don't publish that. [laughs] K: Yeah. R: There is a process to developing your own ideas even if it's mostly internal and you never grab a notebook and work out the story itself. The process of coming up with your own ideas is not “I just read this, I'm going to go write because I'm inspired and I'm going to finish that book before I do anything else.” [laughs] That's probably going to be a very derivative, if not plagiaristic, book. So don't do that. I always recommend you sit with your ideas for a while before you sit down and write it.  K: Absolutely. I mean, that's important in general. R: Carry it around like a baby, pretend you're some kind of marsupial and you have your twelve-day gestation period but you still carry that little joey around for a while before it's ready to enter the world. That's kind of the process that I recommend for a writer. K: [laughs] So there you go. Be a marsupial. R: Be a marsupial. The opossum tail has its own fingerprints which are unique to it, so there's that. Grow a prehensile tail and commit crimes with it so that you can be tail-printed later. Alright, I don't know where this story's going.  K: I like it, I like it. R: Yeah, I like it too, but it's not a good way to wrap up an episode because all we can do is just stop. [laughs] So, if you have any questions about plagiarism or inspiration, or you just want to share your inspirations and influences, you can @ us on Twitter or Instagram @WMBcast. You can find us on patreon.com/WMBcast, and we will have some more marsupial facts for you in two weeks. K: [laughs] R: [laughs] Thanks everybody for listening, and I hope this was a helpful discussion. Kaelyn and I have to go sit at a desk and figure out- have we fulfilled the promises that we made to you when we started this podcast? Because we feel like we've just kind of been indulging ourselves in what topics we bring up, so if you feel like, “Hey, you said you were going to cover this, and you never covered that,” definitely tell us that too, because we want to go back to our mission statement and make sure that every once in a while we give you an episode that's in line with that. So if you have input to that regard, please let us know. Otherwise, marsupial facts in two weeks! Thanks everyone!

On this episode of the podcast we discuss the 1992 adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula from director Francis Ford Coppola! This film revitalized the gothic horror genre & features an amazing array of practical special effects. Join us as we look back at this great horror film as well as the cinema (and wine) of Francis Ford Coppola himself. Support us on Patreon for exclusive bonus discussions, voting rights for our upcoming episodes, and early access to all of our content: www.patreon.com/AlmostCultClassics.

Transylvania's vampire lore inspired the setting of Bram Stoker's Dracula, if not the character of the Count, and encompasses not only undead monsters, but living beings akin to witches.  (The show is introduced with an audio snippet from Maria Tănase, premiere interpreter of Romanian folk song.) Mrs. Karswell begins the show, reading a passage Stoker wrote … Read More Read More The post Transylvanian Vampires appeared first on Bone and Sickle.

Theunissen, Steve, and Jack Cole. Performance by Simon Whistler, Elizabeth Bathory – The ‘Blood Countess,' Biographics, 1 Nov. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3N3TSPZoY1o&lc=UgxS9zTiN2xi2FfEzel4AaABAg.Bon, Scott A. “The Unique Motives of Female Serial Killers.” Psychology Today , 24 June 2019, www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/wicked-deeds/201906/the-unique-motives-female-serial-killers.Craft, Kimberly L. "INFAMOUS LADY:THE TRUE STORY OFCOUNTESS ERZSÉBET BÁTHORY". Independent , 2009.“Elizabeth Báthory.” Serial Killers Wiki, serialkillers.wikia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_B%C3%A1thory.“Elizabeth Báthory.” Wikipedia, Wikimedia Foundation, 2 Mar. 2021, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_B%C3%A1thory.Fox, James Alan, and Jack Levin. “Multiple Homicide: Patterns of Serial and Mass Murder.” Crime and Justice: The University of Chicago Press, vol. 23, 1998, pp. 407–456., doi:https://www.jstor.org/stable/1147545.“Hungarian Countesses' Torturous Escapades Are Exposed.” History.com, A&E Television Networks, 13 Nov. 2009, www.history.com/this-day-in-history/bathorys-torturous-escapades-are-exposed.The Infographics Show, director. Serial Killer Who Killed Over 500 People - The Blood Countess, The Infographics Show, 2 June 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUQAEtPmxBA.Jewell, Tim. “The Macdonald Triad: Can 3 Behaviors Predict a Serial Killer?” Edited by Timothy J Legg, Healthline.com, 24 Mar. 2020, www.healthline.com/health/macdonald-triad.Kettler, Sara. “Elizabeth Bathory.” Biography.com, A&E Networks Television, 21 May 2020, www.biography.com/crime-figure/elizabeth-bathory.KYTKA. “Watch This: Bathory: Countess of Blood.” Everything Czech, 16 Nov. 2017, www.tresbohemes.com/2017/11/watch-bathory-countess-blood/#:~:text=Following%20her%20trial%2C%20one%20of,or%20bear%20her%20name%20anywhere!“The Legend of Elizabeth Báthory: The Blood Countess.” Medical Bag, 14 Jan. 2019, www.medicalbag.com/home/features/grey-matter/the-legend-of-elizabeth-bathory-the-blood-countess/.Scary Night Visit to Elizabeth Bathory's Castle, Researchers, 1 May 2017, www.youtube.com/watch?v=3Afj2siQnJM.Sharma, Pankaj. “Elizabeth Bathory: 10 Things You'll Learn About Her in Hungary.” TheTravel, 3 Nov. 2019, www.thetravel.com/elizabeth-bathory-history-education-hungary-travel/.Shelat, Amit E. “Muscle Function Loss: MedlinePlus Medical Encyclopedia.” MedlinePlus, U.S. National Library of Medicine, 4 Feb. 2020, medlineplus.gov/ency/article/003190.htm.Sherman, Elisabeth. “Did Elizabeth Bathory, The ‘Blood Countess," Actually Deserve Her Nickname?” All That's Interesting, All That's Interesting, 25 Mar. 2020, allthatsinteresting.com/elizabeth-bathory-true-story#:~:text=According%20to%20the%20reports%20and,feast%20on%20their%20exposed%20skin%3B.Slovakia From Above, director. Cachtice Castle - Ruins of Cachtice Castle - The Bloody Lady of Čachtice, Slovakia From Above , 25 Feb. 2018, www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QqGernWjns.Ugc. “Ruins of Cachtice Castle.” Atlas Obscura, Atlas Obscura, 17 Nov. 2009, www.atlasobscura.com/places/ruins-cachtice-castle.White, Conan. The Countess That Bathed In The Blood Of Her Victims! . Performance by Chris Kane, The Countess Who Bathed In The Blood Of Her Victims, Simple History, 8 Oct. 2020, www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdwVmbhCvs8. https://www.abc15.com/lifestyle/blood-facials-what-are-they-are-why-do-people-get-themhttps://shareably.net/bizarre-beauty-trends-you-wont-believe-real/https://www.elle.com/beauty/makeup-skin-care/news/a14931/kim-kardashians-vampire-facial/https://www.google.com/search?q=what+is+a+dermapen&source=lnms&tbm=shop&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwjrsNGtgOjwAhVVHs0KHWfXDjcQ_AUoAXoECAEQAw&biw=1440&bih=732

This week the boys take a magic carpet ride back to November 13th, 1992 to rub some lamps and suck some blood with Disney's ALADDIN and BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA.  It's a whole new world on Episode 64 of OPENING WEEKEND!The scene: A young, dark haired handsome man finds a magic lamp in the desert and is granted three wishes by the all-powerful Genie: "I want to be to be rich, I want to be famous, I want to have a spotless British accent!” Well, Keanu, two out of three ain't bad, right?  November 13, 1992 was an opening weekend filled with bravura performances: Robin Williams' “Genie”, Gary Oldman's “Count Dracula”, and Fred and Dan's “Leather Guy and Construction Worker from The Village People.”   As young Prince Ali was hustling his way through the streets of Agrabah, young Jason was GETTING hustled on the streets of Little Italy. “You ain't never met a friend like me!” said the Three Card Monte dealer…Which is more entertaining: Gary Oldman running around Transylvania wearing silly wigs and getting  drunk on blood  or Jason, Dan, and Fred running around Hempstead, Long Island wearing silly hats PRETENDING to be drunk in student-produced Chekhov comedies? Answer: Neither, because WHAT ARE YOU DOING Anthony Hopkins?!? And the boys get a very special announcement via a genetically altered Stork in the mail-sack!DRACOOOOOOOL!  

Rachel and Andrei of Aeolian Heart join me for a discussion of Occult and Esoteric symbolism in Film. In celebration of the Lunar Eclipse on the Gorgon's Head, we explore 3 Horror classics: Jaws, Bram Stoker's Dracula & The Shining. :-O

This week, we're returning to Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker by covering my highlight of this season, the moment we've been building to for sixteen weeks, 1984's underappreciated masterpiece "Top Secret!".It's a tale that involves cow galoshes, insanely intricate sequences, tons of bird shit, an unexpected amount of musical numbers, and oodles of an impossibly pretty young man named Val Kilmer.Plus, Jim from "Film Rage" stops by for a discussion of his podcast and the 1988 Ken Russell adaptation of Bram Stoker's "Lair of the White Worm". Join your wonky yet affable host!This Week's Recommendation(s): “The Big Sleep" (1946)For every single episode at least a week early and great WEEKLY bonus episodes, become a Patreon subscriber. For only $5 you can help keep the show alive and enjoy some quality laughs in the process: https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschroniclesTwitter: @coolnesspodryan, Instagram: @thecoolnesschronicles, Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/coolnesspodryan Theme Music by: Bildschirm (bildschirm.bandcamp.com). Artwork by: Lacie Barker.  The clips featured in this podcast were for critical review and parody, which are protected under the Fair Use laws of the United States Copyright Act of 1976. All rights are reserved and acknowledged.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/coolnesschronicles)

In high school, most of us were introduced to Bram Stoker’s Dracula or we were exposed to the seductive villain through the plethora of vampire movies from as far back as 1931. Dracula has become a part of our Halloween traditions and part of our ethos. Donna & Lindsay went to Romania over Halloween to … Continue reading Episode 366: Romania, The Perfect Halloween Vacation →

A reading of the book "Dracula" by Bram Stoker to help you fall asleep  Voted for by Patreon supporters. Support the podcast on Patreon and get a full bonus episode every week, vote on what gets read next, get access to all episodes and complete audiobooks! Patreon: https://www.Patreon.com/DownToSleep Down To Sleep is a podcast to fall asleep to. Turn on & drift off. If you need help sleeping or just want to relax listening to classic tales as bedtime stories with a side of unintentional softly spoken ASMR. Come gently nod off to sleep with me, a new episode every Monday. You can listen on Spotify, Google, Apple, and most podcast apps. Website: https://www.DownToSleepPodcast.com Here you will find all the links of where to listen to Down To Sleep, including to our new YouTube channel where you can find more softly spoken book readings, sleep stories, and special episodes with rain sounds to be a sleep aid for you at night and to help you sleep. Enjoy. 

It Came From Cleveland #28 Big Bad B-Movie Show, Bram Stoker, Claude Rains & Patton!

Thank God It's Friday! This week I am joined by the wonderful Bede from The Super Network. We dive into Bram Stoker's Dracula and what makes this film so fantastic! Hope you enjoy the episode. See you next Friday! Follow TGIF - Twitter, Instagram, and Letterboxd Join the Discord Support TGIF: A Horror Movie Podcast by contributing to their Tip Jar: https://tips.pinecast.com/jar/tgif-a-horror-movie-podcast

Listen How Dracula Saved Johnathan Harker From The Attack of Wolves

The Fellowship is pleased to present our review of the new graphic novel Lugosi: The Rise and Fall of Hollywood's Dracula by Koren Shadmi. There's a lot to talk about in this book on many different levels. Plus some random talk and our usual tangents

A discussion about and look back at Bram Stoker and the creation of his 1897 novel "Dracula" and his widow, Florence's, subsequent battles with Prana-Film over their production of the 1922 silent film, "Nosferatu."

This week Kansas City Actors Theatre premieres the second and final part of Bram Stoker's “The Judge's House,” this Friday at noon on KKFI 90.1 FM. KCART returns to “The Judge's House,” written by master of horror Bram Stoker. Malcolm Malcolmson is trying to study for his upcoming exams, but his evenings are plagued by the rats who occupy the judge's house. After receiving some helpful advice from a doctor Malcolm sets out on trying to end his ongoing nightmare. Soon, Malcolm Malcolmson will find out for whom the judge's bell tolls. Featuring Matt Schwader, Hillary Clemens, Cinnamon Schultz, Shawna Peña-Downing, Brian Paulette, and Victor Raider-Wexler. Directed by Matt Schwader, sound design and engineering by Thomas Newby, and hosted by Walter Coppage. -- KCART is made possible in-part by, the Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts, the Estelle S. and Robert A. Long Ellis Foundation, ArtsKC, the Missouri Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, Theatre League, and the Breidenthal-Snyder Foundation.

Today we're chatting with Zin E Rocklyn, author of Flowers for the Sea which just came out in paperback from Tordorcom.Zin E. Rocklyn is a contributor to Bram Stoker-nominated and This is Horror Award-winning Nox Pareidolia, Kaiju Rising II: Reign of Monsters, Brigands: A Blackguards Anthology, and Forever Vacancy anthologies and Weird Luck Tales No. 7 zine. Their story "Summer Skin" in the Bram Stoker-nominated anthology Sycorax's Daughters received an honorable mention for Ellen Datlow's Best Horror of the Year, Volume Ten. Zin contributed the nonfiction essay “My Genre Makes a Monster of Me” to Uncanny Magazine's Hugo Award-winning Disabled People Destroy Science Fiction. Their short story "The Night Sun" and flash fiction "teatime" were published on Tor.com. Flowers for the Sea is their debut novella. Zin is a 2017 VONA and 2018 Viable Paradise graduate as well as a 2022 Clarion West candidate. You can find them on Twitter @intelligentwat.In FLOWERS FOR THE SEA, survivors from a flooded kingdom struggle alone on an ark. Resources are scant, and ravenous beasts circle…and their fangs are sharp. Rocklyn centers the story on Iraxi, a refugee that is ostracized, despised, and a commoner who refused a prince. Iraxi is also pregnant with a child that might be more than human, and her fate may be darker and more powerful than she can imagine.

Episode 77 October 28, 2021 On the Needles 2:47 ALL KNITTING LINKS GO TO RAVELRY UNLESS OTHERWISE NOTED.  Please visit our Instagram page @craftcookreadrepeat for non-Rav photos and info     Newspaper Pullover by Joji Locatelli, Biches & Buches Le Petit Lambswool in Light Grey, Isager Yarn Spinni in Charcoal   On the Easel 8:58 New calendar art! Some landscape art…attempts. Gouachevember is happening! Check the hashtag to see the contributions. Paola workwear jacket from fabrics-store.com   On the Table 18:51 Rancho Gordo Bean club wait list    Autumn pilau from East   Mexican Red Rice from Chicano Eats by Esteban Castillo w/oven roasted chicken thighs. My favorite banana bread. (I use half vegetable shortening & half butter. I use extra banana. And I usually omit nuts).   Weekday Vegetarians review 27:43 Monica loved: Eggplant & tofu with sweet-hot chili glaze,Za'atar flat bread,Crunchy cheesy bean bake, Cauliflower Cutlets with romesco sauce, Broiled Chickpea Caesar Salad   Cortney loved: chickpea mac & cheese, Andy's spicy diced potatoes, Slivered minty sugar snap peas, and vote for pancetta in the stewy black lentils with chard & feta. Plus: ALL the dressings!! Next up: we're exploring Cooking at Home: Or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying about Recipes (and Love My Microwave): A Cookbook by David Chang and Priya Krishna On the Nightstand 48:15 We are now a Bookshop.org affiliate!  You can visit our shop to find books we've talked about or click on the links below.  The books are supplied by local independent bookstores and a percentage goes to us at no cost to you!   The Other Bennet Sister by Janice Hadlow Network Effect by Martha Wells Fugitive Telemetry by Martha Wells The Guide by Peter Heller Apples Never Fall by Lianne Moriarty Matrix by Lauren Groff The Souvenir Museum by Elizabeth McCracken You are Here *for now by Adam J. Kurtz Dracula by Bram Stoker, bonus sketch of Stoker in my Sharpie Sketches highlight. (I've linked to an excellent audio version narrated by J.P. Guimont).

This week, still in the Halloween spirit, we bring you what is widely regarded as the first modern vampire Tale, a short story called 'The Vampyre' by John Polidori.  It is notable as the second most famous piece of literature to come out of the legendary ghost story competition held between Byron and Shelley and their friends over a wet weekend on the shores of Lake Geneva.  That contest gave us 'Frankenstein' as well as this, the first story to fuse together various and disparate folk tales of the vampyre and the undead, and give us a modern narrative that would go on to inspire Bram Stoker and a host of other gothic horror writers.  If you'd like to support The Well Told Tale, please visit us on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thewelltoldtaleBooks - (buying anything on Amazon through this link helps support the podcast): The Vampyre and Other Tales of the Macabre - https://amzn.to/2ZNSrVz Vampire Classics (Illustrated) - https://amzn.to/3CHDrHt The Diary of Dr. John William Polidori - https://amzn.to/3CFFUlT FilmsBram Stoker's Dracula - https://amzn.to/3bAMa2lInterview with the Vampire - https://amzn.to/3EzmuiUI would like to thank my patrons: Toni A, Joshua Clark, Maura Lee, Jane, John Bowles, Glen Thrasher, Ruairi, Cade Norman, Chris, Britt and Silja Tanner.Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/thewelltoldtale)

Happy Halloween! Tonight's sleepy story is Dracula by Bram Stoker. Published in 1897, this is one of the most famous stories in English Literature. Don't worry, tonight's episode is not terrifying. Jonathan Harker arrives in Transylvania and travels to the estate of Count Dracula. If you like this episode, please remember to follow on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or your favourite podcast app. Also, share with any family or friends that might have trouble drifting off.If you'd like to support the podcast, you can buy me a coffee here ------> buymeacoffee.com/justsleeppod

On this episode of Mythic Existence, host Jack Daly explores the origins of vampires and Dracula. We investigate belief about vampires from European folklore, look into the life of Vlad the Impaler, and discuss Bram Stoker's groundbreaking novel.*Like and Subscribe!**Follow Mythic Existence on Instagram and Twitter!*

Dracula – Episode 40 Dracula represents our 4th year and our 40th show!  It has been wonderful to read and grow with all of you please continue to share us with your friends and form your own Reading Radio book clubs across the country. Dracula is the classic gothic tale that made the vampire so famous. ... Read More The post Dracula by Bram Stoker – Episode 40 appeared first on Reading Radio.

Disclaimer #1: This episode is Explicit like all of our other episodes. Disclaimer #2: Do NOT - DO NOT - do the actions we talk about in this episode without first consulting a medical and/or sexual health professional. Lmao. Happy Halloween! We talk about a forefather of villainy, Dracula. We pull from Bram Stoker's Dracula novel (1897), the movie Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992), and Netflix/BBC Dracula (2020) to discuss! We talk: Dracula's despair, why he doesn't like garlic, why he fears entering homes and his insecurities, what it's like to be alive -err, undead- for so long, Dracula's grief, Dracula being pro-sex, and more! We also feature my poem at the end, "Dracula has her period" by moi, Tiana Hennings. Instagram: @nextdoorvillain Email: nextdoorvillain@gmail.com Check out our website: https://www.nextdoorvillain.com/ --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/nextdoorvillain/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/nextdoorvillain/support

Halloween Specials | International Storytelling Event : a podcastaudios Exclusive ✅ | Bram Stoker's : Dracula's Guest . It was written as the first chapter for Stoker's 1897 novel Dracula, but was deleted prior to publication as the original publishers felt was superfluous to the story. "Dracula's Guest" follows an Englishman (whose name is never mentioned, but is presumed to be Jonathan Harker) on a visit to Munich before leaving for Transylvania. It is Walpurgis Night, and in spite of the hotelier's warning to not return late, the young man later leaves his carriage and wanders toward the direction of an abandoned "unholy" village. As the carriage departs with the frightened and superstitious driver, a tall and thin stranger scares the horses at the crest of a hill. ---------------- About Guest : Scott Jameson is an American actor, producer and voice artist. Currently based in Dallas, Texas, he began acting in live theater productions at the age of five. Today he primarily does on-camera work in films, television and commercials. Scott is working on two feature films that are currently in production. The first, titled “The Talent Process,” will be released during 2022 in select theaters across the U.S. and on streaming platforms. It introduces his character Serket (pronounced sir-KET), who then becomes the main character in the sequel, “Serket” which will release in 2023. To find out more about Scott, check out his IMDb profile (https://www.imdb.me/scott-jameson) and Follow him on Facebook (https://www.facebook.com/scott.jameson.actor/). Connect with us : https://linktr.ee/Creativeaudios --- Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/creativecellsaudios.in/support

A special Halloween bonus episode! Madeline tells Lesley about the author who wrote Dracula and not much else!  We're drinking peanut butter pumpkin martinis: One part peanut butter whiskey and two parts pumpkin spice cream liqueur, shaken and poured into a martini glass. 

Listen to them sing, the Children of the night....or just listen to this podcast. Today we are joined by returning guest Dina Lawless as we discuss Francis Ford Coppola's remake of Bram Stoker Dracula. Tune in to the last 5 minutes where Dina discusses her experiences with Lorraine Warren and her fascination with the Occult. 

We brought on superstar MVP guest Linton Lewis from the Uncanny Cinema podcast to talk about this incredibly erotic interpretation of everyone's favorite vampire. There are a lot of interesting things going on in this film, though Keanu Reeves' accent is... not one of them. Come for the horror talk, stay for the dissection of Gary Oldman's moaning! Be sure to also follow us on social at @revengeof90spod.

From folkloric figures like Lamia and Grendel who feast on human flesh, to historical monsters like Vlad the Impaler and Elizabeth Báthory who reveled in human blood and carnage, to Bram Stoker's Dracula, the antecedents to the modern vampire have instilled fear and morbid fascination for centuries. Especially during periods of social devastation, imperial conquest, plague, and mass death, vampires and vampiric figures have featured prominently in popular imagination. In every case, the cultural phenomenon of the vampire reveals much about the time, place, and people from which it emerged—and the persistent relevance and adaptability of the vampire allegory likewise reveals much about the evolution of human society and its timeless struggle to come to terms with death. So, in the age of runaway capitalist destruction and climate catastrophe, what should we make of the popularity of new vampire allegories like Netflix's Midnight Mass and the Provincetown series in the new season of FX's American Horror Story?In this panel discussion, just in time for Halloween, the TRNN team hosts a wide-ranging discussion about the historical significance of the vampire and its enduring allure in the 21st century. Our panel today includes TRNN Editor-in-Chief Maximillian Alvarez; TRNN Managing Editor Jocelyn Dombroski; Marc Steiner, host of The Marc Steiner Show; and special guest, renowned author and editor Lyta Gold.Pre-Production/Studio/Post Production: Stephen FrankHelp us continue producing radically independent news and in-depth analysis by following us and becoming a monthly sustainer: Donate: https://therealnews.com/donate-podSign up for our newsletter: https://therealnews.com/newsletter-podLike us on Facebook: https://facebook.com/therealnewsFollow us on Twitter: https://twitter.com/therealnews

This week Kansas City Actors Theatre premieres its two-part production of Bram Stoker's “The Judge's House,” this Friday at noon on KKFI 90.1 FM. From 1914, “The Judge's House,” written by master of horror Bram Stoker, tells of a Malcolm Malcolmson, a student searching for a quiet place to study for his upcoming exams. Ignoring the local superstitions, Malcolm moves into an old mansion once belonging to an infamous ‘hanging sudge'. As things around the house begin to grow uneasy, Malcolm soon learns to beware the superstitions. Featuring Matt Schwader, Hillary Clemens, Jerry Mañan, Cinnamon Schultz and Shawna Peña-Downing. Directed by Matt Schwader, sound design and engineering my Thomas Newby, and hosted by Walter Coppage. -- KCART is made possible in-part by, the Richard J. Stern Foundation for the Arts, the Estelle S. and Robert A. Long Ellis Foundation, ArtsKC, the Missouri Arts Council, the National Endowment for the Arts, Theatre League, and the Breidenthal-Snyder Foundation.

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For this year's final bonus Halloween show, we're taking a trip to Transylvania. Orson Welles and The Mercury Theatre On the Air present a spine-tingling adaptation of Bram Stoker's Dracula (originally aired on CBS on July 11, 1938).

This week's show is the final frightful installment of our month-long celebration of the Halloween season. We also celebrate 2-years of existence!!! We hope you love this episode to death… There are some frightfully spooktacular songs on this episode that will raise the hairs on the back of your neck and nether regions! Happy Halloween everyone!What is it we do here at InObscuria? In the beginning, good always overpowered the evils of all man's sins... But in time the nations grew weak, and our cities fell to slums while evil stood strong. In the dusts of hell,lurked the blackest of hates. For he whom they feared awaited them... Now many many lifetimes later lay destroyed beaten down and only the corpses of rebels, ashes of dreams, and bloodstained streets remain... It has been written"Those who have the youth, have the future". So, come now children of the beast; be strong and shout at the devil!Songs this week include:Wednesday 13 – “Necrophaze (feat. Alice Cooper)” from Necrophaze (2019)Type O Negative – “Black Sabbath (From The Satanic Perspective)” from The Least Worst Of Type O Negative (2000) Electric Frankenstein – “Dead By Dawn” from The Buzz Of A Thousand Volts (2001)Voodoo Church – “The Undead” from Voodoo Church (1982)The Bronx Casket Co. – “Vampire War” from The Bronx Casket Co. (1999)Ink & Dagger – “The Lines Of Lies” from Ink & Dagger (1999)Helloween – “Halloween” from Keeper Of The Seven Keys Part I (1987)The Voluptuous Horror Of Karen Black – “I Believe In Halloween” from Black Date (1998)Please subscribe everywhere that you listen to podcasts!Visit us: https://inobscuria.com/https://www.facebook.com/InObscuriahttps://twitter.com/inobscuriahttps://www.instagram.com/inobscuria/Buy cool stuff with our logo on it!: https://www.redbubble.com/people/InObscuria?asc=u

Halloween Special: Interview With Shanna Stoker - Episode 8 Season 2Like, Subscribe, And Share This Video With Your Favorite Halloween Loving Friend!Full episode is available now on YouTube.https://youtu.be/exmZwO1qYbMCOMMENT: What Is Your Halloween Costume This Year? We want to know!Rebel Crow Wishes Everyone A Scared And Blessed, Samhain, Halloween, And Dia De Los Muertos.Host, Athena Silver, sits down with small business owner, designer, and Witch, Shanna Stoker. (Yes, she's one of THOSE Stoker's, macabre royalty) Shanna is the co-owner of a Halloween themed Major Arcana Tarot Deck, Terror Tarot. This Tarot deck encompasses the dark spirit of Halloween through our shared scary folklore and fairytales. Every card representing a horror story style archetype, with the same Rider Waite Smith symbolism that we all love. 22 cards in the deck.Get to know Shanna and her spiritual practices through this in-depth conversation. Athena asks her all about Halloween in the Stoker house to her advice for up and coming Witches. They discuss how Witchcraft has helped them and brought each of them to their current paths in life, through depression, difficult situations, loss and heartbreak. Tune in to hear both of their incredible life stories, with fun questions and honest, heartfelt answers. Find out who their favorite historical witches are and why!   The full episodes are available biweekly, on YouTube and on all podcast apps. Shanna Stoker's Contact Information:Etsy: TheGhoulishGarbTikTok: @The_Ghoulish_GalInstagram: @The_Ghoulish_GarbAthena Silver's Contact Information:Website: https://www.ReadingsWithAthenaSilver.comTikTok: @Athena_SilverTikTok Backup Account: @QueenAthenaSilverInstagram: @Athena.SilverFacebook: @ReadingsWithAthenaSilverRebel Crow Psychic Show Website:https://www.RebelCrowPsychicShow.com

It's Halloween week AND our final episode in our Dracula Movie Series! This week we shut the coffin on Dracula by discussing one of the most faithful adaptations to the Bram Stoker novel with Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula. We are joined by local filmmaker Shelby Hagerdon to discuss the 1992 romantic thriller, and […]

Jules Verne is best known to American readers as the author of beloved adventure tales like 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea and Around the World in 80 Days. But was one of his wildest acts of science fiction to anticipate Bram Stoker's Dracula by nearly a decade in his novella The Carpathian Castle? Jack and Kate will attempt to address just this question by diving deep into this 1892 story of Mittel European suspense. How does Jules Verne reveal his feelings about rustic people? Why are telephones so damn terrifying? Siri, is it raining? All these questions and more will be answered in this month's episode of Bad Books for Bad People! BBfBP theme song by True Creature  Find us at BadBooksBadPeople.com, on Twitter @badbooksbadppl, Instagram @badbooksbadpeople and on Facebook. Got questions, comments or feedback? Email us at badbooksbadpeople@gmail.com You can discover where to get all the books featured on Bad Books for Bad People on our About Page.

Halloween continues as the crew, with special guest Edalyn of Building Character sit down, sip Absinthe, and nerd out over 1992s Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  – Guardian Games – Wandering Monster – Bridge City Comics – PDX Asylum –  Song by … Continue reading →

♪♫This is Halloween!  This is Halloween!♫♪  Supporters on our Patreon and fans in our FB group chose the topics for today's episode (plus now there's a sub-reddit):  01:35 sorting Dracula fact from fiction 07:49 how horror stars got their stars 20:01 when did clowns become scary 23:29 the history behind zombies 28:38 movie monster fast facts!  Mentioned in the show: Overly Sarcastic's Frankenstein run-down Cutting Class podcast on Christopher Lee Oh No! Lit Class on The Phantom   Who needs a costume when you could wear this?!   Read the full script. Reach out and touch Moxie on FB, Twit, the 'Gram or email. Music by Kevin MacLeod  Sponsor: City of Ghosts Brandi B. asked that we sort fact from fiction on Vlad Dracula.  Personally, I can remember a time when I didn't know that Vlad the Impaler was thought to be the inspiration from Bram Stoker's genre-launching vampire Dracula.  Hop in your magic school bus, police box, or phone booth with aerial antenna, and let's go back to 15th's century Wallachia, a region of modern day Romania that was then the southern neighbor of the province of Transylvania.  Our Vlad was Vlad III.  Vlad II, his father, was given the nickname Dracul by his fellow Crusade knights in the Order of the Dragon, who were tasked with defeating the Ottoman Empire.  Wallachia was sandwiched between the Ottomans and Christian Europe and so became the site of constant bloody conflict.  Without looking it up, I'm going to guess that they failed, since the Ottoman Empire stood until 1923.  Dracul translated to “dragon” in old Romanian, but the modern meaning is more like devil.  Add an A to the end to denote son-of and you've got yourself a Vlad Dracula.   At age 11, Vlad and his 7-year-old brother Radu went with their father on a diplomatic mission into the Ottoman Empire.  How's it go?  No too good.  The three were taken hostage.  Their captors told Vlad II that he could be released – on condition that the two sons remain.  Since it was his only option, their father agreed.  The boys would be held prisoner for 5 years.  One account holds that they were tutoried in the art of war, science and philosophy.  Other accounts says they were also subjected to torture and abuse.  When Vlad II returned home, he was overthrown in a coup and he and his eldest son were horribly murdered.   Shortly thereafter, Vlad III was released, with a taste for violence and a vendetta against the Ottomans.  To regain his family's power and make a name for himself, he threw a banquet for hundreds of members of his rival families.  On the menu was wine, meat, sweetbreads, and gruesome, vicious murder.  The guests were stabbed not quite to death, then impaled on large spikes.  This would become his signature move, leading to his moniker Vlad the Impaler, but wasn't the only arrow in his quiver.  Facing an army three times the size of his, he ordered his men to infiltrate their territory, poison wells and burn crops.  He also paid diseased men to go in and infect the enemy.  Defeated combatants were often treated to disemboweling, flaying alive, boiling, and of course impalement.  Basically, you turn your enemy into a kabob and let them die slowly and, just as important, conspicuously.  Vlad's reputation spread, leading to stories we have trouble sorting from legend, like that he once took dinner in a veritable forest of spikes.  We do know that in June of 1462, he ordered 20,000 defeated Ottomans to be impaled.  It's a scale that's hard to even imagine.   When the Ottoman Sultan Mehmed II came upon the carnage, he and his men fled in fear back to Constantinople.  You'd think Vlad was on the road to victory, but shortly after, he was forced into exile and imprisoned in Hungary. [[how?]]  He took a stab, no pun intended, on regaining Wallachia 15 years later, but he and his troops were ambushed and killed.  According to a contemporary source, the Ottomans cut his corpse into pieces and marched it back to Sultan Medmed II, who ordered them displayed over the city's gates.  History does not record where the pieces ended up.   Vlad the Impaler was an undeniably brutal ruler, but he's still considered one of the most important rulers in Wallachian history for protecting it against the Ottomans and a national hero of Romania.  He was even praised by Pope Pius II for his military feats and for defending Christendom.  So how did get get from Vlad Dracula, the Impaler, a warrior king with a taste for torture, to, 400 years later, Dracula the undead creature of the night who must feed on the blood of living, can morph into bats or mist, and must sleep in his native earth?  Historians have speculated that Irish author Bram Stoker met with historian Hermann Bamburger, who told him about Vlad III, which ignited some spark of inspiration, but there's not actually any evidence to back this up.  Stoker was actually the first writer that we know of to have a vampire drink blood.  Vampires are actually a common folklore baddie around the world, from the obayifo in Africa which can take over people's bodies and emit phosphorus light from their armpits and anus to the manananggal of the Philippines who can detach her torso from her legs so she can fly around with her organs trailing behind her and use her snakelike tongue to steal babies from the womb.  In Western culture, though, Vlad the Impaler became the basis for everything from Bela Lugosi's Dracula to Count Chocula.  That means he's also the source of the Twilight saga, truly one of history's greatest monsters.   Ronnie asked for “how some legends got their stars.”  I wasn't sure what that meant, so I asked for clarification.  No, I didn't, I launched off immediately and at a full gallop with the first interpretation that came to mind, as I do in all aspects of my life.  So let's talk horror actors and the Hollywood walk of fame.   Even if he weren't a recognizable face, Vincent Price is probably the most recognizable voice in horror history.  For folks my age, you probably heard him for the first time on Michael Jackson's Thriller.  Folks in their 30's might have heard him first as Prof. Ratigan in The Great Mouse Detective.  Price wasn't always a horror icon.  He'd done theater, radio, including Orson Wells Mercury Theater of the Air, and other genres of films, but 1953's House of Wax, which was also the first 3D movie to crack the top 10 box office gross for its year, solidified his place in horror history.  It's almost odd that Price went into acting at all.  His father was the president of the National Candy Company and his grandfather had set the family up with independent means thanks to his brand of cream of tartar.  Price and his wife Mary wrote a number of cookbooks, one of which my mother had when I was young.  You cannot fathom my confused disappointment that it was just a regular cookbook full of regular, boring, non-scary recipes.  And now, for no other reason than it makes me smile, is another amazing voice, Stephen Fry, talking about Price on QI.:  Romanian-born Bela Lugosi was a classical actor in Hungary before making the move to movies.  In fact, he was already playing Dracula on stage when the movie was being assembled.  Lugosi wanted the role so badly he agreed to do it for $500 per week, about $9K today, only one quarter that of actor David Manners who played Jonathan Harker.  It was a good investment, I'd say, since everyone knows Lugosi and this was the first time I'd ever seen David Manners' name.  Though Lugosi turned down the role of the monster in Frankenstein, he was quickly locked into horror.  He appeared in minor roles in a few good movies, like “Ninotchka” with Greta Garbo, but mostly bounced like a plinko chip from mediocre to bad movies, with ever decreasing budgets.  His drug addiction probably had a cyclical relationship with his work prospects.  He died two days into filming the absolutely dreadful “Plan 9 From Outer Space” and was replaced by a much younger and taller actor and his ex-wife's chiropractor because he fit the costume.   Peter Lorre is a name you might not recognize, but you would absolutely recognize his overall aesthetic.  It's still being referenced and parodied to this day.  See the bad guy?  Is he short, with round eyes, and a distinctive way of speaking?  What you got there is Peter Lorre.  Hungarian-born Lorre struck out at 17 to become a star.  For 10 years he played bit parts in amateur productions, but in 1931 he got his big break in the German film “M,” and Hollywood took notice.  His first English-speaking role was in the Hitchcock thriller “The Man Who Knew Too Much.”  The character spoke English, but Lorre didn't.  Just like Bela Legosi during his first turn as Dracula, Lorre had to memorize his lines phonetically.  Imagine how difficult it must be to put the right pacing and inflection into a sentence when you don't know which word means what.  He continued portraying psychopaths until John Huston cast him in a quasi-comic role in “The Maltese Falcon” with Humphrey Bogart and Sidney Greenstreet, which led to lighter roles like the one he played in Arsenic and Old Lace.  If you never seen it, make it you next choice.  It's a comedy, but you can definitely watch it with your horror movies, since it's about a pair of serial killers hiding bodies in their cellar.   Arsenic and Old Lace also features a bad guy getting plastic surgery to avoid the police, which accidentally leaves him looking like Boris Karloff and he's really touchy about it.  I don't know why.  Even though he played many monsters and villains in his career, Karloff was said to actually be a kind, soft-spoken man who was happiest with a good book or in his garden.  We hear him narrate How the Grinch Stole Christmas every year.  He doesn't sing the song, though.  That's Thurl Ravenscroft, who was also the original voice of Tony the Tiger.  The title role in Frankenstein took Karloff from bit player to household name.  Karloff said of the monster, “He was inarticulate, helpless and tragic.  I owe everything to him. He's my best friend.”  By the way, if you're one of those people who delights in going “Um, actually, Frankenstein was the name of the doctor,” can you not?  We all know that.  And since it's the last name of the man who gave him life, aka his father, it's a perfectly passable patronym to use.  Oh and by the way Mr or Ms Superior Nerd, Frankenstein wasn't a doctor, he was a college dropout.  I refer you to my much-beloved Red at Overly Sarcastic Productions on YouTube for a thorough explanation of the actual story.  Penny Dreadful did get pretty close in their interpretation.   Here's a name more people should know, John Carradine.  Wait, you say, the guy from Kill Bill?  No, that's his son David.  Oh, you mean the FBI guy the sister was dating on Dexter.  No, that's his other son Keith.  Revenge of the Nerds?  No, that's Robert.  The patriarch John Carradine was in over 500 movies, big names like Grapes of Wrath and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, but he also did a lot of horror, though it could be a mixed bag — everything from Dracula in House of Dracula down to Billy the Kid vs Dracula.  Not always for the love of it, either.  Sometimes a gig's just a gig.  He told one of his sons, “Just make sure that if you've got to do a role you don't like, it makes you a lot of money.”  Good advice for many areas of life.  If you've got Prime Video or Shudder, look for The Monster Club.  It's an darling, schlocky little anthology movie, which they just don't seem to make anymore, starring Carradine and Vincent Price.     Jaime Lee Curtis could have been on this list since she was in 5 of the Halloween films, but I just don't think people think “horror” when they hear her name.   There were a few names surprisingly not set in the stones.  While ‘man of a thousand faces' Lon Chaney, who played the original Phantom of the Opera and Hunchback of Notre Dame, has a star, his son, Lon Chaney Jr, who played the Wolfman, the Mummy and numerous other roles in dozens of horror movies, does.  Somehow, Christopher Lee doesn't either.  In addition to the 282 roles on his imdb page, he deserves a star just for playing Dracula 10 times and still having a career after that.  Also, he was metal as fuck, recording metal albums into his 80's and there was the time he corrected director Peter Jackson on what it's like when you stab someone, because he *knew.  My buddies over at Cutting Class diverged from their usual format to tell us all about his amazing life.   Over in the Brainiac Breakroom, (plug sub reddit, thank Zach), Alyssa asked for the history behind clowns being evil.  One day, a man dressed up as a clown and it was terrifying.  Thank you for coming to my TED talk.   No?  Okay.  Fine!  It's not like I have to research them and keep seeing pictures of clowns.  Clowns weren't really regarded as frightening, or at least a fear of clowns wasn't widely known, from the creation of what we'd recognize as a clown by Joseph Grimaldi in the 1820's until fairly recently.  David Carlyon, author, playwright and a former clown with Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus in the 1970s, argues that coulrophobia, the fear of clowns, was born from the counter-culture 1960s and picked up steam in the 1980s.  “There is no ancient fear of clowns,” he said. “It wasn't like there was this panic rippling through Madison Square Garden as I walked up through the seats. Not at all.”  For centuries, clowns were a funny thing for kids — there was Bozo, Ronald McDonald, Red Skelton's Clem Kaddidlehopper and Emmet Kelly's sad clown– then bam!  Stephen King's hit novel “It,” the doll in “Poltergeist,” and every incarnation of The Joker.  It could be seen as a pendulum swing.  Clowns had been so far to the good side that it must have been inevitable they would swing *way the hell over to evil.   Not so fast, argues Benjamin Radford, author of the book “Bad Clowns,” who argues that evil clowns have always been among us.  “It's a mistake to ask when clowns turned bad because historically they were never really good.  Sometimes they're making you laugh. Other times, they're laughing at your expense.”  Radford traces bad clowns all the way to ancient Greece and connects them to court jesters and the Harlequin figure.  He points particularly to Punch of the Punch & Judy puppet shows that date back to the 1500s.  Punch was not only not sweet and loveable, he was violent, abusive, and even homicidal.   Maybe when isn't as important as why.  Why are some of us afraid of clowns?  Personally, I think it's their complete disregard for personal space.  Kindly keep your grease-painted face at least arm's length away.  The grease paint may be part of it.  It exaggerates the features.  The face is basically human in composition, but it's not.  It dangles us over the edge of the uncanny valley, where something makes us uncomfortable because it is *almost human.  The makeup obscures the wearer's identity, so we don't really know who we're dealing with.  Clowns also act in aberrant ways, contrary to societal norms and expectations, and that might subconsciously get our back up.  As for coulrophilia, sexual attraction to clowns…. I got nothing.  You do you.   Charlie asked for the real history behind popular horror icons, like werewolves, vampires, and zombies.  Even though the zombie craze held on longer than the 2017 obsession with bacon, most people don't know about them pre-George Romero's Night of the Living Dead.   The word “zombie” first appeared in English around 1810 in the book “History of Brazil,” this was “Zombi,” a West African deity.  The word later came to suggest a husk of a body without vital life energy, human in form but lacking the self-awareness, intelligence, and a soul.  The Atlantic slave trade caused the idea to move across the ocean, where West African religions began to mix with force Christianity.  Pop culture continually intermixes many African Diasporic traditions and portrays them exclusively as Voodoo. However, most of what is portrayed in books, movies, and television is actually hoodoo. Voodoo is a religion that has two markedly different branches: Haitian Vodou and Louisiana Vodoun. Hoodoo is neither a religion, nor a denomination of a religion—it is a form of folk magic that originated in West Africa and is mainly practiced today in the Southern United States.   Haitian zombies were said to be people brought back from the dead (and sometimes controlled) through magical means by voodoo priests called bokors or houngan. Sometimes the zombification was done as punishment (striking fear in those who believed that they could be abused even after death), but often the zombies were said to have been used as slave labor on farms and sugarcane plantations. In 1980, one mentally ill man even claimed to have been held captive as a zombie worker for two decades, though he could not lead investigators to where he had worked, and his story was never verified.   To many people, both in Haiti and elsewhere, zombies are very real and as such very frightening.  Think about it.  These people were enslaved, someone else claimed dominion over their body, but they still had their mind and their spirit.  What could be more frightening to an enslaved person than an existence where even that is taken from you?   In the 1980s when a scientist named Wade Davis claimed to have found a powder that could create zombies, thus providing a scientific basis for zombie stories, a powerful neurotoxin called tetrodotoxin, which can be found in several animals including pufferfish.  He claimed to have infiltrated secret societies of bokors and obtained several samples of the zombie-making powder, which were later chemically analyzed.  Davis wrote a book on the topic, “The Serpent and the Rainbow,” which was later made into a really underappreciated movie.  Davis was held up as the man who had scientifically proven the existence of zombies, but skeptic pointed out that the samples of the zombie powder were inconsistent and that the amounts of neurotoxin they contained were not high enough to create zombies.  It's not the kind of thing you can play fast & loose with.  Tetrodotoxin has a very narrow band between paralytic and fatal.  Others pointed out nobody had ever found any of the alleged Haitian plantations filled with zombie laborers.  While Davis acknowledged problems with his theories, and had to lay to rest some sensational claims being attributed to him, he insisted that the Haitian belief in zombies *could be based on the rare happenstance of someone being poisoned by tetrodotoxin and later coming to in their coffin.   Bonus fact: Ever wonder where we get brain-eating zombies from?  Correlation doesn't equal causation, but the first zombie to eat brains was the zombie known as Tarman in 1984's Return of the Living Dead.  This wasn't a George Romero movie, though.  It's based on a novel called  Return of the Living Dead by John Russo, one of the writers of Night of the Living Dead.  After Russo and Romero parted company, Russo retained the rights to any titles featuring the phrase “Living Dead.”    Cindra asked for movie monster facts.  The moon is getting full, so let's hit these facts muy rapido.   1922's Nosferatu was an illegal and unauthorized adaption of Bram Stoker's Dracula.  Stoker's heirs sued over the film and a court ruling ordered that all copies be destroyed.  However, Nosferatu subsequently surfaced in other countries and came to be regarded as an influential masterpiece of cinema.   Not a single photograph of Lon Chaney as the Phantom in The Phantom of the Opera (1925) was published in a newspaper or magazine, or seen anywhere before the film opened in theaters.  It was a complete surprise to the audience and to Chaney's costar Mary Philbin, whos shriek of fear and disgust was genuine.   In the original Dracula, Lugosi never once blinks his eyes on camera, to give his character an otherworldy vibe.  Francis Ford Coppolla did something similar by having Dracula's shadow move slightly independently, like the rules of our world don't apply to him.   Even though he starred in the film, Boris Karloff was considered such a no-name nobody that Universal didn't invite him to the premiere of 1931's Frankenstein.   Karloff's classic Mummy the next year did not speak because the actor had so many layers of cotton glued to his face that he couldn't move his mouth.   The Creature from the Black Lagoon's look was based on old seventeenth-century woodcuts of two bizarre creatures called the Sea Monk and the Sea Bishop.   To make a man invisible for 1933's The Invisible Man, director James Whale had Claude Rains dressed completely in black velvet and filmed him in front of a black velvet background.   The movie poster for The Mummy (1932) holds the record for the most money paid for a movie poster at an auction: nearly half a million dollars.   Boris Karloff's costume and makeup for 1935's Bride of Frankenstein were so heavy and hot that he lost 20 pounds during filming, mostly through sweat.  His shoes weighed 13 lb/6 kg/1 stone apiece.   The large grosses for the film House on Haunted Hill (1960) were noticed by Sir Alfred Hitchcock was inspired to make a horror movie after the seeing the box office gross for William Castle's House on Haunted Hill.   Filming the shower scene for Psycho was pretty mundane, but actress Janet Leigh was so terrified by seeing the finished product –thanks to the editing by Alma Reveill-Hitchcock and Bernard Herrmann score– that she did not shower, only bathed, from the premier in 1960 to her death in 2004.  You can read more about Alma Revill in the YBOF book.   According to our friends Megan and RJ at Oh No! Lit Class podcast, the first use of Toccata Fuge in G Minor in a film was the 1962 Phantom of the Opera.  It's hard to imagine classic horror without it.   In Night of the Living Dead, the body parts the zombies ate were ham covered in chocolate sauce.  George Romero joked that they shouldn't bother putting the zombie makeup on the actors because the choco-pork made them look pale and sick with nausea anyway.   A lot of people know that Michael Myers' mask in the original Halloween was actually a William Shatner mask painted white.  They bought it because it was on clearance and the film had a small budget.  Most people don't know that Shatner later repaid the favor by dressing up as Michael Myers for Halloween.   Freddy Kruger's look was based on a scary drunk man Wes Craven saw outside his home as a child.  His glove made of leather and steak knives was actually inspired by Craven's cat.  Looks down at scratches on both arms.  Yeah, that checks out.  The idea of being killed in your sleep comes from real deaths of people who survived the Khmer Rouge in Cambodia, only to die mysteriously later.   1987's The Monster Squad. With a werewolf, a mummy, Dracula, and Frankenstein's monster in the mix, the group looked suspiciously like the line-up of the 1930s and '40s Universal horror movies. To avoid confusion (i.e. lawsuits), filmmaker Fred Dekker made some subtle changes to his monsters, like removing Dracula's widow's peak, and moving Frankenstein's neck bolts up to his forehead. See? Totally different!   Yes, those were real bees in Candyman, even the ones in Candyman's mouth.  Tony Todd had a clause in his contract that he would get $1k for every bee sting he got during filming.  Even though juvenile bees with underdeveloped stingers were used, he still got $23k worth of stings.   You might think 1991's Silence of the Lambs was the first horror movie to win an Oscar, but Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde beat them to it by 60 years with Fredric March's Oscar for Best Actor.

Emily is immersing herself in some self-love reading. She's enjoying The Body is Not an Apology: The Power of Radical Self-Love by Sonya Renee Taylor and she re-read (!) Being Perfect by Anna Quindlen. Chris meanwhile is on a horror binge — She's listening to an audio version of Dracula by Bram Stoker and read The Sundial by Shirley Jackson. 'Tis the season! But both Book Cougars fan-girled big time over Alice Henderson author of the new Alex Carter “cli-fi” mystery/thriller series. Wildlife lovers and climate advocates won't want to miss our Author Spotlight with Alice.

Night Phantom: Werner Herzog's Nosferatu the Vampyre On this week's episode, Ibrahim & I close out The Halloween Season with a look at an exceptional re-imagining of a Horror Classic, Werner Herzog's 1979 masterpiece Nosferatu the Vampyre. Featuring great performances from Bruno Ganz, Isabelle Adjani, and a masterful Klaus Kinski, this is easily one of the great Dracula re-tellings. It's a thrill for Ibrahim & I to sit down, look back, and discuss this great work of cinema. There's a whole lot going on in this episode. Take a listen as we celebrate Halloween.  Questions, Comments, Complaints, & Suggestions can be directed to gondoramos@yahoo.com. Our Continued Thanks. 

Episode #215 of BGMania: A Video Game Music Podcast. This week on the show, Bryan and Frank from RPGera wait for the sun to go down before strolling the alleys and streets, hoping to bump into a vampire! Email the show at bgmania@leveldowngames.com with requests for upcoming episodes, questions, feedback, comments, concerns, whatever you want really! EPISODE PLAYLIST AND CREDITS The Brood's Theme from WWF Attitude [Jim Johnson, 1999] On the Champs Désolés from The Witcher 3: Blood & Wine [Marcin Przybylowicz, Mikolai Stroinski, & Piotr Musiał, 2016] Stereo from Night Trap [Sunny BlueSkyes & Martin Lund, 1992] Ozama, the True Evil from Twisted Tales of Spike McFang [Hisashi Matsushita, 1994] Thames River -Round 1- from Vampire: Master of Darkness [Yoko Wada & Takashi Horiguchi, 1993] Arcadian Vampire from Disgaea 4 [Tenpei Sato, 2011] The Guardian from Illusion of Gaia [Yasuhiro Kawasaki, 1994] Bloodthirsty from Resident Evil Village [Shusaku Uchiyama, 2021] Battle With the First from Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Chaos Bleeds [Ian Livingstone, 2003] Blood Thirst Concerto -Raphael's Theme- from Soul Calibur V [Cris Velasco, 2012] What We Could Have Become from Vampyr [Olivier Deriviere, 2018] Dark Necrobat's Theme from Mega Man X5 [Naoto Tanaka, Naoya Kamisaka, & Takuya Miyawaki, 2001] Count Batula from Conker's Bad Fur Day [Robin Beanland, 2001] Ruined Stables from Bram Stoker's Dracula [Andy Brock, 1993] SUPPORT US Patreon: https://patreon.com/rpgera CONTACT US Website: https://rpgera.com Discord: https://discord.gg/cC73Heu Twitch: https://twitch.tv/leveldowngames Twitter: https://twitter.com/OriginalLDG Instagram: https://instagram.com/bryan.ldg/ Facebook: https://facebook.com/leveldowngaming --- Send in a voice message: https://anchor.fm/bgmania/message Support this podcast: https://anchor.fm/bgmania/support

You may have heard of them before: those pale creatures with suspiciously sharp canines that sleep in coffins during the day, hunt people at night, and occasionally transform into bats. Stories of bloodsucking monsters have haunted humanity for hundreds, even thousands of years—but the modern vampire was arguably born when Enlightenment rationality met Eastern European folklore. That's Nick Groom's argument: he's known as the Prof of Goth, and he makes the case that vampires rose from the grave at the same time that philosophy, theology, forensic medicine, and literature were beginning to question what it meant to be human. Why have vampires lingered in the imagination for hundreds of years? Nick Groom joins us on the podcast to open some coffins for answers. This episode originally aired in 2018.Go beyond the episode:Nick Groom's The Vampire: A New HistoryThe London Library reported that it located some of the dog-eared books Bram Stoker used during the seven years he researched Dracula Watch the trailer for The Hunger (1983), in which David Bowie and Susan Sarandon both suffer the love of an immortal vampireWe are also fond of Only Lovers Left Alive (2014), in which a glamorous Tilda Swinton and a depressed Tom Hiddleston puzzle out their place in modern societyHere's a montage of all the bite scenes from Christopher Lee's classic turn in Dracula (1958)And, of course, there's always Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1996–2003), which inspired Slayage, a peer-reviewed journal from the Whedon Studies AssociationTune in every week to catch interviews with the liveliest voices from literature, the arts, sciences, history, and public affairs; reports on cutting-edge works in progress; long-form narratives; and compelling excerpts from new books. Hosted by Stephanie Bastek.Subscribe: iTunes • Feedburner • Stitcher • Google Play • AcastHave suggestions for projects you'd like us to catch up on, or writers you want to hear from? Send us a note: podcast [at] theamericanscholar [dot] org. And rate us on iTunes! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

In this episode, the Retro Movie Geek crew is joined by Allyson & Drew Clark (check out more from the Clarks here), and they're geeking out over Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992) and the look of the movie the effects the cast the insanity of some of the characters and much, much more! Synopsis: Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder and Anthony Hopkins star in director Francis Ford Coppola's visually stunning, passionately seductive version of the classic Dracula legend. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Coppola returns to the original source of the Dracula myth, and from that gothic romance, he creates a modern masterpiece. Gary Oldman's metamorphosis as Dracula - who grows from old to young, from man to beast - is nothing short of amazing. Winona Ryder brings equal intensity to the role of a young beauty who becomes the object of Dracula's devastating desire. Anthony Hopkins co-stars as the famed doctor who dares to believe in Dracula, and then dares to confront him. Opulent, dazzling and utterly irresistible, this is Dracula as you've never seen him. And once you've seen Bram Stoker's Dracula, you'll never forget it! .......................................................................................................................... Special thanks to Midnight Syndicate (find more Midnight Syndicate scares here) for letting us use the tune Winged Fury from the album Vampyre: Symhonies from the Crypt, for Spooky Flix Fest 2021! .......................................................................................................................... ..........................................................................................................................   LISTENER FEEDBACK: Leave us your voicemail feedback at (484) 577-3876. Check out Darrell's other cool podcasts here. Check out Peter's Retro Reviews over at ForgottenFlix.com here. Check out The Forgotten Flix Podcast here. Special thanks to Kevin Spencer for the fantastic show logo! Special thanks to Hayden for the use of his fantastic music for our opening theme this episode! You can check out more from this amazing artist here! Special thanks to Retro Promenade for the use of music from the album Carpenter. Music use permitted under a Creative Commons license. CLICK HERE and get a copy of the album and support these fantastic artists!

BRAM STOKER'S DRACULA Welcome to Episode 27 of Season 3 Show Notes John Wick takes on Commissioner Gordon in Bram Stoker's Dracula as Randy REDACTED takes on Tracy Mangum to recast Bram Stoker's Dracula! If you want to watch the show, you can head over to matineeheroes.com/castoff where you'll find all the links to past and current episodes. Feel free to email MHCastoff@gmail.com to offer up feedback, suggest movies for the Castoff or just to say "hey". You can also watch the CastOFF! live every Tuesday 9pm/6pm ET/PT on http://twitch.tv/matineeheroes & https://youtube.com/channel/UCnxw7gfxe_ChqBXnchT8vFA

On this special Halloween episode of Acid Horizon, we're joined by Dr Jonathan Greenaway, whom you may know as the Youtube Video Essayist The Lit Crit Guy. Jon is also the cohost of the Horror Vanguard Podcast, and recent author of  the text Theology, Horror and Fiction out on Bloomsbury press. Today, Jon joins us to discuss the prospects for a 'Gothic' Marxism, one that recognizes the monstrous in capital and the people whom capital monsters in its drive for infinite accumulation. We discuss the figure of the monster, the return of the repressed trauma of capital in the sphere of contemporary horror culture, and what it means to stand in solidarity with the monstrous and the profane. Thinkers included in the discussion include Marx, China Mieville, Margaret Cohen, Paul B. Preciado, Laboria Cubonics, Hegel, Silvia Federici, Walter Benjamin, and Deleuze and Guattari. Also discussed are such horror staples as Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead, The Walking Dead, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Tourist Trap, His House, The VVitch, and many more!Link's to Jon's work:The LitCrit Guy on YouTubeHorror VanguardJon's Blog---Contribute to Acid HorizonSubscribe to us on Apple PodcastsHappy Hour at Hippel's (Adam's blog)New Revolts (Matt's Blog)Revolting Bodies (Will's BlogSplit Infinities (Craig's SubstackSereptie (Pod Music)Merch StoreSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/acidhorizonpodcast)

Welcome to Scatterbrain Podcast: Vlad! In honor of one of the many Vlads that we love. No, not Putin ( sexy bitch that he is ), but The Impaler himself! He always STUCK it to his enemies. I would STAKE my life that this is great episode. I think you WOOD agree after sticking it through to the end. Ok, I'll stop. Halloween special number 2 of 4 for our favorite time of the year! The air is getting colder, the Moon is full and bright, and frankly my deep pockets are currently filled with pecans! Long story. Thanks to all who listen, and to those who won't: burn in hell! This is a fun and interesting podcast! WTF? Seriously, we really do appreciate your loyalty and time. Available on Spotify, Apple, Google, Instagram, Twitter, Pocket-Cast, iHeartRadio, Stone Tablets, Ancient Dead Sea Scrolls, insideyourmomspanties.com, or wherever you would just look if you weren't so damn lazy! It's music, comedy, and interestingly weird topics! What's not to love? First we banter a touch. Then we review the new EP "Upgrade" from Danish thrashers Demolizer. Then we put the bloody cherry on top and talk about the Wallachian Voivode, Vlad The Impaler. Also known as Vlad Dracula. His full name was simply: Vlad III, and he is a national hero of Romania to this day. Was he really so bad? Was he really the inspiration for Bram Stoker's "Dracula"? Does Ian really store shelled nuts in his pant pockets? Listen to find out! Scatterbrain Podcast with Ian and Dan: Subscribe, listen, follow, and share! Twitter - @ScatterbrainPod and Instagram - @ScatterbrainPodSD. (c) 2021 - SBPCSD

It's Halloween season and time to do some spooky theme shows! Of course, we've tackled monsters several times on the show before, but we've never devoted the whole show to… The post e184. Bram Stoker's Dracula & the Draculi that Followed appeared first on The VoxPopcast.

Welcome to Season #2 Episode #12 of That Pretentious Book Club! In this special Halloween episode Spoons and Wheezy are joined by Lexi Potter for a discussion of Dracula by Bram Stoker! With discussions of fox adoption, Kendall's ever-present Keanu obsession, and of course a passionate summary of Dracula itself, this episode is a great way to ring in the spooky season! Pour yourself a cup of tea, raise a pinky, and join the club for this discussion of Dracula.Skippers jump to 17:36Visit us at thatpretentiousbookclub.com or find us on social media @thatpretentiousbookclubSupport the show (https://www.patreon.com/thatpretentiousbookclub)

Spooky October continues with Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula! Keanu Reeves' accent! Winona Ryder's accent! Gary Oldman's accent! Also, Bette Midler's ex-boyfriend, aka Tom Waits! This. Movie. Has. Everything.

Spooktober marches on and as it does I continue to make Newski (who hates horror) watch a classic horror movie EVERY SATURDAY THIS MONTH! We'll be hitting all the big ones - Aliens, Ghosts, Vampires, Werewolves and Zombies. So sit back, pour yourself a Bloody Mary and join us on this journey! This week we're avoiding the sun, drinking some blood, tea, coffee, or wine and hunting down a tall, sexy vampire, all while discussing 1958's classic Hammer horror film ‘Dracula' from 1958. Dracula is a 1958 British gothic horror film directed by Terence Fisher and written by Jimmy Sangster based on Bram Stoker's 1897 novel of the same title. The first in the series of Hammer Horror films starring Christopher Lee as Count Dracula, the film also features Peter Cushing as Doctor Van Helsing, along with Michael Gough, Melissa Stribling, Carol Marsh, and John Van Eyssen. In the United States, the film was retitled Horror of Dracula to avoid confusion with the U.S. original by Universal Pictures, 1931's Dracula. We Watched A Thing is supported by Dendy Cinemas Canberra. The best Australian cinema chain showing everything from blockbusters to arthouse and indie films. Find them at https://www.dendy.com.au/ If you like this podcast, or hate it and us and want to tell us so - You can reach us at wewatchedathing@gmail.com Or, Twitter - @WeWatchedAThing Facebook - @WeWatchedAThing Instagram - @WeWatchedAThing and on iTunes and Youtube If you really like us and think we're worth at least a dollar, why not check out our patreon at http://patreon.com/wewatchedathing. Every little bit helps, and you can get access to bonus episodes, early releases, and even tell us what movies to watch.

Antony Ferrara heats his quarters like an inferno, collects brain-eating beetles, and wears an Egyptian ring. So, why does Cairn suspect him of killing a swan? Sax Rohmer, today on The Classic Tales Podcast. Welcome to The Classic Tales Podcast. Thank you for listening. Thank you to all of our financial supporters. We couldn't do this without you, and we really appreciate your support. We've set it up so that for a five-dollar monthly donation, you get a monthly code for $8 off any audiobook order. Give more, and you get more! This way you can easily build out your classic audiobook library, and you help to give more folks like you the chance to discover the classics in a curated and easily accessible format. Go to http://classictalesaudiobooks.com today, and become a financial supporter. You'll be glad you did. Thank you so much. Go now to http://classictalesaudiobooks.com and become a financial supporter today. We won a podcast award! The Academy of Interactive and Visual Arts has awarded The Classic Tales Podcast with a Gold Award! Juried by some titans from the top media firms, (Disney, Conde Nast, Microsoft, etc.), I share this honor with Trevor Noah's Daily Show Podcast, MTV's Official Challenge Podcast, Broadway Podcast Network and a few others. Only the top 10% of those who entered were awarded the Gold Award. We are super psyched about that. 813, the fourth novel in the Arsène Lupin series is also now available! Head on over to classictalesaudiobooks.com and pick up this fantastic adventure! And if you'd like to save 2 dollars when you get 813, simply enter the coupon code: podcast. No subscription, no additional purchase necessary, just enter the word podcast, and save 2 bucks. Thank you for your support! Today's story is from the creator of the Fu-Manchu series, Sax Rohmer. It was originally titled, The Brood of the Witch-Queen. I think that the unfortunate title is the reason that this book is not more well know today. That, and the ending isn't super great. Just putting that out there right now. But H.P. Lovecraft compared this book with Bram Stoker's Dracula, and many critics of the time considered it one of Rohmer's best. I've taken the liberty of releasing it as Knight of the Necropolis. Hopefully ol' Sax isn't turning too much in his grave at that. One of the things that really draws me to classic Halloween monsters is that they are steeped in literature. Obviously, Dracula and Frankenstein immediately come to mind with their respective baddies. There are many werewolf short stories, from Kipling's The Mark of the Beast, to Murryat's The White Wolf of the Harz Mountains. Alexandre Dumas even wrote a full length, lack luster novel about a werewolf, clumsily translated as The Wolf Leader. I'm told Steinbeck also wrote a werewolf yarn. Mummy tales also abound in short fiction. Among the best are Conan Doyle's Lot No. 249, Louisa May Alcott's The Ring of Thoth, and H.P. Lovecraft's Imprisoned with the Pharaohs. Among the less successful is Bram Stoker's novel Jewel of the Seven Stars. Now, today's story isn't perfect by any means. It's not high literature. But when I read it, I felt that it really delivered the same feeling that I get when I watch the original movie of The Mummy, with Boris Karloff. It's set up as a series of adventures where we can eventually piece together the identity of that devotee of ancient sorcery: Antony Ferrara. The similarities to Dracula are evident. Nobody believes in Egyptian sorcery, there's only one scholar who's studied enough to stop him, etc.. But what can I say, when it comes to magic rings, brain-eating beetles, vampires, ancient curses, Egyptian mummies, and the like, I'm always up for it. I hope you are, too. And now, The Knight of the Necropolis, Part 1 of 8, by Sax Rohmer. Tap here to purchase 813, Arsène Lupin Vol. 4, by Maurice Leblanc!   Tap here to purchase your copy of The Black Tulip, by Alexandre Dumas! Tap here to go to www.classictalesaudiobooks.com and become a financial supporter!   Tap here to go to our merchandise store!   Tap here to visit our YouTube Channel: