Profs and Pints Baltimore presents: “An Encounter with Early Vampires,” a scholarly look at what folklore, grave sites, and various records tell us about centuries-old Slavic beliefs concerning the undead, with Stanley Joseph Stepanic, who teaches a course on Dracula and vampire folklore as an assistant professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Virginia.

[Doors open at 5. The talk starts at 6:30. The room is open seating.]

Modern popular culture tends to treat vampires as irresistibly sexy. But the folklore that gave rise to Dracula, Nosferatu, Twilight, and an assortment of skimpy Halloween costumes actually depicted vampires as gruesome rather than attractive, the stuff of nightmares rather than fantasies.

Join a fascinating excavation of early vampire belief with Stanley Stepanic, who has given several excellent Profs and Pints talks and whose course on Dracula is exceptionally popular among University of Virginia students.

He’ll take you on a scholarly journey to Eastern Europe and back in time several centuries, beginning with the first written evidence of vampires in a Russian text from 1047 A.D. You’ll learn about references to vampire burials in Slavic legal codes from the fourteenth century and about the vampire hysteria that swept Eastern and Central Europe in the mid-eighteenth century.

You’ll learn how the vampires of those times were depicted as rotting, reanimated corpses that returned from the grave to attack their victims and inflict diseases such as rabies and tuberculosis upon them. Many of the earliest were undead men whose first targets were their families. Women reported being sexually assaulted by the vampiric forms of their husbands, and those who subsequently gave birth would regard their offspring as human-vampire hybrids destined to become vampire hunters.

We’ll peer into the graves of people whose bodies were chopped into pieces to prevent their rise from the dead. Professor Stepanic will explain how writers of the eighteenth century resurrected the vampire in the much more appealing form we envision today, but echoes of original version continue to thrive in popular culture in the form of zombies.

You’ll come away seeing vampires in a new light that renders them far more terrifying. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID.)

Image by Canva.