Profs & Pints San Francisco: The Rise of Vampires

Profs and Pints San Francisco presents: “The Rise of Vampires,” on the folkloric origins and literary evolution of today’s fanged fiends, with Sara Hackenberg, professor of English at San Francisco State University and scholar of Victorian literature and literature’s vampire tradition.

[Tickets must be purchased online, at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/san-francisco-rise-of-vampires .]

Did you know that vampires sprang from literature nearly a whole century before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula, and that they prowled in folklore for centuries before that?

You’d have to visit a lot of gravesites to witness the unearthing of as many vampires as will be raised at the October 12th debut of Profs and Pints at The Dairy community space at San Francisco’s Presidio Sports Basement.

The excavation will be carried out by Professor Sara Hackenberg, who previously has given excellent Profs and Pints talks on vampires and Christmas ghost stories.

She’ll show you the vampire beneath the vampire beneath the vampire, tracing their evolution in old European folklore and the English literature of the nineteenth-century.

You’ll get to know the seductive, snaky Lamia in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1816 poem “Christabel” and the sapphic seductress at the center of Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 novella Carmilla. You’ll spend time with the mad, bad, and dangerous Byronic vampire that originated in John Polidori’s 1819 gothic horror story “The Vampyre,” found his way into theatrical adaptations such as James Planché’s 1820 “The Bride of the Isles,” and then stalked through cheap popular publications–known as “penny bloods” or later as “penny dreadfuls”—such as James Malcolm Rymer’s mid-1800s serial Varney, The Vampire.

We’ll consider how Bram Stoker was influenced by all of these texts and folded a variety of characteristics of their fearsome femmes and hommes fatales into Count Dracula, the most famous literary vampire of all. (Advance tickets: $13.50 plus processing fees. Door price: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: “The Premature Burial,” an 1854 painting by Antoine Wiertz (Wiertz Museum / Wikimedia).