Sure, no one can shut up about vampires right now, but some people, and I mean this, actually know a thing or two about vampires. And of that handful, Elizabeth Miller is probably a key digit. Not only one of Canada's top Vampire experts, she's one of the most respected in the world. She's spent over a decade being the know-all of vampiric knowledge. Having been published several times, her latest is A Dracula Handbook, for all you Twilight dummies that could learn a thing or two (or hey, let's start at a thing, one step at a time y'know?) Even opening up her website I find myself unable not to learn more. Whitby was one of Bram Stoker’s fave vacation spots? Fascinating! Oh... Whitby... England... Not Whitby Ontario... No, no, that makes way more sense. I still learned something though.

How does one become a vampire expert to begin with?

Well I got interested in this in the early 90s, I was teaching university, teaching Dracula to a first year class and decided if I was teaching them about it I should find out MORE about it. So I started researching and went on and on and found out how fascinating it was, found there was a lot of gaps in the research that had been done at the time and it just went on from there. Now I’m still at it.

Of all the conventional creatures, vampires seem the most universal, almost every culture has a variation from the strigoi to the chupacabra, why do you think that is?

I think it’s because of the actual threat the vampire poses. It’s going to drink your blood and blood traditionally, this going back into ancient times, considered to be the source of life, or the essence of life. To take somebody’s life you use the phrase you spilled somebody’s blood. The fear that the dead could come back and take the blood of the living. It is quite universal, and even though the term vampire didn’t always apply there was still a vampire like creature in every culture and civilization in the world.

I know that some cultures don’t even have words to separate creatures like the werewolf and vampire.

The word "vampire" itself is eastern European, Serbian actually, the earliest occurrence of it. That would have been in the middle ages, but the concept of the vampire, a creature that does what a vampire does, goes into antiquity.

What would you say are the largest misconceptions about vampires?

Well there’s a lot of misconceptions about vampires. That vampire legends began with particular people, such as the countess Elizabeth Bathory who used to bathe in the blood of virgins. Now true she was a pretty nasty person but was never in her own time associated with vampires and she certainly wasn’t a vampire, she didn’t drink the blood of her victims. Another one is Vlad the Impaler, a lot of people mistakenly think was Stoker’s inspiration for Dracula or just that the vampire legend was connected with him, but it never was. That’s a modern thought. So there are a lot of misconceptions that unfortunately find their way into legitimate research.

Because vampires are socially constructed, is there a wrong way to imagine them at all?

Well the fact of the matter is the vampire is a cultural object to begin with, indicates that there’s no right way or wrong way. The problem with stories about vampires or the people who write about vampires is that they all feel to some extent that they are in the shadow of Stoker’s Dracula, so that is a major conscious decision. “So my vampire’s not going to be afraid of garlic, but MY vampire IS going to be afraid of garlic.”

I just remember the scene from that trailer for John Carpenter’s Vampires of James Woods rambling, “Well I know what YOU think you know about vampires.” You always get personal variations of the rules.

You have to have variations. This will allow the myth to flourish. Because different people can do different things to it. Otherwise it would die out, or un-die out or whatever.

Well vampires are very popular right now, though I wish I could say it was under better circumstances...

Hahaha!

Are you troubled that a collection of people have turned vampires into pale pussies?

Well basically as for the “pussification” of vampires, as a Dracula fan it does bother me. Though on the other hand, y’know this is bringing in new readers, and who knows, maybe one in a thousand of these new readers may actually say, “Well maybe I’ll go see where all of this came from!”

Or at least another book that isn’t part of a series!

That’s right! Exactly. There comes a point where a vampire loses its threatening nature,  to which then what is the point of it being a vampire? Why not just have it as the boy next door? Or some guy who owns a motorcycle?

But then how could they live forever~

I think it plays a bit much on the immortality thing and not enough on the terror.

It’s just not a monster anymore.

No it’s not a monster anymore.

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