English professor Harriet Hustis is an expert on the eerie.
She studies gothic literature from the 18th–21st century, and has published scholarship on Dracula, Frankenstein, and Jekyll and Hyde.
In June, she bit into something even scarier to her than horror novels and tried to take her monster scholarship into newer technology. So, long before Halloween season, Hustis spent a week learning about podcasting, content creation, and technology through the National Humanities Center’s Virtual Podcasting Institute.
Out of this experience came a hair-raising podcast episode on the blood-sucking creatures who have populated our scary stories for centuries, from Count Dracula and Carmilla to Edward Cullen and Stefan Salvatore. In the episode, Hustis and three other college professors from across the country discuss the evolution of vampire storytelling.
Here, Hustis talks about fear — of both monsters and podcasting.
Q: ’Tis the season for your scholarship. As we bite into our Halloween candy, what should we know about gothic literature?
A: From the start, gothic literature was a genre associated with suspense, secrets, mysteries, and the macabre. As time went on, works of gothic literature became populated with strange and dangerous figures — monsters, demons, witches, sociopaths, and, of course, vampires.
At its core, the genre of the gothic is about the confrontation between innocence and whatever a particular culture identifies as “evil” or “dangerous.”
Q: What’s the allure of vampires, in particular?
A: Vampires offer a way for us — as readers or viewers — to confront the things that unnerve us. While horror is typically about what terrifies us, what makes vampires and the gothic interesting is that we’re simultaneously frightened and curious — they always operate at an intersection between fear and desire. You can see this over and over again in vampire stories: characters who want to run away, but don’t — or at least not until it’s too late.
Q: Scary. But how do they reflect our desires?
A: Vampires are linked to the aristocracy and wealth. They function in a world of castles or mansions. Even a figure like Twilight’s Edward Cullen is basically an aristocrat of teen culture: he’s mysterious and good-looking and is out enjoying things that others who lack power and privilege don’t have access to. Money and (male) power are measures of “value.”
The popularity of vampires has ultimately shifted the way they’re represented: they’re still “other” and “different,” but we’ve also appropriated that “difference” because that’s what patriarchal, imperialist, and capitalist cultures always seek to do — to claim for ourselves whatever appears to be powerful.
Q: What is more frightening: the monsters you study or learning how to produce a podcast?
A. The scariest thing about podcasting is really the same scary thing that accompanies any attempt to put your ideas and your “voice” out in the world. You think you’ll “sound stupid,” that you’ll say the wrong thing, or that the ideas that interest you will bore everyone else.
I was really lucky because I was randomly assigned to a team of fellow podcasters who shared my interests, so we quickly created a space where we were able to bounce ideas off of each other and feel supported. The challenge, of course, was that we also had to learn the technology and create the content simultaneously — I was really glad that we were able to find ways to laugh and have fun while doing that.
— Corinne Coakley ’25
