Even the nastiest fictions communicate a powerful socio-political message. Sometimes, grindhouse fare is actually the most potent transmission vehicle because it is so visceral and bypasses all reason.

Unless you are Rose Sinister.

Her intellectually stimulating, addictive podcast takes a highbrow approach to a lowbrow subject – applying historic research, cinema studies and literary interpretation to vampires.

I find that vampire stories are just the right vehicle for this [approach], actually. And I don’t find them lowbrow at all. Of all our human monsters, vampires are some of the most profoundly enduring reflections of our sins and aspirations.

And I very much like taking the seemingly simple, and showing how complex it can be – because they’re stories told by people after all. And people are so complex.

In my work as a walking tour guide, before I started the podcast, I realized early on that there was only so much I could communicate in a 10-minute ghost story, and that, years later, people wouldn’t remember all the specific details of the story, but how the story made them feel; what it prompted them to think about. That changed the way I looked at storytelling as a medium, and I started crafting my ghost and vampire stories around broader human lessons, which really resonated with people who took my tours.

People who took my tours frequently asked if I had a podcast, had ever considered a podcast, and I remember one day listening to Lore and thinking, “I could do this!”

With my podcast, I’m able to go much deeper than I can while standing with a group of 20 people on a crowded sidewalk in the French Quarter for 10 minutes at a time, but I’m still using the story to communicate important theories and truths and necessary discussions.

Have you ever felt too smart for the vampire crowd and/or to lurid for film/lit theorists?

Sometimes it is hard to reach “my people,” because you’re right that I’m sometimes a little too deep for all vampire fans, who just want mindless wish fulfillment dark fantasy entertainment, and not pretentious enough for serious film or literary critics. But I don’t make my podcast for everyone: I make each episode of the podcast something I would want to listen to, but which no one else is doing, and it turns out I’m not alone in wanting that! So I think there’s a powerful lesson there in creating for a very specific niche and not being afraid of that.

Which came first? The interest in theory and criticism or the obsession with vampires?

I think I’ve always been an insufferably pretentious nerd. There’s a family story about how, aged 8, I left the movie theater after watching Disney’s The Little Mermaid spitting mad, not just because they’d changed the ending and made it a happy one, but that in doing so they’d changed the theme of the story, and my father in particular had no idea how to even begin communicating with a child like that, and insisted, “dammit, it’s just entertainment! Can’t you just be entertained like a normal kid!?!”

But I think perhaps my obsession with vampires started maybe a year before that. I’d read Interview With the Vampire around age six, when a babysitter left a copy of the book at the house. That’s how I discovered that New Orleans was a real city, and not just a part of Disneyland (I still love “New Orleans Square” the best, though). A little bit later, I read an “abridged for young readers” version of Dracula that mentioned, at the back, that Bram Stoker had based the character Dracula on the historical figure of Vlad Tepesh.

Ergo, I decided that if New Orleans was a real place and Dracula was a real person, vampires had to be real, and I wasn’t entirely comfortable with that.

The next several years, my school reports were nothing but essays on bats, castles, the Black Plague, mummies, and other “spooky” things I could get away with reading and writing about. So I will say that, for my family, especially my dad, the podcast seems like something I’ve always been building towards. And to get back to your question, I’m not sure which came first.

When you choose a topic, how much of your insights are formed before you start the writing process and how much is discovered along the way?

About fifty percent of the time my preconceived notions fly out the window as I discover fascinating angles and avenues I hadn’t known that I didn’t know. For me, that’s the best part – all the new stuff I get to learn while researching and preparing each episode. I had no idea I was going to do a Marxist analysis of Underworld, or that my episode on We Are the Night would require so much research into German history and identity, for instance, but I’m glad I followed those rabbit holes!

Deconstructing the “Mormon” issues in Twilight and really getting into the cultural headspace of the author gave me a profoundly different opinion on the work itself, and the way culture and religion influence works of art and literature, in ways far beyond the obvious.

And Dracula was a revelation as well. I don’t think any screen adaptation has really gotten Stoker’s themes right. I’d love to see a female director tackle Dracula, because I think audiences would see a very different story, and I think that story would probably be a lot closer to Stoker’s intention than Dracula has historically been portrayed. Nosferatu may have come the closest in many ways, but it’s still not quite right…

The breadth and adaptability of vampires as metaphor becomes clear very quickly while listening to your podcast. Sometimes they are impossibly attractive objects of desire, other times there are hideous ghouls. What intrinsic qualities make a vampire?

I think if we can broadly define a vampire as a person, living or (un)dead, who derives their sustenance from vital human life force energy. That to me is as simple as it gets.

I do find the insistence that vampires are inhumanly beautiful somewhat tired. That’s where the vampire as wish fulfillment fantasy stretches things a bit too far. That’s when the vampire starts to require a kryptonite, like sunlight or garlic or holy objects to defeat them, otherwise they become, like Superman, too powerful, with no price to pay for that power.

But my favorite vampires? Have fangs, avoid the sun, live forever (more or less), have complicated relationships with mortals, might be charismatic but aren’t necessarily supermodels, can be staked, etc. I’m a classicist – even though many of those “classic” tropes aren’t part of the original folklore. So I like exploring how that evolution transpired.

You moved from Los Angeles to New Orleans. What are your impressions of both cities? What of Los Angeles is still a part of you? What about New Orleans resonate so strongly?

I fell I love with New Orleans as a child, and I do think that sometimes you have to leave home in order to find it. Everyone moves to Los Angeles for the opportunities, but I left LA because I saw no future for myself there, just an endless hustle at banal administrative desk jobs, trying to pursue my passion projects on evenings and weekends, never having enough money to go out and socialize and live I life that reflected my desires and dreams.

In New Orleans, I instantly became a character in a strange paranormal novel about the city – or at least it felt like that. I worked at a Voodoo store, then a liquor store. I could afford to live in beautiful old houses with charming detail, the clubs didn’t charge cover. I sold goth jewelry and fairy wings to tourists. I hung out under ancient oaks in City Park and took endless photos of cemeteries.

Now when I go to LA, I’m able to leverage a lot of the weird and cool things I’ve done in New Orleans. I became “someone” in New Orleans and that weirdly translates to something of value in Los Angeles. Angelenos like collaborating and building and creating neat things together, but you can get swallowed up and used pretty quickly if you don’t know your own worth or value and how to trade that. I needed to leave LA in order to become something I could trade in LA.

Race and culture impact your critiques of vampire stories. Most vampire stories seem to feature all white casts, and yet the “metaphysical character-as-other” seems to appear often. Do you feel vampires and werewolves and the like are used to explore cultural anxiety?

Vampires and Werewolves (and Witches, really) seem to stem from the same root word (Upir, perhaps, at least according to some etymologists), and the same fear. The other, the malevolent, the familiar-turned-predatory, the thing with power to kill and maim and destroy beyond the limited means available to common men and women.

Now I think these creatures have evolved into their own entities, and they’re often depicted as being at each other’s throats – it’s almost like a sibling rivalry, the vampire the witches and the werewolves vying for dominance one over the other.

And I think you can make an argument that, in our modern folklore-as-fiction, the vampire appears oppositional to the witch and the werewolf, both of whom somewhat represent a oneness with the natural world, and the vampire as the oppressive dominator of it. I think that’s very much a reflection of our own anxieties of the human impact on the environment. We have become the invading other we once feared – still do fear, in fact. The ongoing anti-immigrant sentiment at the border, specifically targeted at brown people, ignores that fact that America is a nation built in stolen land, and that, in a very real sense, white people of European descent are the invaders.

Maybe there’s space in the world of potential vampire metaphors to become more comfortable, through fiction, with an uncomfortable truth.

I know you are LGBTQIA friendly. Could you explore how vampire fiction and queer identity intersect?

The vampire in literature has always been the epitome of Queer, from the very beginning, via the intense, bordering-on-the-forbidden intimate friendship between Aubrey and Ruthven in Polidori’s 1819 The Vampyre, we see right away in the very first English language vampire novel the coded fear of the vampire as something “unnatural” in more ways than one.

Le Fanu’s Carmilla was explicitly lesbian, 53 years later.

It’s interesting because what society may have viewed as dire warnings and proscriptions against certain behaviors and relationships, the very individuals those warnings were perhaps intended for saw something of themselves reflected there, a visibility not allowed outside the lens of this fictional creation.

Much like “queer coding” certain cartoon villains made them into LGBTQIA+ icons on Tumbler. It’s more than the allure of the forbidden. It’s about finding representation where you can, in taking someone’s slur and owning it as a badge of pride.

What about vampires, specifically, beyond other horror concepts, speaks to you?

I think a lot about all the skills and knowledge and languages that have been lost to time, and for me, part of the fantasy of the vampire is envisioning them as immortal gatekeepers of the forgotten. They hold on to the knowledge of gods whose names have been forgotten, they process and weave sea silk, they remember the secrets of the construction of the pyramids. If I were a vampire, I like to think I’d spend at least some of my time keeping old, otherwise forgotten things and skills alive. Invisible mending. Irish lacemaking. Early 21st century internet slang.

If you had to make a vampire movie playlist for someone who has never seen any, what would make the cut? Which do you find life-affirming? What’s a “problematic fave”?

1931 Dracula
1936 Dracula’s Daughter
1973 Ganja and Hess (director’s cut)
1977 Martin
1983 The Hunger
1987 Near Dark
1992 Bram Stoker’s Dracula
1994 Interview With the Vampire
1998 Blade

That would give anyone a comprehensive overview of vampire cinema. It hits all the main points, I think. Although it leaves out a few of my favorites. I’d like to include 1983 The Hunger, 1987 Near Dark, and 2013 Only Lovers Left Alive, as well. Only Lovers Left Alive is definitely life-affirming. What is life worth living for? “Appreciating nature, cultivating kindness and friendships, and dancing!” I believe that. That’s my mantra. That’s my raison d’être.

Problematic fave is Bram Stoker’s Dracula as directed by Coppola. Again, the aesthetic. Unf. The aesthetic. And the soundtrack! And Gary Oldman was pretty cute in those cobalt-blue specs (though was that an intentional nod to the previous belief that such blue glass lenses were an effective treatment for the symptoms of syphilis? It tracks with Van Helsing’s remarks about civilization/“siphilization” to his students, and underscores Dracula’s capacity as the bearer of contagion, but it’s also such an obscure nod, I don’t know if it was deliberate. But it fits and also it was pretty) . But oh! It misses the mark on important themes and characterizations (side note: my dream cast Van Helsing is Tom Hanks. Read the book. And tell me he wouldn’t be perfect).

What other forms of expression have you explored?

I started off this journey as a storyteller – performing ghost and vampire tours in the French Quarter, which I’ve been going since 2013. Around 2015 I started getting more and more into photography, learning about lighting and composition. I would invite people who took my tours to follow me on Instagram, and that’s how I already had a small audience when I launched my podcast. Now I’ve started selling prints of certain images I’ve taken, either while on tour or at cemeteries, at shops in New Orleans and LA.

I also design t-shirts and jewelry, and sometimes I sew. I also enjoy decorating cakes. And embroidery, but not counted cross stitch. I enjoy fine cooking. I’ve researched making my own mead. I’ve dabbled in clay sculpture and I frequently sing karaoke on stages across New Orleans.

Anyone wanting to check out my jewelry, t-shirt, or photography offerings should check out my website, rosesinister.com, or follow me on Instagram or Twitter (IG: rosesinister, Twitter: rose_sinister).

All photographs © Rose Sinister, except where indicated otherwise.