Vampires Before Dracula: Disease, Panic, and the Management of the Undead
Long before Dracula gave the vampire a cloak, a castle, and a seductive gaze, the undead were something far more troubling: a practical problem.
In the villages of Eastern and Central Europe, the dead did not always stay buried. Bodies were said to rise, to feed, to return to their families—not as spirits, but as flesh that would not decay properly. Livestock sickened. Children wasted away. Entire households fell ill. And in response, communities acted—not with superstition, but with a grim, methodical logic.
This talk explores the historical phenomenon of the so-called “vampire panics” of the 17th and 18th centuries, when officials, clergy, and physicians were drawn into investigations of the undead. Corpses were exhumed and examined. Reports were written. Remedies were prescribed. The boundary between folklore, medicine, and early science began to blur in unsettling ways.
Why did certain bodies become vampires? What did people actually see when they opened the grave? And how did disease—particularly those that distort the body in death—shape the belief that the dead were feeding on the living?
From stakes driven through the heart to sickles laid across the throat, from garlic and fire to the careful repositioning of the corpse, this lecture reveals the ritual technologies developed to contain the restless dead. These were not random acts of fear, but structured responses to a world in which death itself seemed unstable.
Drawing on historical case studies, medical misunderstandings, and the anthropology of death, this talk repositions the vampire not as a figure of gothic romance, but as something far older and more disturbing: a body that refuses to behave.
Because before the vampire became seductive, it was unmanageable.
Speaker Bio:
Lena Schattenherz Heide-Brennand is a Norwegian lecturer with a master degree in language, culture and literature from the University of Oslo and Linnaeus University. She has been lecturing and teaching various subjects since 1998. Her field of interest and main focus has always been topics that others have considered strange, eccentric and eerie, and she has specialised in a variety of dark subjects linked to folklore, mythology and Victorian traditions and medicine. Her students often point out her thorough knowledge about the subjects she is teaching, in addition to her charismatic appearance. She refers to herself as a performance lecturer and always gives her audience an outstanding experience
don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day
