Vampires are hot, y'all

It's Been a Minute

NPR

News Commentary, Society & Culture, News, Spirituality, Religion & Spirituality

4.6 • 8.8K Ratings

🗓️ 28 October 2022

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Spooky season is upon us, so we decided to sink our teeth into the world of vampires. Host Brittany Luse kicks off the conversation with Kendra R. Parker, who teaches a class at Georgia Southern University about Black vampires in film and literature. They talk about the racial and sexual politics of vampire narratives and why humans continue to find vampire stories compelling.

Then Brittany sits down with Jacob Anderson, star of the AMC reboot of Interview with the Vampire. The two get into the shaky ethics of vampirism and the trauma of immortality.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Hey y'all, you're listening to It's Been a Minute from NPR.
0:05.4	I'm Brittany Luce.
0:07.0	Alright, we are in the final stretch of spooky season and Halloween is peering its little
0:13.4	jack-o-lantern head right around the corner.
0:16.5	And to mark the occasion, we're doing a special creature feature on that most seductive,
0:22.6	most mysterious and perhaps most human of monsters, the vampire.
0:36.7	That's Kendra R Parker.
0:38.2	That is literally what I have been saying.
0:40.2	I feel like every era gets the vampire it deserves.
0:44.2	Please say more about this actual theory as opposed to my armchair theory.
0:48.4	I think it depends on who's in power, right?
0:51.1	Kendra teaches African-American literature at Georgia Southern University and her specialty
0:55.6	is, of course, vampires.
0:58.6	Black vampires in particular.
1:00.3	The vampire has long represented something that the people in the dominant culture fear.
1:05.0	And I don't think it's just a vampire.
1:07.0	I think it's a monster in general.
1:09.7	So I know vampires are like an entire pop culture world unto themselves, but I never
1:15.3	cared about them one way or the other.
1:17.4	Twilight, yawn, true blood, true boar.
1:21.1	But now, I'm a changed woman.
1:24.3	What converted me?
	...

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