This course on vampires is so popular, it might just be immortal

January 7, 2025 by Cynthia Macdonald - A&S News

To say Maxx Calame loves vampires is an understatement.

His obsession began at the age of eight, when he first came across his mother’s copy of Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire. It continued throughout his adolescence, when he acquired a tattoo of the vampire Astarion from the video game Baldur’s Gate 3. And it persists today, with his recent completion of a hugely popular first-year seminar course called Our Vampires, Ourselves (GER194H1).

“This class was why I came to U of T,” says the first-year member of Victoria College. “I would say I’m a big vampire connoisseur in all types of media: games, books and movies.”

Our Vampires, Ourselves was first created fourteen years ago by Erol Boran, associate professor, teaching stream in the Department of Germanic Languages & Literatures.

Tom Cruise (left) and Brad Pitt (right).
Tom Cruise stars as Lestat and Brad Pitt as Louis de Pointe du Lac in Interview with the Vampire, a film directed by Neil Jordan and based on Anne Rice's 1976 novel of the same name. Photo: Francois Duhamel/Sygma via Getty Images.

“It’s made it through different times and phases,” says Boran, “and it’s as popular now as it ever was. I could probably teach two or three classes and they would still be quite full.”

When I started here at U of T, I wondered how I could find an interesting topic that would draw the students in. I wasn’t thinking about the vampire as such, but of the vampire as a mirror of ourselves. And I sensed that what had an amazing attraction to me would also attract the students.

Students spend the course’s first half studying Dracula, the best-known vampire of them all. They then segue into learning about a wide variety of lesser-known but much beloved bloodsuckers: from novelist Sheridan Le Fanu’s lesbian vampire Carmilla, to the teenage vampires of Twilight, to the southern vampires of True Blood and more.

Why are vampires so appealing?

The answer, says Matthew Bain, lies in their versatility. “You can have so many variations on what a vampire is: you have Castlevania or Nosferatu, who are horrifying monsters, but at the same time you have Twilight and other depictions where they are the heroes,” says Bain, also a student in the class and a first-year member of New College.

Like Boran and Calame, Bain believes that unlike other monsters — such as werewolves — vampires present as human and can act as potential mirrors to our own journey in the world. “You might not be a blood-sucking monster yourself, but you might feel othered, or somehow apart from the majority community. Studying vampires is a really useful way to explore the idea of your own experience as a metaphor.”

Boran himself developed an interest in vampires when he was embarking on his master’s thesis, for which he read 50 vampire books. “Back in the ‘90s it was not such a popular academic topic, so I had to really convince the professors to let me do it,” he says.

“And when I started here at U of T, I wondered how I could find an interesting topic that would draw the students in. I wasn’t thinking about the vampire as such, but of the vampire as a mirror of ourselves. And I sensed that what had an amazing attraction to me would also attract the students.”

Boran says that vampires never die — literally — because they are metaphors not only for who we are, but for our collective social fears and prejudices. These have included homosexuality in 19th-century novels such as Dracula and Carmilla; AIDS in Interview with the Vampire; and racial discrimination in Buffy the Vampire Slayer and True Blood.

This course is an excellent opportunity to mix academics with personal interests, and a lighthearted way to explore ideas while learning and developing your own abilities. Even if you’re not a vampire fanatic like we are!

Calame adds that vampires have historically permitted people to “confront things they might not want to confront.” In their own experience, “vampires have given me a voice, in a way — especially being someone who identifies with the queer community. They’ve allowed me to relate to what I face on a daily basis.”

“The one constant over the years,” says Boran, “is that this course attracts really interesting people. It’s my all-time favourite course. And I always want to teach it in the first semester, when people come right from high school.”

Indeed, Anne Rice once said that vampires let young people “chart a noble path through a hideous culture.” That remains true as one generation gives way to another.

“I really like the mindframe that many students bring with them when they first come here,” Boran says. “It may have to do with vulnerability, or being in a new context, but students in first year are very open. We have such interesting discussions.”

Asked about their favourite vampires, Calame cites Astarion, as well as Interview with the Vampire’s Lestat; Bain favours Joshua York, from the George R.R. Martin novel Fevre Dream; and Boran is drawn toward Louis, another Anne Rice character.

“Vampires change with the times, but very often they’re presented as out of time, or left behind by time,” he says. “Louis suffers in a way that seems to be at the core of contemporary life…and now as I’m growing older, I’m noticing how long life is, and how you still have to hold on and suffer through it. It makes me like this character even more.”

Though this year’s course has come to an end, Bain and Calame say that vampires will always be with them; Calame even hopes to work his lifelong interest into future studies in archaeology.

Summing up his own experience, Bain says: “This course is an excellent opportunity to mix academics with personal interests, and a lighthearted way to explore ideas while learning and developing your own abilities. Even if you’re not a vampire fanatic like we are!”