Andrew Murray is not a vampire. He is, however, the professor who teaches the wildly popular "GMST454: A Cultural History of Vampires" class, which is a course offered under the English department and Germanic studies at the University of Victoria.
He doesn't mind being called Professor Dracula or a vampire, but he prefers Andrew.
When we sat down with him to chat in his office on the second floor of the Clearihue Building, the oldest academic building on campus, he was particularly self-effacing when questioned about the success of the Dracula course, giving credit to his predecessor, Dr. Peter Golz, who taught the course for the last 22 years.
"It has a kind of legendary status because so many people took it over the years, at least 200 students each semester," Murray said. "I was in a bookstore the other day getting a book on vampires, and the woman who sold it to me said she took a course in vampires at UVic."
This is the first time Murray is teaching the course, the biggest class in his teaching career.
If you were to write a Dracula screenplay or book, how would this vampire look?
I tend to think of vampires as very formal creatures – I’d be tempted to go very high fashion, like an all-in-black Balenciaga vampire, or Dior or Hermes; some kind of impeccable being that has seduced its target before it has even had to speak.
Which of the popular vampire supernatural powers do you wish you have?
I think the capacity to alter oneself into fog, a bat, a wolf, etc. on short notice would be a good thing to have.
Which vampire myths do you find the most interesting and the most ridiculous?
I’m interested by the idea of the half vampire, or the sense that the transformation can be reversed or counteracted somehow, the sense of the blood corruption being reversible, not permanent. Perhaps there are halfling vampires wandering around? I can’t think of anything particularly ridiculous – I mean I have to take the things seriously if I’m to succeed in teaching the class.
Where do you think the notion of vampires come from?
One of the earliest ones were coming out of Europe. Some of the things are just to do with the notion of being buried alive. That when medicine was more primitive, people were more likely to be buried alive, so they were banging on coffins... An interesting thing is that one of the reasons cremations became much more popular was because nobody comes back from cremation, right?
Why is there such a huge fascination with vampires?
I think people have always been interested in the notion of the "un-dead" and like to be frightened. The 21st century saw the explosion of landmark vampire pop culture update for these creatures of the night, like Twilight and True Blood, and that seemed to boost interest again. Dracula as a novel, its impact wasn't huge when it was first published 125 years ago, but its legacy is incredible. It just seems like something that's not really going away. You only have to do a quick Netflix search for vampires to see how many shows there are with different variants of vampires. In fact, one of the first assignments I'm gonna give my students is tell me about your favorite vampire and why this vampire is your favourite. Like, why does this vampire belong on the syllabus instead of the ones I've chosen, so I'll give them the chance to sort of convince me that this is the one and we'll see what they come up with.
What makes GMST454 such a popular course to take for UVic students?
The appeal is in the vampire. So much has been done in popular culture everywhere and vampires have always been one of those interesting things we'd like to see on film and read about. A lot of people take it as an elective. I mean, it'll have a lot of German studies majors in it, a lot of English majors, probably film students in it too. I'd imagine a lot of the people in it are taking it because it works toward their major effectively. And then many people are in their third or fourth year and it's like, well, why don't I take a class on vampires to give me a break from biochemistry or, you know, microbiology or something like that. So, I think it's appealing across multiple disciplines for sure.
What will you be covering in the course?
We’ll look at the origins and backgrounds to vampire mythology and literature for starters. There will be some readings assigned such as the 1819 novel The Vampyre by John Polidori, Bram Stoker’s Dracula as well as its film adaptations. And we’ll watch other films too, including Murnau’s Nosferatu, Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, Thomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, Patrick Süsskind’s Perfume, to name a few. So, two novels, a short story, six or seven films. They're not going to be writing long term papers or doing complicated research, but they'll be learning lots of stuff.
Is Bram Stoker’s Dracula a good place to start for those who want to learn about vampires?
I'm seeing Dracula as kind of foundational to the sort of 20th and 21st century vampire tradition, and we'll look a bit at the folklore that's older than Dracula and earlier fictions. But to me, the conversation starts with Dracula and then we’ll see what other directors have done with the novel.
With the many existing iterations of vampires, what "innovations" did Bram Stoker give the vampire lore with Dracula?
There's a lot of things in Dracula that seem really significant, like not being able to see his reflection or not being able to cross running water. It's sort of like this cabinet that all kinds of things come out of.
How will the actual class be structured?
Choosing the actual texts was hard because there's so many that I like. But at the same time, I wanted to sort of respect the tradition that Dr. Golz started, using a lot of films too. It's a three-hour class – I will open with a lecture about some elements of the film, prepare them on things to look out for and then watch the film and in the last hour of the class, there will be some discussion and participation exercises. I'm reasonably confident in the methodology and I think that is kind of what Peter has done traditionally. I'm hoping to generate that sort of feeling of collective experience, especially for films that maybe the class is less likely to have seen.
How will you be assessing the students in your class?
In a class as big as this one, 212 students in total, the assessment is in the form of exams. We'll have a midterm and a final exam, like good old-fashioned paper-and-pen assessment. But there will also be marks to be given for class participation. They’re going to make their case and argue for their favourite vampire. I'm a big fan of class participation. For this course, they can write answers on cue cards and then hand those cards in at the end, so I'm not putting them on the spot.
How would you make your course 'vampire' power proof from students who want to cheat their way through the course ?
I will keep my own ancestry/identity mysterious, just to keep them wondering about whether I myself might be closer to having a vampiric identity than they might hope.
For any student looking to take the course in the future, what would you tell them?
What I would say is, you're gonna get an inherently interesting subject matter and there's no doubt you're gonna find things that are enthralling in it. You’re also gonna have a committed group of people and a professor who is enthralled too. So you'll be swept up in a momentum of a kind of enthusiasm that I think, a lot of students really appreciate in the classroom, that sort of sense of common purpose.
What are you hoping the students will take away from the course?
I'm big on asking my students to reflect on what they've learned, so I'm assuming I'll get some answers from them, from that. I would imagine it might be to do with kind of the versatility of the vampire as a historical figure or even just monsters more broadly about how adaptable they are to different traditions. You know, there's something primal in human nature and a monster is kind of out there on the boundary of that. It's sort of like trying to tell us something, trying to warn us about something, maybe trying to show us something. I think just recognizing that there's a kind of tradition that crosses cultures and eras where we sort of all need to be afraid. Sometimes we all wanna be frightened and we all sort of appreciate this sort of empathy of horror.
I'll be very interested to hear what the students have to say about the experience, and you know, hopefully it's positive and I'll take account of it when I teach again in, probably 2026.
