ISBN: 978-0-472-06923-1

University of Michigan Press, 2006

The following interview was conducted by: Chris Detloff.

It’s hard to place a label on Bruce A. McClelland -- he’s simply a man who has experienced (and excelled in) so many areas of life that one or two words doesn’t do him justice. What did become apparent in a recent interview, however, is that Mr. McClelland is a man of passion; whether it’s politics, world history, pop culture, or any number of other subjects, McClelland knows his stuff and he’s not afraid to share his opinions. I recently had the opportunity to ask Mr. McClelland a number of questions relating to his life and his most recent book, Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead. The following is what Mr. McClelland had to say:

Chris: Your resume, including your education background, is both impressive and extensive. Were there any early-life experiences which set you on the path that you decided to take? Family influences, perhaps?

Bruce:  “Well, I must say that I had a wonderful high-school education, academically speaking: I studied Russian beginning in eighth or ninth grade, I think, and was reading Homer’s Iliad in Greek when I was a senior. I took the concept of a liberal arts education seriously when I got to Bard College, and when I decided to become a poet (there), I decided to not take the ordinary English lit major track. Instead, I studied physics, languages, and linguistics, and eventually computer languages. This breadth had an adverse effect, however, on my sense of literacy and therefore confidence.”

Chris: Some of the positions you've held throughout your career seem to maintain a theme of "creativity." Is it a knack for creativity that keeps you moving through life? Or do you see yourself as more of a researcher/scientist/academic?

Bruce: “I’m not as creative, I suppose, as I once was, in part because I am no longer in an environment that fosters creativity at the level I was used to (I hung out with drunken/stoned/weird painters and poets in downtown NYC back in the 70s, and with avant-garde poets and musicians in upstate New York in the 70s and 80s.) If you judge from my scores on SATs, GREs, etc. you’d see that my left and right brains are equally matched, and in some cases I’ve even done better in the quantitative area. Defining yourself as a poet, however, does not pay the bills unless you teach, and I had a family to support, so I took advantage of my early experience with computers, as well as my knowledge of linguistics, to get into online databases, software, etc. My more traditional academic achievements are somewhat late: I came to Charlottesville to pursue a doctorate at the age of 44. Whereas creativity allowed me to taste a lot of different intellectual areas, finishing my doctorate in the social areas of the humanities (anthropology/ethnography/folklore) allowed me to go deep into a problem that had been perplexing me for thirty years. I ultimately found demystification to be a more interesting process than mystification.”

Chris: You have a fairly extensive number of published poems. When (and why) did your interest in poetry develop? 

Bruce: “I wrote poetry in high school, and was involved with the school literary magazine. In college, I met Robert Kelly, who became my mentor and friend for the next 26 years (until a rather violent break-up in 1992). I completed my first book of poems at 27, and completed a book of translations of the Russian poet Osip Mandelstam (Tristia; 1921) when I was 21 (it was published in an anthology when I was 26). I continued to write and publish poetry until 1996. Currently, I am, shall we say, ‘taking a break’ from poetry. I am more disenchanted by the egos of poets and the narcissism of the poetry scene than by poetry itself, but it is hard to have one without the other, I’ve found.”

Chris: Did your interest in worldwide history and languages develop from within yourself? Were there factors in your upbringing that influenced your interest in outside cultures?

Bruce: “I studied Russian, Latin and Greek in high school, and was always enamored of languages and linguistic theory. Russian was my major in college, and I got an MA in Russian literature later. Regarding the vampire, it just so happens that this creature comes into being in a part of the world where there are a lot of cross-currents and intermingling cultural influences (Slavic, Celtic, Hungarian, Romanian, Greek, Turkish…), a milieu I absolutely love to be in. I lived in Moscow for a couple of years, and worked on my dissertation in Bulgaria. As part of my job (directing the US government- sponsored Internet Access and Training Program in Russia), I traveled all over the former Soviet Union.  I think it is my love of languages that leads to my fascination with other cultures. I particularly like the way the study of different languages affects one’s thinking: it disrupts your sense of stability and permanency with respect to linguistic/perceptual categories. My poetry often relies upon both etymology and the sounds of words in different languages bumping up against each other in my head. I like being in a strange land, where even watching bad TV is an education. Also, in foreign countries, you have an excuse for being an outsider. Understanding being an outsider, of course, is crucial to my understanding of the vampire.”

Chris: Readers of your book will no doubt wonder where your interest in vampires comes from. Is your interest in vampires a result of early-life influences? Or did your interest in vampires result from a certain experience?    

Bruce: “Well, when I was a kid, I subscribed to a magazine called ‘Famous Monsters of Filmland.’ I loved horror movies, after having the crap scared out of me when I was only seven by Horror of Frankenstein (Hammer Studios, Christopher Lee). I went to see horror films and sci-fi all the time, double features on Saturdays, and always stayed up late on Saturday nights to watch the old horror films on TV.”

“In 1975, McNally and Florescu’s In Search of Dracula came out, and as a result of reading that, I wrote my first book of poems, The Dracula Poems, published first in a literary magazine (1976), and then as a book (1978). At the end of that book, I thought I was more or less done with vampires, but in the late 80s, I read Jan Perkowski’s The Darkling: A Treatise on Slavic Vampirism. That book showed me that there was a link between my knowledge of Slavic languages and my interest in vampires. Since our kids were grown and gone, I left my job in high tech (right before the dot com boom, of course) and we sold our house in upstate New York (right before the real estate boom, of course) to come down here so I could study with Perkowski and finish my doctorate in Slavic Folklore at UVA.”

“While my long poem dealt with the iconography and phenomenology of Dracula, and looked at the myth in a rather dark, gothic/romantic, perverse psychosexual way (the usual way vampires are seen), when I encountered the Bulgarian folklore I discovered something much lighter, much more coherent, and much more nuanced. I decided to see if I could trace the cultural-historical line from the modern Western vampire to the earlier, Orthodox folkloric vampire. My dissertation, which looked closely at the ritual/syncretic origin of the vampire, was evidence that there was indeed a connection between the two forms.”

Chris: When discussing the origins of the term vampir, you mention that the earliest meaning of the word did not likely refer to anything supernatural. Rather, you suggest that the term was likely a “pejorative name for a group or a member of a group whose rituals or behavior were offensive to early Orthodox Christians.” What groups in today’s society would you compare to early Orthodox Christians? (By groups I mean political divisions, academic groups, religious leaders, etc.)

Bruce: “I can’t think of a specific equivalent to the Orthodox Christians of the middle ages, because at the time, official Christianity was aligning itself with various other political and social processes in an attempt to extend and solidify cultural and ethnic boundaries (e.g. ‘Europe’). Certainly the in-group/out-group dynamics that characterize many religio-political struggles are still in place, and demonization of the Other is everywhere.”

“For example, the resurgence of a Crusader attitude in recent years has led to local demonization of Muslims in general, not just those practitioners that violently refuse to accept the hegemony of the Christian-capitalist worldview. Denigration by means of pejoration of ritual attributes persists in terms like ‘towel head’ or ‘dot head,’ where signs of religious affiliation become symbols of inferiority or, in the case of Islamic ‘extremists,’ pernicious evil. But while the general mechanisms of religious scapegoating are ongoing, I don’t see quite the same motivation as was operative a thousand years ago. These attitudes do seem to arise from insecurity about some aspect of the reigning dogma that is not well worked out, however.”

Chris: When examining the “victims” of these early Christians, you often make comparisons between witches, sorcerers, and vampires. What, if any, 21st century groups would you compare to these scapegoats of the past?

Bruce: “Well, again, as I mentioned previously, religious and political scapegoats are everywhere. If we look at any groups that seem to be universally held to be ‘evil,’ this general agreement itself suggests that targeting is going on. Aside from the Arab Muslims, which seem to have replaced Jews and Communists as the primary ‘threat’ to the Euro-American social structure (and vampires were, after all, threats), there are also pedophiles and serial killers and drug dealers, but these groups are not deemed to have mystical threatening power (in the way that sorcerers were thought to have certain vision). What they have in common, however, is lack of respect for societal taboos, and taboos serve to protect a society’s mythology and identity by blocking uncontrolled behaviors that would subvert agreed-upon power arrangements. As with medieval Christianity, there are frequently economic reasons as well as purely political ones for labeling certain groups evil. I understand the ‘vision’ attributed to witches and sorcerers to represent their status as outside viewers of (therefore threats to) the taboo system that is the underlying structure of the power group/society.”

Chris: In your book, you clearly show how attitudes about vampires shifted from the folkloric to the literary as authors and filmmakers got their hands on the vampire legend -- most notably Bram Stoker. Do you feel the trend will ever reverse? That we’ll see less of a focus on the literary vampire and hear more about vampires in the folklore of pop culture? Urban legends come to mind…

Bruce: “I could be wrong, but I think the basic phenomenology of the vampire is getting tired: bats, wings, fangs, etc. The vampire is now an archetype, in that all versions of the myth are variations on the original. Once I discovered the folkloric vampire, I found in those very brief tales not an elaborate literary narrative, but rather a type of existential being that expressed some very nuanced and profound ideas about the nature of innocence and guilt and punishment and righteousness. The folkloric vampire survived in a society that was not burdened by extensive bureaucracy and legislation. In today’s world, there is so little ambiguity, as every aspect of life has been circumscribed in legislation, that it doesn’t make sense to imagine a return to ideas about outsiders or excommunicates coming back to life. Furthermore, we are approaching a time where ‘coming back from the dead’ is neither medically nor technologically outlandish, while a lot of the academic research devoted to, say, post-Colonialism and/or multiculturalism is now becoming mainstream, so that non-academics are also becoming aware of the power dynamics of exclusion and scapegoating – the mechanism, in other words, is no longer ‘unconscious’ (except in certain political administrations).  That said, it is also true that Hollywood is inherently fond of developing new special effects around vampires, werewolves, etc., in part because it was cinema that brought monsters like that into American consciousness, and they are an intrinsic part of film history. It is an interesting thought experiment to consider what would have happened to the vampire tale without the movies, with their ‘ability’ to eliminate ambiguity. So long as vampires represent a kind of adolescent violent eros, I suppose cinematic vampires will continue to represent the narcissistic longings of alienated adolescence.”

“I think stories about vampires may gradually become influenced by more new research that adds another dimension to understanding the functional role of the corpse as an object of displaced punishment. But otherwise, I think the violence that pervades the world now is so real and so much worse than anything vampires ever did, and so much more visible, that the vampire story will gradually become nostalgic (as, I think, it already has). The best vampire/seer at the moment is Hannibal Lechter, and there still seems to be a vicarious or voyeuristic fascination with that kind of violent bloodthirstiness. But notice that he is not presumed to be dead (though I guess he is in a tomb, of sorts), and his supernaturalism, to the extent he is supernatural, lies in his superior ‘intelligence.’ Hannibal is a seer, and serial killer profilers are also seers, but they need to have intimate understanding of those they are hunting. (As Van Helsing needs the vision of Dracula-bitten Mina, Clarice needs the vision of Hannibal.) So the serial killer and the terrorist will come to exemplify the social function of the vampire, especially because now the vampire’s victimization has been exposed (in my book, and elsewhere).”

Chris: I may be wrong, but it sounds like you’ve traveled fairly extensively throughout Slavic and Balkan areas and have spent significant time with many of the locals. What role does the vampire play in modern life for many of these people? Are myths and legends as strong now as they were in previous centuries?

Bruce: “This is a very good question, and something I mention briefly in my book. What Euro-Americans generally fail to get is that for Eastern Europe (up to, say, 1950, when urbanizing, atheistic and proselytizing Communism became predominant), oral demonological tales were simply a natural folkloric form existing in a primarily agrarian world. To the extent that the people actually believed in these things – and I’m not sure that societies on the whole actually ever do believe in them literally, rather these are narrative forms that carry on local history and pass on/encode social controls – there was a system of divinities (and ‘demons’) that characterized the benefits and dangers of the natural world in which they lived and worked.”

“Oral folklore of this traditional sort is definitely in decline. There are footnotes in my book where I point to the fact, for example, that in small Bulgarian Turkish villages (maxalas), Bulgarian Turks will actually offer (to ethnographers) to provide the phone numbers of vampires! In one of the later tales I encountered collected in the early 90s, the informant tells the folklorist that vampires don’t come around much anymore ‘because we now have electric lights’ – she is attributing this decline, in other words, to the vampire’s fear of light. However, looked at more abstractly, we can see that she is really implying that the process of urbanization is destroying the particular type of community upon which this sort of oral folklore depends.”

Chris: This question has been touched upon slightly in previous ones, however this will ask a little more directly. Do you feel the legend of the vampire is alive and well in today’s society? If so, do you feel vampires are viewed as more of a literary or folkloric figure?

Bruce: “The advent of a show like Buffy, which in a sense makes my book possible, suggests that we are collectively conflicted about our interest in the nature of the vampire as either sympathetic or evil. Anne Rice heroized the vampire’s victimhood by romanticizing the erotic violence that stemmed from it, and the Goth movement seems sympathetic to the feelings of vengeful hostility of the unfairly excommunicated. Perkowski and I and now others have struggled to make people in the West aware of the folkloric nature of the vampire, but at this point, the vampire is pretty much a cinematic figure [not literary… (video games being extensions of the cinematic more than the literary)]. I continue to assert that all cinematic vampires derive from Dracula, even those that attempt to reject the Dracula structure (Anne Rice, for example). Even in Russia (where there are two competing words for vampire, the literary one being much broader in currency than the folkloric one) and in present-day Bulgaria, contemporary notions of vampires are derived from Western pop culture. The ‘authentic’ South Slavic folkloric character of old is more or less moribund (because the people who told such tales have died off, and the circumstances for keeping those tales alive – village farmhouses on pitch-black nights in the dead of winter, say – are rarer and rarer).”

Chris: Up until this point, I’ve asked a lot of questions about vampires. I think, however, that it’s important to cover some ground regarding vampire slayers for our readers. You’ve pointed out that these individuals (slayers) have held many different responsibilities over the course of history, including seer, slayer and healer. What role do you feel the slayer plays in today’s society?

Bruce: “In my opinion, the most obvious slayer today in pop culture is the ‘psychological profiler,’ namely, a person who is depicted as being strange and in touch with forces we can’t see. The role of the slayer is to provide the justification for scapegoating. Therefore, anyone who either uses technologies that are hyperperceptive (e.g. intelligence agency paraphernalia) or has access to information that the rest of us don’t have access to is in a position to justify scapegoating. Obviously, the entire Iraq debacle was constructed using this kind of misdirection, which did not get read as an abuse of power so long as the people joining the lynch mob didn’t question either the process or the results. Alas, the results have been so messy and impossible to conceal that the mechanism itself broke down. The scapegoating of Hussein and Iraq would have succeeded if there had been enough evidence to satisfy the growing doubts of those who had otherwise given into their thirst for revenge. Now, ironically, the public need for revenge seems to be coalescing and reorienting itself toward the Bush administration (a dynamic that often develops when leaders of lynch mobs fail to maintain the illusion of justice outside the law).”

“The drive for vengeance is a significant part of the slayer mechanism. The society wants to restore order by blaming and then destroying or exiling the cause of some otherwise inexplicable social disturbance. The 9/11 events were so contradictory of the mythology of the US’ universal benevolence that the society quickly needed to find anyone but itself to blame. The notion that the attack could have in any way been justified or have a logical rationale in the minds of the attackers was so threatening to the mythology of the US as the savior of the globally downtrodden that there was no logical way that the raw and exposed society could have become introspective. (The slayer mechanism by definition obviates cultural/personal introspection.) The idea that there were weapons of mass destruction turned out to have about as much authenticity as claiming that someone saw an excommunicate corpse walking around after dark. Yet it temporarily did not matter that it was deceitful, since everyone was willing to participate in the deceit.”

Chris: You’ve pointed out in your book that the “qualifications” necessary to become a seer/slayer have varied quite a bit throughout the course of history, mostly due to the fluctuating characteristics of vampires themselves. What, if any, qualifications do you feel have been required for slayers in recent times?

Bruce: “Well, Buffy is clearly the only self-proclaimed slayer these days. Generally speaking, the slayer has to represent and buy into the existing system authority, but cannot be a legitimate part of it (cops and soldiers are never slayers!). Writing my book, I realized that back in the days of Watergate, the journalist could portray a kind of slayer, insofar as s/he had access to information that could be selectively disclosed to elevate or destroy the reputation of a given individual. But today, with the Web, it may be too difficult for journalists to play that role: despite the fact that they often inhabit the ‘corridors of power’ in DC, New York, etc., they themselves no longer have any real legitimacy, since there are too many channels for competing views and exposure of ideology. Put differently, everyone is a potential journalist, so there are no credentials (‘markings’) to indicate who is a ‘real’ journalist (with attendant rights to exclude non-journalist). Perhaps we will need non-Journalist Seers some day…Where does Judith Miller fit into this, I wonder?”

“So a slayer, then, is someone who is ideologically suspect (because he or she has something in common with the vampire-target), but his or her special knowledge gives them an interpretive edge in the assignment of evil. It is critical that the audience be extremely willing to not question the vision of the seer.”

Chris: Can you give our readers any thoughts as to the future of the vampire legend? Perhaps where it’s headed or how strong it might remain?

Bruce: “The vampire has proven remarkably resilient: the term itself is perhaps a thousand years old, and we’ve had almost three hundred years of literary tales about literally or metaphorically blood-sucking demons. There are many possible transpositions of that dynamic as blood and death and lust etc. can be transposed into a number of different realms.”

“One thing that helps keep the interest in vampires, and witches and magicians, for that matter, alive is the official hostility toward a worldview in which such beings might be considered ‘normal,’ i.e. social organizations where time is not necessarily perceived as linear (upon which capitalism depends) and nature is not seen as an enemy (as it is in post-Cartesian Christianity). So long as the forces protecting the Christian ecclesia continue to promote the idea of evil as being linked to ungodliness (in a broad sense), there will be people who identify with either (a) the ecclesia or (b) the ungodly. The vampire is so closely linked to dualism because official Christianity has not solved the problem of the authorship of evil and death, and unconsciously keeps returning to a disguised version of the very dualism that it has always chastised as heretical.”

Chris: You are free to dismiss this question, but I have to ask since many readers are likely curious about the topic: during your studies, have you ever met someone who claimed to be a vampire? If so, do you feel they actually were a vampire of some type?

Bruce: “That is a version of the first question I am always asked, ‘Are there really vampires?’ No, I’ve never directly met anyone who claimed to be a vampire (though I’ve met a lot of women (never men, for some reason) who claim to be witches). If there is a syndrome called vampirism that pertains to a certain belief system, it is either psychotic/delusional or else symbolic of a mode of operating within certain power relationships (‘psychic vampires’). I of course do not believe that human beings can get out of their graves and walk around and do damage.”

“Nevertheless: I will say that I was once having dinner in Bulgaria with two famous Russian archaeologists and an equally famous Bulgarian archeologist (Ivan Marazov, my host) (within the limits of how famous an archeologist can be) and we were discussing the vampire and the Slavic etymology of the term (we were conversing in Russian as the common language between us). One of the Russians kept looking at me very strangely, and I was very suspicious of him for some reason. I went home having spent a very enjoyable evening with some very intelligent and erudite scholars. But the next day, at my apartment in Sofia, I could not get out of bed. I was not sick – I did not have a fever or feel bad – I just couldn’t get up, I had absolutely no energy. I don’t drink, so there could not have been a hangover. I was not paralyzed, I just did not have any energy to get up. By evening, this lassitude had passed, but I connected it mystically to the Russian archeologist. Bulgarian friends later explained that perhaps the grapes I had been served had been sprayed with copper sulfate, but medically savvy friends told me that I would have had to have had a lot more grapes than I did. To this day, I can’t help the feeling that I had been incapacitated somehow by the will of this weird, brilliant guy, almost as though he were proving to me that they (vampires) existed.”

Chris: This is less of a question and more of a wrap-up to the interview. Feel free to give readers any other thoughts or opinions that you feel might not have been covered.

Bruce: “You should probably never trust an author’s own assessment of his purpose, but I believe that the point of my book was to demonstrate the provisional nature of the labels that are used to assign members of certain social groups to categories that seem to take on great significance because they are proposed to be linked to human survival and to critical questions about life and death (and what happens afterward). The insidiousness of the ongoing and shape-shifting vampire narrative is that the attribution of evil to an insentient and inactive corpse cannot be anything but absurd, and thus naturally exposes the underlying tendentiousness of the category ‘evil’ --but even so, the socially imaginative animation of a passive and innocent corpse for the purpose of punishment is somehow accepted by all as a valid moral construct serving the need of the group to normalize internal relations extra-legally. Thus, even when the vampire is clearly innocent, it is the rigid agreement about his guilt among the living members of the society that violates the very logic of the concept of guilt without any objection, and thereby forces the society to live with the knowledge of its own intentional blindness and injustice. What are the consequences of that for the society’s future and well-being?”

“When vampire folklore was excerpted from its Slavic and East European, agrarian, Orthodox context in the eighteenth century and eventually became a literary trope if not a mythology, the understanding of the moral ambiguity that accompanied the Bulgarian tales (in which a corpse is held responsible for all kinds of effects in the real world) was completely lost. In literate Europe and America, the victim aspect of the innocent corpse was completely supplanted by ascribing to his foreignness and supernatural aspect a number of evil intentions, whether political, religious, or, more recently, erotic. By covering up the traces of moral ambiguity when the vampire was brought into literature and film, the heroic aspect of the special individual who can reveal the vampire’s absolute evil was amplified. Now we live in a world of superheroes and evil geniuses – Bush, Buffy, Giuliani, Superman, and even, presumably, Osama bin Laden – whose ability to destroy, kill or punish on the basis of mystical power or divinely conferred authority (perhaps in the form of unquestionable moral rectitude) goes unquestioned, as does the guilt of the corpse. A certain class of social relations is normalized at the expense of others. For those of us who sometimes find ourselves sympathizing with the vampire, it sometimes makes sense to ask who is guilty if not the dead?”

 The above interview was contributed by: Chris Detloff. Chris is a long-time resident of Minnesota and a graduate of St. Cloud State University with a bachelor's degree in Rhetorical and Applied Writing. In addition to freelance writing and editing duties for a variety of periodicals. Chris cites Hunter S. Thompson as his favorite all-time author.

To read Chris's Review of  Slayers and Their Vampires: A Cultural History of Killing the Dead CLICK HERE