Halloween Special: Frankenstein & Dracula with Dax Stokes and Melissa Smith-Lauro

Classical Education

About our Guests

Dax Stokes is the host of the award-winning podcast "The Vampire Historian," and a frequent lecturer on the topics of Dracula and vampire folklore. As an academic librarian in the North Texas area, he has organized two symposia on vampire studies featuring scholars from across the United States. His published works on Dracula can be found in IndieJudge Magazine, the Fantastika Journal, Vamped.org, and at thevampirehistorian.com.

Melissa Smith-Lauro is a corporate writer and content strategist who taught literature & composition at the university level for eight years. She’s the indefatigable mother of four sons who play baseball and attend in-person classes at the Flint Academy in Arlington, TX, and online classes with Miss Esther’s Integrated Homeschool Curriculum through the Classical Learning Resource Center. For fun, she works with local creatives to produce collaborative, beautiful, story-driven multimedia children’s content. Melissa is a proponent of Charlotte Mason principles, classical education content, and Montessori education methods. She is a gentle parenting enthusiast and an advocate for ADHD and autism awareness, accommodation, and inclusion in classical schools.

Show Notes

Trae and Adrienne invited Dax and Melissa to discuss the two most famous monsters in gothic fiction literature, Frankenstein and Dracula. The big ideas in these classics help us wrestle with what it means to be a human being through exploring the rich stories of these two monsters. What is a monster, and why should we read these books? Should students in classical schools read them? Join us as we explore these two famous monsters and their authors.

Be sure to check out The Vampire Historian podcast with Dax Stokes too!

Movies Mentioned

• Dracula (1992) The Coppola Version- Portrays all forms of Dracula
• Gothic: Movie with Julian Sands and Shelley
• Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
• Count Dracula: BBC 70’s version with Louis Jourdan
• The Search of Dracula: documentary
• Dracula Dead and Loving It (Mel Brooks and Leslie Nielson)
• Nofaratu (destroyed from law suit)
• Young Frankenstein with Gene Wilder (a Mel Brooks film)
• YouTube on Albertus Magnus, St. Thomas Aquinas and the Robot

Books mentioned

• 1818 version of Frankenstein
• 1831 version of Frankenstein
• Transylvanian Superstitions by Emily Gerard
• In Search of Dracula: The History of Dracual and vampires
• The Icelandic Dracula , 1901 - Powers of Darkness: The Lost Version of Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Swedish version of Dracula - not translated into English yet
• Varney the Vampire (Penny Dreadfuls)
• The Vampire Book (Now the Vampire Almanac)
• Dr. John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819)

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Credits:

Sound Engineer: Andrew Helsel

Logo Art: Anastasiya CF
Music: Vivaldi's Concerto for 2 Violins in B flat major, RV529 : Lana Trotovsek, violin Sreten Krstic, violin with Chamber Orchestra of Slovenian Philharmonic

Special Music: Toccata and Fugue in D Minor, BWV 561; Public Domain classics sourced from the: https://archive.org/.

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