Considering you’re a civil war expert, how in the actual hell did you not know about Abraham Lincoln’s history in vampire hunting?

The intro had only one thing to do with the video, and it is that our beloved Bluejay is ………… an engineer(clutches pearls.)

Blue Jay has a background in chemical engineering.

As a woman in a stem field who was raised by a pair of engineer parents (one chemical, one electrical, and growing up we had WEIRD dinner conversations), I can confirm it’s not just the males who are socially awkward. I think the vampire corpses in the videos are more socially adept than us.

6:54 anyone in the modern day that doesn’t think this can happen again definitely doesn’t remember the 2016 killer clown panic.

We've seen a witch panic in the US pretty recently. It's known as the Satanic Panic of the 1980's where a bunch of people freaked out about Dungeons and Dragons and started attacking people. They did not find any witches.

"That intro has absolutely nothing to do with anything in the rest of the video" - oh, sweet summer child

Shoutout to my favorite vampire hunter, Abraham Lincoln!

I read the title initially (scrolling) as 'Vampire Reacts', and thought Chris really changed his vibe.

"...intro had nothing to do with the rest of the video..." Oh, you sweet summer child...

IN fact Dracula is the FOURTH novel in English to involve a vampire.  Carmilla isn't even the first. The first fictional work (King James I's demonology and Calmet's The Invisible World are both older but treated vampires as real) was The Vampyre by John Palidori. It was followed by Varney the Vampire (authorship unsure) and then Le Fanu's Carmilla before Dracula. The Vampyre is particularly interesting because of it's origins.

in 1816 one of the most important events in the history of literature happened by accident. George Gordon Byron invited his close friends Percy Shelley, Claire Clairmont and Mary Wolstencraft Godwin to join him at his estate on Lake Geneva.  The plan was for boating, picnics and other summer fun all of which was... ruined by 1815.  The eruption of Tamborr and other major volcanoes seriously disrupted the weather in Europe.  So instead of sunny weather they got cold and major thunderstorms leaving them trapped inside.  One night while reading a book of German ghost stories Byron decided they should try writing their own.  Byron began a story about a vampire (Fragment of a Novel) but got bored and never finished.  If Percy wrote anything there's no record of it that I've seen,  and Claire Clairmont seemed to have spent the time trying to get back into Byron's pants (they'd slept together before but he wasn't interested). Byron's physician John Polidori picked up the fragment Byron started and wrote the first vampire novel in English (The Vampyre published 1819 anonymously).  Mary on the other hand took inspiration from an overheard conversation of galvinism by Byron and her boyfriend to write a little novel called Frankenstein, you may have heard of it. As a history and horror nerd I find it fascinating that when two of the greatest literary minds of an age got together and made a dare to write a scary story it was a physician who was never very famous and Shelley's future wife (granted her father was a noted political philosopher and her mother the first feminist philosopher) who changed literary history.

The Balkans vampire panic is more interesting with context: the deaths of Petar Blagojevic and Arnold Paole happened in 1725-1726. Between 1718 and 1739, the Habsburg Monarchy had annexed Serbia and northern Bosnia from the Ottoman Empire following a war. During that time, Austrian authorities strengthened their administrative and military presence in these border areas for security, and as a result, Western Austrian doctors and officials were confronted with the customs, folklore and beliefs of rural Orthodox peasants, including a variety of of names for life-draining undead creatures (upyr, strigoi, vrikolakas…) which was translated as “vampire”. These monsters were associated with disease, which was rampant in these war-ravaged areas, making them fertile ground for a vampire panic. Austrian doctors and officials were confronted for the first time to customs like these, which were usually left to religious and judiciary authorities, wrote them down and spread them in Europe. It was an illustration of the meeting between the European elites’ Enlightenment-era rationalism and encyclopedic intention to catalogue everything, and the superstitions and beliefs of the majority rural population.

Definitely need to check BlueJay's  "How to Survive as a Court Jester"

There's also a Victorian  penny dreadful novel called "Varney the Vampire" being sold in the UK at a similar period

Having socialized with engineers, I can confirm that first part isn't entirely wrong. 🤣
2:27 Your expressions are the best 🤣
2:57 I did know this, but only because I was such a vampire nerd in high school that I wrote my senior paper on vampires. 🧛‍♀🦇
9:21 I love when my favorite YouTubers give each other shout-outs!
18:16 Ah, I see you are a man of taste! 😆

3:30 That explains why the Castlevania games have a recurring femme fatale vampire named Carmilla.

It can be hard to separate real life lore from Konami lore 😅.

16:07 hence the seeming randomness of the opening skit.

Vampires are the last thing I think of when watching Blue Jays -- the bird, not the ball team.

Speaking of Blue Jay, as a Canadian, I'm so disappointed my Blue Jay's couldn't get it done in Game 7

I knew that Le Fanu's Carmilla was considered the first popular vampire story, but my Major was English, not History (or chemistry).  Poldori's 'The Vampire' also predates Stoker's Dracula, and there was a penny dreadful called 'Varney the Vampire,' as well.