The Podcast for Social Research · The Brooklyn Institute for Social Research

(Pop) Cultural Marxism, Episode 15: Vampires!

·2 hr 31 min

The episode opens with a catch-up between the hosts. Joseph returns after some time away and talks about video games, especially Monster Hunter Wilds and the next Elden Ring expansion. That opening stays loose and friendly. It also sets the pace for a conversation that moves by association before it settles into its main argument. From there, the show turns toward vampires. The hosts start using the genre as a way to think about adaptation, cultural inheritance, and the social problems that fiction can hide or reveal. A major thread is race. The discussion notices how race can start to fade into the background in the current adaptation even when the story still asks you to keep it in view. Children matter here too. The hosts spend time on the way a character in Fledgling who looks like a child changes the stakes of the text. That detail is not treated as decoration. It becomes a way to talk about vulnerability, dependence, and the categories fantasy uses to make its worlds legible. The move to Dubai gets particular attention. The hosts read it as one of the show's sharper choices because it places Louis inside an aristocratic, ultra-rich parallel society. That setting lets the adaptation stage a strange version of modern vampiric life. The conversation also compares that move with the books, noting that some of the material appears later there than it does on screen. The older film version comes up as well. The hosts say it is fine, even if they were never especially impressed by it. By the end, the episode has widened from vampire talk into a discussion of race, class, children, and the way adaptations decide what to foreground. It is patient, recursive criticism with enough pop-cultural texture to keep the abstract arguments grounded.

As heard by us

A vampire discussion that keeps returning to race, inheritance, and what adaptations choose to smooth over.

The episode treats vampires as a starting point rather than the point, and that gives the conversation room to move through race, children, class, and inheritance with more intent than simple recap.

Read the full review in PlayNext →

Why you'd press play

You want vampire talk that turns into a theory problem.

Read the full recommendation in PlayNext →

Listen to the show on

Apple Podcasts Spotify