Sam has been interviewed for BBC News alongside the horror writer and actor Mark Gatiss and Interview with the Vampire writer Rolin Jones. She talks about the immortality of the vampire and how it has always been associated with disease and contagion. Polidori’s 1819 creation in The Vampyre has links with tuberculosis (as shown by Marcus Sedgwick’s chapter in our recently published book, The Legacy of John Polidori: The Romantic Vampire and its Progeny. She notes the links, too, between plague-bearing rats and F. W. Murnau’s 1922 film, Nosferatu – a topic further explored in her recent seminar talk, ‘Rat Kings and the Rat as Vampiric Totem Animal: Mythical Interactions Between The Pied Piper, Dracula and Nosferatu‘.
