When I started this project, I set a few boundaries in place to help limit my discussions. I wouldn’t be talking about zombies, aliens, or man-made abominations so early on. I wouldn’t talk about anything past 1900 to keep these folktales regionally limited, or at least easier to trace than the quickly mutating monster movie media. I wouldn’t explore American, Oceanic, or Asian monsters, to try to keep to a discrete strain with a written record. I would produce academically-worded papers intended to be taken as pure research.

As I continued research, however, I became curious of exactly what I knew versus what I thought I knew, and I enjoyed pleasant diversions down the rabbit hole in researching the Salem Witch Trials, or an impressive attempt at tackling all the monster movies I never got to see in my sheltered youth.

And at the conclusion of the first year of this project, the most neatly polished essays I have to offer are pieces on the Salem Witch Trials, vampire and monster movies, global taboos, and Blood Libel’s connection with vampires through the modern era. I feel like I’ve careened wildly off-track from where I intended to go, and I’m learning to be okay with that. Research is the lifeblood of academia, and I have enjoyed few pleasures as great as being able to dig in and study something that I really love, or something that I don’t know much about yet. (Don’t hold me to reading up on obscure mathematical theorems. I have my limits!) My Salem paper clocked in at 17 single-space pages in part because of my physical experiences which enriched my writing, but also because the combination of on-the-ground experience and the glut of research produced a genuine excitement for the topic. While I scheduled pieces exploring safer topics like ‘vampire anathema’, I found that forcing myself to write on something that I’d researched extensively but had little passion about produced lackluster writing efforts. The thesis experience allowed me to do something fun, and in the process, I could relate that fun to others. I want this kind of drive to fuel the rest of the topics I write about so I can relate my passion to you, and I’m eager to see where the next year will take me.