Profs and Pints Meetup-Metro DC

Profs and Pints Northern Virginia presents: “Virginia, Commonwealth of Horror,” on terrifying tales rooted in the Old Dominion, with Joshua Barton, lecturer in English at Virginia Commonwealth University and scholar of horror.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/nv-woodbooger .]

Virginia is for lovers of a good fright. It boasts one of the richest horror folklore traditions in America, ranging from colonial tales of witchcraft all over the state to the modern legend of Fairfax County’s Bunny Man.

Every whisper of a shadowed plantation, every account of a witch trial, and every rumor of a cryptid said to lurk in the Blue Ridge Mountains offers a window into the Commonwealth’s history, cultural anxieties, and evolving identity.

Join Joshua Barton, whose fantastic talks on horror have earned him a devoted following among Profs and Pints fans, as he takes us through decades of Old Dominion horror lore, tracing how supernatural tales and gothic traditions evolved alongside the nation itself.

We'll explore how early colonial fears of the untamed wilderness transformed into antebellum gothic fiction, ghost stories, and, ultimately, into the bizarre suburban legends of the modern era. We’ll look at tales of Grace Sherwood (the “Witch of Pungo”), the Richmond Vampire, and Virginia’s very own Bigfoot, the Woodbooger.

Along the way, Barton will discuss why some dark legends endure in popular culture for centuries while others vanish entirely. He’ll explain how these stories reflect Virginia’s real-world historical shifts, local folklore, and literary imagination.

You’ll come to understand how these tales highlight what makes Virginia unique, both culturally and in its storytelling traditions. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Richmond’s Hollywood Cemetery, where the mausoleum of W. W. Pool is said to hold the Richmond Vampire (Photo by Mr. Johnson / Wikimedia Commons).

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Venturing into Eco-Horror,” an exploration of a genre focused on humanity’s troubled relationship with the natural world, with Joshua Barton, lecturer in English at Virginia Commonwealth University and scholar of horror.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/dc-eco-horror .]

What happens when nature stops being a passive backdrop to horror films and itself becomes the monster?

Join us as we explore eco-horror, a genre that channels environmental anxiety into green nightmares in the form of tales of toxic landscapes, invasive species, and planetary revenge.

The speaker, Profs and Pints fan favorite Joshua Barton, will look at how fears related to ecological collapse, climate change, and human hubris have shaped modern storytelling.

He’ll trace the roots of eco-horror in earlier works where nature rebels against human exploitation, including Steve Sekely’s The Day of the Triffids and Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds. From there, he’ll move into contemporary examples that reflect modern environmental anxieties, like Alex Garland’s Annihilation, Barry Levinson’s The Bay, and M. Night Shyamalan’s The Happening.

We’ll also examine literary eco-horror that blends ecological thought with cosmic dread, including The Ruins by Scott Smith and The Girl with All the Gifts by M. R. Carey.

Across these texts and films, we’ll aim to answer a central question: Why does environmental catastrophe so often take the form of horror? By analyzing cultural context and ecological themes, we’ll see how eco-horror dramatizes the consequences of environmental neglect and forces audiences to confront uncomfortable possibilities about the future of our planet.

Part cultural critique, part genre exploration, this lecture invites audiences to reconsider the boundary between the natural world and the monstrous.

Ultimately, we’ll see that the true horror lies not in nature itself, but in humanity’s impact on it. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image: Photo by Jb Lardizabal / Creative Commons.

Profs and Pints DC presents: “The Vampire as ‘Other,’” on a dreaded centuries-old creature as stand-in for those living in the margins, with Stanley Joseph Stepanic, who teaches a course on Dracula and vampire folklore as an assistant professor of Slavic languages and literature at the University of Virginia.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/dc-vampire-as-other .]

The vampire has long been a malleable symbol of everything from repressed sexual desire to dreaded disease. From its beginnings, however, it has represented few things more than “otherness,” or the condition of having outsider status for whatever reason.

Explore the vampire as a symbol of otherness—and the many ways in which it has shape-shifted to fill this role—with Professor Stanley Stepanic, who has given several excellent Profs and Pints talks in the past.

He’ll start by digging up some of the oldest references to vampires in Slavic folklore and culture, such as the 1726 case of suspected Serbian vampire Arnold Paole and the subsequent panic it caused.

From there we’ll look at the rise of vampires in literature and film and how they have come to embody cultural anxieties related to race, ethnicity, gender, and other traits.

You’ll become familiar with Bela Lugosi, a Hungarian refugee whose thick accent stood in the way of his dreams of becoming an actor until play and film producers went looking for the perfect Dracula.

We’ll look at themes related to marginalization in the film Blacula, the Blade comics and film, the recent hit movie Sinners, and the video game The Blood of Dawnwalker.

You’ll emerge with a greater appreciation of why the vampire character resonates with anyone who has felt oppressed or relegated to the sidelines. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. The talk starts 30 minutes later.)
Image by Canva.

Profs and Pints DC presents: “Washington’s Spookiest Days,” on local seances and other efforts to communicate with the beyond during the early 20th century, with Mark Benbow, lecturer in American history at George Washington University and former historian at the Woodrow Wilson House Museum.

[Advance tickets: $13.50 plus sales tax and processing fees. Available at https://events.ticketleap.com/tickets/profsandpints/dc-spooky-washington .]

What do Harry Houdini, Woodrow Wilson, Arthur Conan Doyle, the famous Washington brewmaster Christian Heurich, and the spirit of a Native-American “Princess” named Monotowah have in common?

They’re all part of an eerie chapter of Washington history, the 1910s and 1920s, when seances were the focus of both harmless parlor games and serious religious practices, and when skeptics of the occult clashed with its believers in the halls of Congress.

Learn about this fascinating time with Mark Benbow, a historian who wrote two books on Wilson and one on Heurich, and who has earned great reviews in giving this talk in the past.

He’ll discuss how a Spiritualist movement that had arisen in the nineteenth century, combined with a spike in interest in contacting the dead following the First World War, left many Washingtonians trying to reach those on “the other side.”

Among the fascinating figures he’ll summon up: Madame Marcia Champney, a popular Washington D.C. medium, who claimed to have visited Edith Wilson and other First Ladies in the White House. She bragged of having fatally cursed debunker Harry Houdini during a Congressional hearing in which he testified in favor of legislation banning seances.

Edith Wilson, Woodrow’s second wife, was not the only believer in his circle. Her brother Randolph hosted seances in their S Street home using a Ouija board and color-coded lights and music, to contact wise spirits including a Native American maiden and a “Hindoo” mystic.

Benbow will share a few ghost stories from his time as the Woodrow Wilson House Historian and even let you know where the house’s “haunted” bathroom is. He’ll leave you with a better sense of where to look for ghosts when Halloween arrives. (Doors: $17, or $15 with a student ID. Listed time is for doors. Talk starts 30 minutes later.)

Image by Canva.