Welcome back to DEAD Time. After devouring season two of Interview With the Vampire on AMC, and being mesmerized by Sam Reid as Lestat de Lioncourt, I decided to reach out to the founding father and leading expert on modern vampire culture and mythology.
Father Sebastiaan is a Master Fangsmith, an author, and the Impresario of the Endless Night Vampire Ball, an annual event that showcases vampire culture. Father Sebastiaan has been involved in the vampire/vampyre subculture since 1992 and draws his inspiration from Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles, and specifically Lestat de Lioncourt. Father Sebastiaan has appeared on Travel Channel’s Ghost Adventures, CW, History Channel, Discovery and MTV. He is the author of Vampyre Sanguinomicon: The Lexicon of the Living Vampire, and Vampyre Magick: The Grimoire of the Living Vampire, as well as several other books and is working on his upcoming memoir.
To find out more about the Endless Night Vampire Ball, you can check out their website.
Bloody Disgusting was excited to have the opportunity to chat with Father Sebastiaan about being involved in the vampire subculture since the nineties, creating the Endless Night Vampire Ball, chaos magic, and a lot more.
Photo Credit: Seth Neuffer
Bloody Disgusting: You are considered the founding father of modern vampire culture and you’re a Fangsmith, who makes custom fangs for clients. What first sparked your interest in vampires?
Father Sebastiaan: What sparked my interest in vampires was my mom. Sadly, she passed away last year. What happened was I was in my kitchen, and she was telling me Tom Cruise is losing weight to become a vampire called Lestat de Lioncourt. This author named Anne Rice wrote it. So, I picked up Interview With the Vampire and I hated it. Then I picked up The Vampire Lestat and I loved it. Because I hate Louis, whining Louis. I became fascinated with Anne Rice’s world of vampires. And then I found Vampire: The Masquerade, LARPing. My girlfriend at the time, who was Magenta from Rocky Horror, invited me to go to Rocky Horror and I met some people that identified as vampires, and I started just meeting all these people.
In 1993, Dawn and I went to a gaming convention and got our fangs done by a guy named Gregor. Gregor made both of our fangs, and we went home, and we had a good time. I’m not going to get too personal, but Dawn had a fantasy of being a vampire. I was involved in the Vampire: The Masquerade community then because that was new and fresh. And it was really interesting because Vampire: The Masquerade did something that no other RPG did. Are you familiar with Vampire: The Masquerade?
BD: I don’t think I’ve ever heard of that one.
FS: It was a tabletop and LARP game. Instead of playing like a wizard or warrior, a cleric or a thief, you would have different clans of vampires that identify as different things. And you play this game in nightclubs. Vampire: The Masquerade was the first game that girls got involved in. Girls would actually play a role-playing game. It was insane. It was revolutionary. It was awesome to have a co-ed game. Girls wouldn’t touch role-playing games with a 10-foot pole because it was too nerdy, and they would lose their entire social life. Yeah. My grandfather was a dentist, and I wanted him to teach me how to make fangs. And he told me, “No, that’s Satanic.” And I’m like, “Grandpa, that’s not Satanic. It’s just dental work for Halloween.” So, my aunt, who’s also a dentist because my grandfather was a dentist, hooked me up with a dentist that could teach me how to make fangs if I cleaned dentures for a year.
So, I did the karate kid thing, where I waxed on and waxed off for about 16 months. During that time, I was learning how to make dental prosthetics and learning about the anatomy of the mouth and stuff like that. And I’ve got a whole bunch of stories about my adventures with that dentist. I got to the point where I was confident in making a pair of fangs. I sat my mom down on Christmas Day in 1994 and I said, “Mom, I want to make you fangs.” And she’s like, “Are you like Lestat and I’m Gabrielle from Interview with the Vampire?” I said, “I hate Louis, mom, but I love Lestat.”
Lestat has been my role model since I was a kid. I made my mom my first pair of fangs. She’s the first person I’ve ever made fangs for, and they came out okay. I eventually made her another pair that looked good. I was so confident in making fangs that I decided to go professional. I dropped out of college, and I started working at a tattoo parlor in New York called Andromeda Body Piercing. I went into the center of the goth world, and I tried to get LARPers to buy fangs. And Halloween of 1995, I rocked it. I found my calling.
BD: I guess no one else was doing anything like that at that time, right?
FS: There were plenty of people doing it, but not in the way that I did it. I sold a lifestyle. Vampire: The Masquerade, as a LARP, had a whole universe that you can see the influence of coming off of it. I’m releasing my memoirs on my birthday next year, January 24th. I started making fangs and I had the choice to brand myself Sabretooth or the Dark Tooth Fairy. I’m glad I chose Sabretooth. My business became Sabretooth, and my clients became known as Clan Sabretooth. It just kind of naturally evolved and I got invited to the Anne Rice Memnoch Ball in 1995, where Anne Rice had Kirsten Dunst come out of a coffin. It was just an insane experience. And I was thrust into New Orleans, and I fell in love with New Orleans. The entire world of New Orleans was so fucking amazing. I fell in love with it. I was fascinated by it. I fell in love with Anne Rice, and I was in Vampire: The Masquerade and then I decided to throw my own Vampire Ball in New York.
I threw three of them and on the third one, a woman named Susan Walsh disappeared. She was investigating vampires for the Village Voice. That brought the media down on me. And I got interviewed by MTV, Glamour Magazine, and Cosmopolitan. All these different magazines and publications and TV shows came to talk to me. Basically, I was at the forefront of the vampire community. The LARP was great, but my girlfriend came to me, and she said, “I don’t want to play by these rules. I don’t want to play games anymore. I want to live it.” So, I took the game lifestyle and mixed it with Renfaire lifestyle in Society for Creative Anachronism and it turned out to be a lifestyle. So, how I became the founding father of the vampire culture is I gave a lexicon of terminology that people could use to understand the vampire lifestyle and vampire experience. I created a lineage of Sabretooth Clan which became a legacy.
Photo Credit: Seth Neuffer
BD: You are also a chaos magician. For readers who are not familiar with the term, can you explain what is involved in the practice of chaos magic? You wrote a book about vampire magic as well, right?
FS: I wrote Sanguinomicon: The Path of Vampyre Magick, which mixes chaos magic and vampirism. Chaos magic is a concept of creating belief as a tool and you can shape things according to belief systems. It’s not occult magic as you think, like the psychology of sigil work. Sigil work is the symbols and symbols are the most basic. Chaos magic deals with the concept of thought forms and I classify them into sigils, servitors, tulpas, egregores, and god forms. Each one is exponential from the other and the creation and manipulation of these entities, or these thought forms, is all psychological. So, for example, a sigil is a symbol. You take that symbol, and you define it. Like the golden arches and McDonald’s. When you smell the french fries and you see the golden arches, so many of us get psychologically turned on because we’re hungry and we’re excited to go to McDonald’s. Those are the sigil work.
An egregore is the concept of a thought form that is the soul of a group of people. For example, a corporation is an egregore. Disney is an egregore. A football team is an egregore. And two egregores clashing is two football teams coming together in the fans. The cheering, the identity of the sigil of the band, like the Raiders in Vegas. The egregore is centered around the Raiders stadium. And the symbol is the Raiders helmet. And the energy of the fandom of the Raiders is so strong that it creates a psychological group think. And that is separate from the normal thought patterns and that’s what’s called an egregore. A god form is an egregore that has an identity. So, for example, superheroes are god forms because people worship them. More people know about Spider-Man than they know about going to church.
Darth Vader is a god form. Elvis became a god form. And god forms can shape shift. And Jesus is a god form. Because Jesus, like Elvis, people go, “Oh, white Jesus.” And I’m like, “Well, Jesus was probably a Middle Eastern guy with an afro.”
The historical Jesus. But like Elvis, Elvis has so many variations and they’re called aspects. And the collective belief in people believing in him, and believing in Jesus or believing in Darth Vader, the collective thought pattern is kind of like an AI. And the egregore has a personality. Like Elvis has a personality and an identity that people can relate to. I’m not sure if that’s making sense, but that’s the best explanation I can give to the lay person.
BD: You’ve been on Ghost Adventures, and you made Zak Bagans some custom fangs. How do you think vampires, and vampire culture, fit into the world of the paranormal and have you had a paranormal experience you can tell me about?
FS: Oh, I have many paranormal experiences I can share. One’s right on Ghost Adventures. The physical body of a human being has a ghost in it. Every person you see walking down the street is a ghost in the shell. So, you’re having paranormal experiences and what a lot of people don’t understand is the difference between the supernatural, the paranormal, and the supernormal. Supernormal is the mom picking up the car with the kids underneath. You know, the mom that saves the kid and gets trapped or someone falls out of an airplane, and they survive. That’s supernormal. Paranormal has an effect on the real world. But you can’t explain it with science.
So, that’s why people are using all those like EMF meters in the ghost hunting scene. If they’re using technology to record experiences like that, it results in a paranormal experience. So let me give you an example of something that was paranormal before science discovered it. Germs. Nobody knew what caused disease and germs were so microscopic people didn’t believe that small things like that existed. They didn’t know in the 1880s, 1850s and 1860s and 1870s. They just discovered germs, and today we know what germs are. We believe in germs. We know germs exist, but we can’t see them with the naked eye. So how do you believe that? How do you validate they’re real?
Another thing that was paranormal in 1819 and was known to science in 1920? Air. Nobody knew that air existed. You could see smoke and people just thought it was empty space. But they discovered small molecules of oxygen and hydrogen were floating around you. And that’s what created air. So, supernatural is different from paranormal in that you cannot explain it with science and there’s no way to prove it is true or not, right? So, for example, God is supernatural. You can’t prove God doesn’t exist and you can’t prove God exists. Theists believe in God. Atheists don’t believe in God and agnostics don’t know. And they’re okay not knowing. I don’t think it’s possible to be an atheist or a theist because you can’t prove God exists or doesn’t exist. You just have to have faith, right? So, that’s supernormal, paranormal and supernatural.
The three different categories.
I had a paranormal experience when I went to Romania. I’ve had many paranormal experiences, but when I went to Romania, I was with a witch named Andrea Bathory who was giving me a tour in 2016. We went to Bran Castle, which is the famous Dracula Castle. We did a ritual to summon an ancient Strigoi spirit, which is the vampires of the region. This was crazy [laughs]. It was a full moon over Bran Castle.
And you could see the whole valley and the whole village below it and the castle and the mountain just like out of a movie. And we did the ritual, and nothing happened. We did the ritual around nine o’clock right, right around sundown. Suddenly I’m like, “Ah, nothing’s going to happen.” And what happened was an orb showed up above me. It looked like a ball of water. I put my hand into it and suddenly I had another consciousness in my mind.
It was kind of like venom. Andrea Bathory started laughing and going, “Oh, you met a real Strigoi. Oh my God, that’s great!” Because the Strigoi Morti are undead, which means they’re between life and death. They’re in between incarnations. And they have learned how to survive death by becoming undead, fully conscious spirits. This one possessed me, and I go, “What’s your name?” And he goes, “You wouldn’t believe me if I told you.” I’m like, “All right, tell me your name.” And he says, “Dazul.” I’m like, “Oh, come on, that’s not your fucking real name.” And he’s like,”What do you expect? It’s my real name.” This is a conversation I was having in my head and Andrea Bathory was scaring the shit out of me because she was laughing her ass off.
I went to sleep, and I woke up and I’m like, “Oh, that was a nightmare.” And then I heard, “Good morning. “I was like, let’s go back to Bucharest. I need to get this thing out of me.” And she was like, “Are you sure you want it out of you?” The confidence that I was feeling, the majesty, the magic that I was feeling, I never felt better. But I felt like I was in a room with someone that consistently was talking to me. I didn’t have any privacy. And I stopped at a pit stop. I go to these American tourists and I’m like, “Help me. I got possessed.” And Dazul’s like, “They’ll never believe you.” Andrea said that I’m going to regret getting rid of this entity because once you kick it out, it’s never going to come back.
I was feeling a sense of confidence that I’ve never felt in my life, a sense of power that I could do anything. We went back to her house, and she took a bunch of candles and put it on the earth and then dripped a drop of blood on the dirt in a cauldron and then dripped a drop of blood into a bowl with water. And she said, “Put your arms in an ‘S’ position and we’re going to get rid of this thing.” He was like, “You’re going to regret this. I’ll never come back to you.” I heard the voice go away and I felt my privacy come back. And I will tell you, I miss that feeling of confidence. I’ve never been able to replicate it.
Photo Credit: Seth Neuffer
BD: You’re the Impresario of The Endless Night Vampire Ball in New Orleans, which is described as “Venetian Masquerade meets a Vampire Court, with the energy of a rock concert and the elegance of Burlesque Cabaret.” What inspired you to create this event?
FS: I wanted a place for people to go, so I experimented with a couple of different types of events. Then I went to the Anne Rice Memnoch Ball in 1995, which is the biggest vampire ball in history and will never be replicated. I fell in love with Anne Rice, and I got to meet her in New Orleans at her ball. She was greeting everybody in a carriage, and I knew I could never replicate that because I didn’t have the budget. And this is a year after the movie Interview With the Vampire came out.
So, five A-list actors in there was nuts. I went there to New Orleans, which is a story in itself. In fact, you can read it in my memoirs, Blood and Spirit, which is coming out in January of 2025.
And my memoirs explores my vision of the vampire community in the 1990s. It’s called Blood and Spirit and it’s the adventures of Father Sebastiaan. It’s going to be really cool. We’re putting the press release out on Halloween because I have a bunch of readers reading it.
BD: Oh, very cool! So, you created the Endless Night ball as a place for everyone who was into the vampire culture to come together?
FS: It was mainly for my fang clients that have something in common. The Sabretooth members, which are my fan clients, are absolutely wonderful people. They know what they want. They come of their own free will and they get things. They are just amazing, unique people that have their own paradigm. They’re like long lost members of a family that I haven’t met.
When I make their fangs and they look in the mirror for the first time, it’s amazing. But the vampire ball Endless Night is unique in the fact that it was created originally as an event for my fang clients. It’s the only vampire event that travels around the world. It’s crazy because we’ve done them in Prague, Berlin, Paris, Amsterdam, Barcelona, and New York. It started in New York. After I went to the Anne Rice Ball, I came back from New Orleans to New York, and I threw a vampire ball. I give her full credit for introducing me to the vampire genre. A lot of people go, “Oh, you copied Anne Rice.” And I’m like, “No, she inspired me.” [laughs] I mean, her character Lestat is my hero. So, what am I supposed to do? Not throw vampire balls and make fangs? I moved to Paris because of her. I moved to Paris because of her. I lived in Paris for eight and a half years. I became a cataphile. I was in the catacombs every night [laughs].
Endless Night evolved over the years. We’ve done it all over the United States and all over Europe and the brand is well known. The brand is bigger than me now. It’s bigger than Father Sebastiaan. Endless Night is a worldwide phenomenon. But what I try to do is make it simple and make the patrons the priority. The people that are buying tickets are the people that the event is about. Not me, not my crew, not my staff, not my performers. We are there to serve the experience of those people.
What’s really important is that it’s an escape from the muggle world. We do not go and promote and go, “Oh, we have queer and gay people doing shows.” We just put them on stage and let them communicate their own energy themselves. We have Republicans, Democrats, conservatives, and the event is not about politics. We do not allow politics in our event. It’s an escape from the normal reality for people to come together that love vampires. There’s no muggle politics allowed. Endless Night started in a gay club, so the history should speak for itself. It was conceived in a gay club, Limelight in New York. It’s a church at 666 6th Avenue.
BD: Maybe another time we can talk about the show Interview With the Vampire.
FS: [laughs] Oh, I have many things to say about Interview With the Vampire.
If you’re looking for a pair of custom fangs, you can check out Father Sebastiaan’s site Sabretooth and you can also find him on YouTube as well.
Photo Credit: Seth Neuffer