Dracula Unearthed
Not your normal holiday snaps!
Bite me's very own Mark Benecke recently starred in a one hour movie for the National Geographic TV Channel. ‘Dracula Unearthed' was shot in Romania at original locations. Participants in the programme included the curator of Castle Bran Dan Dermengiu, head of the Institute of Forensic Medicine Bukarest and Kurt Treptow, historian and author of a book about the life of Vlad Tepes.
 Dr. Mark Benecke aka ‘Dr. Maggot' believes in a ‘physiological basis for vampirism', and contends that vampires can be explained scientifically - that light sensitivity, thirsting for blood and the phenomenon of gasping corpses are natural, not supernatural, conditions. This intense devotee of the living dead uses modern criminal forensic methods to investigate the vampire myth.
Through this work, Benecke has had a play written about him and is the author and co-author of more than five books, including The Dream of Eternal Life, (Columbia University Press, 2002).
He has delivered medical lectures on the topic of impaling, but unlike many fans of the supernatural Count, the German doctor thinks that many aspects of the myth are very natural indeed - and are based on the biology of the human body and the biology of death.
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