"Count Yorga, Vampire" by Laura Maria Censabella

From TRUTH BE TOLD's September 25th, 2025 show ("Scary Monsters!") Laura Maria Censabella's "Count Yorga, Vampire" tells the story of a  campy movie monster who teaches a child her first lessons in human betrayal.

Laura has received three grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts in Playwriting and Screenwriting, and her play Carla Cooks The War won the Saroyan/Paul Human Rights Playwriting Prize. Her play Paradise was produced by Viola Davis and Julius Tennon, and Beyond Words was a recent Boston Globe Critic’s Pick.

TRUTH BE TOLD was created by Susan Kim and David Zellnik and each episode was produced and scored by Eric Svejcar. Logo designed by Joseph Zellnik.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:03

Hello and welcome back to Truth Be Told Season 1: Love and Monsters. Each of these 14 episodes features one story performed at Ensemble Studio Theater in New York City as part of the live event Truth Be Told. This story night was created by Susan Kim and David Zelnick and features members of EST and friends who tell heartbreaking, embarrassing, hilarious, true stories all based on the theme. This seven-week season draws from our first two sold-out evenings, First Love, First Lust, and Scary Monsters. And now, without further ado, the story of a campy movie monster who teaches a child her first lessons in human betrayal, written and performed by Laura Maria Sensibella.

SPEAKER_02 0:52

It was Mary Ellen's mother who started it all. Our first encounter with the monster. Mary Ellen was my best friend. She was my age, lived next door to our garden apartment in Queens, and her face was a galaxy of freckles that only I knew how to travel. We spent hours in each other's apartments and overheard all our parents' fights. To drown them out, we played Romeo and Juliet. Sometimes she played Romeo, sometimes I played Romeo, and whoever played Juliet hopped up on her twin bed exclaiming, Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou, my Romeo? And Romeo would pop out of the closet with, I am here, Juliet, in a funny voice that would crack us up till whatever was going on in the living room had quieted down and we could tiptoe out. You see, our mothers were spectacularly bored in their marriages. My mom, Vicky, met my dad at 16 a few years after she came here from Italy, and she was pregnant with me at 20. Whatever glamour and sophistication she thought my older dad possessed had worn off by the time I came along. Which is why she delayed having my brother for five years. Won't we go to hell if we use birth control? My father asked. We'll chance it, my mother said. Mary Ellen's mother was even more clueless in the ways of the world than my mother. But she was born in the U.S. and that gave her an edge. Elaine was a dark-haired Italian-French American, but she'd given up her entire ethnic identity when as a teenager she married the love of her life, Danny Haran. Danny was this skinny bricklayer who chain smoked and had a chronic cough, and Elaine spent her days tiptoeing around his hairpin temper and raising their three big girls to be Irish. So much like Lucy and Ethel, Elaine and Vicky had escapades. Most of them were benign, like the time they sported Buffont wigs, hoping to transform themselves into Hollywood vixens, but they sometimes involved Mary Ellen and me. Like the time Elaine heard about a low-cost sleepaway camp through the parish priest and thought it would be a great adventure. At that camp, seven-year-old Mary Ellen and I were shaken down by the older kids for our best belongings, dunked in an icy lake before breakfast, and routinely punished by the nuns with isolation or no food. Our mothers were very contrite, but that didn't end their desire to show us all a good time. Enter the monster. The day started out innocently enough. Elaine was babysitting, and she suggested to Mary Ellen and me, like it would be the funnest thing in the world, that we go to John's bargain store to comb through the bins. Even then, I knew that the heaps of wrinkled clothes and naked dolls were junk. But who's going to turn down a free toy? After Elaine picked out some clothes for Mary Ellen, she suggested out of nowhere that we catch a horror flick across the street, which ended just in time to cook Danny's dinner. The movie had a very curious title that did not sound promising. It was called Count Yorga Vampire. But we said, sure, let's go. Never mind that it was rated PG and we were nine. Never mind that we'd never seen a horror flick before. And never mind that it was actually a softcore porn film that had been cut down to give it its barely PG rating. Here is what unfolded in the dark the way my nine-year-old brain remembers it. A car breaks down in the middle of the woods. A girl inside is wearing a skimpy nightgown. Her boyfriend touches her breast, which nine-year-old me thinks is incredibly disgusting, yet strangely titillating. But then he has to pee. We hear creepy footsteps in the woods behind him, and suddenly this man with the red mouth and pointy teeth of an animal looms. Now, any adult watching would know this is Count Yorga, a Bulgarian prince who's been invited to Los Angeles to conduct a seance. This is where the Wikipedia summary comes in handy. But all backstory is lost on me. Oh, and there's something about a mother who dies and her sexy daughter who wants to contact her with the seance, but I can't really follow that. All I know is a vampire is sucking the blood of the girl in the car while her breaths are heaving. Next thing I remember is that she is back at her house eating a kitten.

SPEAKER_01 6:34

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 6:36

She is tearing apart with her bloodied hands and mouth, and while she is covered with cat, she tries to kiss her boyfriend. By this point, perhaps Elaine might have suggested we quietly make an exit, but not a peep from her. The jumbled rest of the movie involves Jorga ordering his undead brides to have sex in his dungeon, a feeding frenzy by these brides on a too inquisitive doctor, and then the sexy woman who misses her mother gets raped by Jorga's servant and discovers Mom is now one of the undead brides. My nails dig into Mary Ellen's wrist, and her head presses into mine as against all odds, the woman and her boyfriend hold off the vampires with crosses, stake some of them through their hearts, and trap the rest in the dungeon. Evil is vanquished. But then the sexy woman you thought was really good, turns on her boyfriend in the last frame, revealing the pointy teeth of the undead and lunges toward the camera. Count Yorga could be anywhere, and I had to stay vigilant. Out came the night light again, a puny talisman against all the darkness in the world. But it was all I had. I couldn't tell my parents of my terror, they had their own problems. And I don't remember Elaine ever saying much about the movie except that was pretty scary, huh? And right after we saw it. Mary Ellen and I never spoke of it. It was like we had seen the underbelly of the world and glimpsed some lesson we didn't want to learn yet. Eventually, a few years passed, I was able to sleep again, and that's when Count Yorga came for me. I was 12, turning 13, thinking of asking for my own skimpy nightgown, when mom called me into the kitchen. She had a Bible open and she asked me to look at a section on Jesus casting the devil out of a very frightening naked man and into a herd of swine. She kept saying, But how does the devil get into this man? She wasn't sure she was reading it right. You see, mom read very slowly and used the dictionary a lot because she was still catching up with English. Despite that, it was she who gave me my love of reading and took me to the library every week. It was she who read my brother and me, the little engine that could. I think I can, I think I can. And when I was laid up in bed with strep throat, the librarian gave her a little house on the prairie, which is the first book I remember all about a girl. So, when she asked me about the Bible, she asked me because she knew I was a good reader. Also, I went to Catholic school and she figured the nuns might have said something about demon possession. You see, there was another horror film that had come out around this time, and it was called The Exorcist. Neither of us had seen it, but you couldn't help knowing, since every other TV commercial advertised it, that a demon had taken over someone's body. I explained the Bible passage with a very unsatisfactory. I don't know, mom. The nuns never explained it. I don't know. So next, mom went to Elaine. Why do I feel a pressure on my chest? It wakes me up at night and I feel so scared. Like something is lurking in the room. Then I get these feelings like I want to hurt my husband, like I want to hurt my children. Overhearing mom say this was like, well, it was like turning and suddenly seeing the bloody teeth of Count Yorga coming for your neck. And she was telling all this to my best friend's mother. Just like I knew John's bargain store was a scam, I knew you didn't tell this kind of thing to Elaine. My mother, my mother had lived through World War II in Italy, where she had seen her mother almost shot several times for working with the resistance, and where men were routinely tortured in the piazza. When the family came to this country in 1950 with nothing to their name, they arrived at the height of the McCarthy era and within a year were in the sights of the FBI, accused of being communists because of my grandmother's work with the partisans. My mother married my father to get out of the house. Elaine, on the other hand, had grown up in one patch of Sunnyside Queens. The only other place she'd ever seen in the world when she married Danny and moved was our patch of Queens. She was not equipped. Frightened and at a loss, she told my mother, You shouldn't have those feelings. There's something wrong with you. My mother, who only years earlier had said to my father they'd chance going to hell to use birth control, now was convinced she was possessed. Elaine told all the women in our apartment complex that mom was crazy. She told Mary Ellen that too. In the old days, Mary Ellen would have guarded the secret about my mother, just like we pulled whatever food we had at sleepaway camp, us against the world. But now Mary Ellen had a decision to make. One day in school I was standing in line as she was filing out of gym. My heart leapt to see her. But instead of our usual big hello, she looked at me, said something mean to the other girls that I couldn't hear, and they all snickered. That's when the lesson of Count Yorga came home to me. Your best friend, your best friend's mother, and even your own mother could turn into people who were unrecognizable to you, and all sense of safety could be drained from the world. Because the real plot of Count Jorga, the one I had missed as a nine-year-old, but which I had somehow absorbed anyway, was that a young woman is grieving her mother, who turns out to be in the thrall of a demon vampire, but she can't save her or her friends. Mary Ellen and Elaine still live next door, but they ignored us for years after, never smiling or saying hello. We walked past each other like the undead. Now, when I think back at that time, I feel the loneliness of my mother's PTSD and depression and the long years of recovery. But I also feel the loss of Mary Ellen. She was my Romeo, my Juliet, my first friend, the first person whose eyes I ever gazed in beyond my own family as I look down from my twin bed. I even miss hapless Elaine. Danny died young and she was left raising the three girls on her own with her salary as a nursing home attendant. But I missed the time before that when she took us to the Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. Even though we were too far back to see anything, and we froze in our holiday tights and cloth coats. She was trying to give us something that she'd never had and didn't know how to give. Experience beyond the narrow confines of our lives. But it was something she was afraid of herself until it came for her, too. At the end of Count Jorga, the woman who loses her mother turns into the undead herself. I've worked hard to keep that from happening, despite learning that fear, sadness, and betrayal exist in the world. And to leave Count Jorga as much as possible safely in his crypt. Thank you.

SPEAKER_00 15:38

Laura has received three grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts in playwriting and screenwriting, and her play, Carla Cooks the War, won the Soroyan slash Paul Human Rights Playwriting Prize. Her play, Paradise, was produced by Viola Davis and Julius Tenen, and Beyond Words was a recent Boston Globe critics pick. Truth Be Told was created by Susan Kim and David Zeldick, and each episode was produced and scored by Eric Sveichar. If you enjoyed this, please tell your friends and keep listening. More stories of love and lust will be released every Monday and Scary Monsters every Thursday. And do hit like and subscribe, it really helps. Till next time, remember, Truth Wants to be known. Yours too.