Woodstake. Say it out loud a couple of times, and you get it. Arthur summed it up perfectly when we kicked off the episode:
Seriously think about it. Woodstake, Woodstock, and vampires.
That is the whole pitch, and honestly, it sold us before we even opened the book.
We sat down for an interview with Shawn Hainsworth, the creator and writer behind Woodstake (he publishes under the pen name Darin S. Cape), to talk about how a vampire ended up at the most famous music festival of all time.
We got into Dracula, the hippie generation, Felipe Kroll’s gorgeous painted art, and the much darker sequel on its way. If you like your vampire stories with a little something underneath the fun, you are going to want to hear this.
What Is Woodstake? The Vampire Graphic Novel Set at Woodstock 1969
Shawn’s elevator pitch is about as clean as it gets:
It is a vampire who descends on Woodstock in 1969. So… Yeah, it’s hippies versus vampires.
The idea came from two books colliding in his head. Shawn rereads Bram Stoker’s Dracula every couple of years, and he happened to be reading it at the same time as The Road to Woodstock by Michael Lang, one of the original festival organizers (who makes a little cameo in the book, by the way). The pun showed up first. Then the scenes followed, like a vampire feeding on a hippie who had just dropped LSD.
Shawn did not want a one-joke book, though. “I didn’t want it to just be campy,” he told us. Finding something bigger took time; the whole project took about five years. It started as a screenplay, and Felipe Kroll then spent roughly three years on the art.
Why Woodstock Was the Perfect Hunting Ground for a Vampire
Think about it. Around 400,000 people, no cell phones, and nobody acting remotely normal. Shawn pointed out that if you lost someone at Woodstock, you basically found them when you got home. For a vampire, that is a buffet with zero security.
The theme took longer to crack. Shawn was born in 1966 and grew up in the shadow of the hippie generation, then watched peace and love turn into “whoever dies with the most toys wins” in the eighties. Dropping a vampire, “probably one of the most cynical creatures in the world,” into a crowd that believed it could change the world gave him his story.
The characters reflect different kinds of hippies. Nina is the true believer. Artie is the guy who will probably sell out and become a yuppie in twenty years. Jon is just trying to push his own career. Shawn also brings in the conservative side of the era, and one of his favorite moments is a vampire arguing with Artie about the Vietnam War while trying to kill him. (Priorities.)
From Screenplay to Painted Pages: Felipe Kroll’s Art
Arthur wanted to know how much changed between the screenplay and the graphic novel. The answer: a lot. Shawn had done around ten drafts and was convinced it was finished. “I can’t change this, it’s perfect,” he said, laughing at himself. Then he started building pages and saw everything that could be better.
The entire prologue was added after the first two issues were written, mostly to answer one question: why is there a vampire in Upstate New York? Some grainy, TV-style pages with a news crew were cut and then brought back, which Shawn compared to editing a film.
We have to talk about the art. Meaghan said every frame feels like its own piece, the kind you stop and stare at, and the brushy, gritty style fits the festival perfectly.
They were there for days. Nobody showered. Like, it’s kinda gross.
Felipe went back and repainted pages he was not happy with, and Shawn calls him a great creative partner. The funny part? They have never met in person. “That’s my excuse to go to Brazil,” Shawn joked.
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Getting Woodstock Right, Down to the Set Times
Shawn and Felipe watched the Woodstock documentary on repeat. The guy emptying the porta potties shows up in the book. So does the stage announcer. Every act plays at the right time, because the festival is so well documented; Shawn mentioned Sly and the Family Stone going on at 10:02 PM. And by pure luck, Creedence was playing Bad Moon Rising right as things come to a head on Saturday night.
The story moves between Nina, Jon, the sheriff getting the town of Bethel ready, the vampire, and Dr. Van Helsing. Meaghan loved a sneaky Van Halen gag (“my cousin Eddie”), and Shawn said he wanted it there for anyone who could pick it up.
When Meaghan asked which performance he would want to see from backstage, Shawn listed Santana, Crosby, Stills & Nash, Jimi Hendrix, and Arlo Guthrie. The story he loved most was Richie Havens. The next act was late, so Havens kept getting told to keep going, ran out of material, and improvised “Freedom” on the spot. Shawn even had Martin Scorsese, who was there working on the documentary, in a screenplay scene that got cut.
Want a soundtrack? There is a Spotify playlist of the songs in the book, and the issues are named after songs: Going Up the Country, My Generation, Freedom, Bad Moon Rising, and Purple Haze.
Why Vampires Are the Swiss Army Knives of Horror
Shawn called vampires “the Swiss Army knives of the horror world,” and we could not agree more. He loves Shadow of the Vampire, where Willem Dafoe’s Max Schreck is actually a vampire feeding on the Nosferatu crew, and he brought up What We Do in the Shadows, Interview with the Vampire, and even the salt vampire from the first Star Trek episode. For him, it all comes back to being prey, and to using another person without caring about their humanity.
Meaghan added a recommendation of her own, Los Vampires, which she caught at a festival this summer. It follows the Spanish-language crew of Dracula that filmed at night while the English production shot during the day.
It really plays out like a stage play. I loved it. It was so good.
Shawn can’t wait to see it. As Meaghan put it, vampires are “an everlasting sort of subgenre of themselves.”
Woodstake ’99 and What’s Next From SHP Comics
The sequel, Woodstake ’99, wraps up the story. (No Coachella Stake, sadly, even after Meaghan pitched Burning Man.) Expect a big tonal shift. Felipe’s art is more painterly and darker, and “it feels dirtier.” The vampire is not treating the festival as a feeding ground anymore either.
Now he’s like back for vengeance.
We have seen the Netflix documentary on Woodstock ’99, so this hit home. Shawn’s favorite moment is a woman from the original festival driving around in a golf cart, asking kids to help pick up trash, and getting told to do it herself. Between $5 water, a crowd locked behind gates, and the awful treatment of women, Shawn put it simply:
Everything was wrong about ’99.
When we recorded, they had painted through page 19 of issue three, with a Kickstarter planned for October and a goal of wrapping up by April or May 2027. Shawn expects Woodstake ’99 to land around Halloween next year, either the single issues or the full graphic novel.
SHP Comics is busy beyond that, too. There is Zicky: Wrath of the Rat King for readers nine and up, the space opera The Killing Machine, the office comedy EroTech, and Sight, a sci-fi horror story built on the Cassandra myth. They are also translating a 1970s Spanish collection of macabre tales adapting Poe, Lovecraft, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Kafka. You can find it all at shpcomics.com.
That’s incredible. You have, like, a whole production house.