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have established the ‘ground rules’ for how vampires act, Varney can take credit for one of the more curious recurring tropes of vampire narrative: vampire suicide. From Rymer’s un-dead omnibus, considered the first full-length work of vampire fiction, to modern vampire narratives including films such as Blacula (William Crain, 1972), Thirst (Park Chan-wook, 2009) and Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch, 2014); television programs such as True Blood (based on the Southern Vampire Mystery series by author Charlaine Harris) and Angel (the Buffy the Vampire
drochfholla idir a chéile ‘there is bad blood between them’, m eaning a grudge, ill-feeling, a poisoned relationship. Drochfholla – Dracula – is a condensed metaphor for Anglo-Irish relations in the nineteenth century; bad blood that courses through the veins and capillaries of a corrupt and corrupting Irish body politic. In this interminable stasis the collective Irish social body is preyed on by new generations of bloodsucking parasites in a never-ending repetition of the past. The Count, the embodiment of this morbid condition, is the un-dead vestige of a remote
heterosexist disdain for the promiscuous gay, and the equally promiscuous vampire. It admits to an element of choice, and, indeed, the assertion of a certain discretion as to who may – or may not – be admitted to the ranks of the un-dead. To those within its purlieu, it is an all-consuming way of life, to be celebrated as such, rather than a deviant departure from the life lived before, the life lived by
solitary hunter, absorbed in his or her own afterlife and prioritizing the needs of the self alone, its contemporary equivalent is considerably more likely to be scripted as a communal being. 5 The intellectual isolation of the newly created or newly aware vampire is central to this substantial change in the deathstyle of the fictional Un-Dead which may be tentatively dated to the last quarter of the twentieth century. The
. Every effort of art from now on and in remembrance of this moment will find its authority dependent upon what it can neither enliven, beautify, nor forget (since forgetfulness, aesthetically, is just sentimentality, entertainment, the culture industry). Dissonance, sublime unknowability, is the aesthetic (non-)representation of the undead. Near the beginning of the novel this climatic moment is anticipated as Zuckerman reflects on how everyday life depends on our trying to understand those people around us and how, no matter how careful, judicious, patient, attentive
Printing Terror places horror comics of the mid-twentieth century in dialogue with the anxieties of their age. It rejects the narrative of horror comics as inherently and necessarily subversive and explores, instead, the ways in which these texts manifest white male fears over America’s changing sociological landscape. It examines two eras: the pre-CCA period of the 1940s and 1950s, and the post-CCA era to 1975. The authors examine each of these periods through the lenses of war, gender, and race, demonstrating that horror comics are centred upon white male victimhood and the monstrosity of the gendered and/or racialised other. It is of interest to scholars of horror, comics studies, and American history. It is suitably accessible to be used in undergraduate classes.
the old methods of literary art. We shall have to adapt ourselves to the shadowy screen and to the cold machine.’ Tolstoy further characterised cinema as a unique and uncanny medium that was, in his words, ‘closer to life’ than literature, yet eerily capable of rendering its living subjects ‘undead’ (Starr, 1972 : 32). Thus was this realistic medium, this ‘cold machine’ born
). What is the essential nature of Camille, perceived by her parents and sister as the girl they knew and nurtured, before the deadly accident? If substance refers to the essential nature of something, what Les Revenants precisely explores is substance: specifically, the substance of being alive (and that of being dead), a recurring trope in gothic and zombie narratives. This is clearly stated in relation to the vastly popular The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–present), in which some zombies retain an ominous similarity to other humans, especially when the undead are
identity and the relationships of the ‘I’ to the ‘not-I’, of subject to object, of self to world, and of self to body. And, in a cultural moment saturated with zombie imagery, the animate corpse finally asks us what it means to be human at all (on the ontological questions raised by zombies, see Cohen’s ‘Undead’ and McRobert’s ‘Shoot Everything’). Interestingly, at the same moment in which zombies have achieved unprecedented cultural prominence, these questions of the relationships of self to non-self and of the animate to the inanimate are
disturbing characteristics. His power to rejuvenate himself and to transform into a dog, a bat or swirling mist questions the very notion of a stable identity. A postmodern audience might be more comfortable with Dracula’s unfixed, mutating shape and appreciative of the work of generations of film-makers who have persistently resurrected Stoker’s truly un-dead vampire in fittingly