Search results
bloodshot, that he looked less like a man than some hideous phantom, moist from the grave, and worried by an evil spirit.’ 22 This portrait of master thief Fagin resembles the criminal Count Dracula, whose three vampire women are described as ‘Un-Dead phantoms ’ (p. 411; emphasis added). The eye of the Jew has been stigmatised as red, mesmeric and demonic through its association with the Evil Eye, a
with their staking and decapitation, yet this act of penetration preserves the social body against death. As an undead body, disseminating an uncanny state of living-death with each body he bites, Dracula embodies a form of death which threatens two aspects of the paternal symbolic order. In a cultural sense the vampire’s false death is a serious falsification of Christian
the Campagna believed by the ancients to be the gateway to hell. Le Fanu echoes Virgil’s lines from Book 6 of the Aeneid, ‘Facilis descensus Averni ...’, a phrase assimilated to English by Milton and Dry den, suggesting how easy is the tempting path to damnation. We may think that the narrator is recalling how close her lapse into the world of the ‘undead’ had been, yet
-stage reading) mounted on a theatre stage in front of a paying audience (which could be as few as a single person, as long as they had paid for their seat). Few of these adaptations exist in print, although Sylvia Starshine’s edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula: Or the Undead – A Play in Prologue and Five Acts (1897), reveals a ‘play’ that uses swathes of the novel pasted in to be read aloud, a performance contrived solely to plug the absurd gaps in contemporary copyright law. With this in consideration, it is no surprise that
Undead: Evil and the Appeal of Horror (Boulder: Westview Press, 2000 ). 5 See Daniel Shaw, ‘A Humean Definition of Horror,’ Film-Philosophy , Vol. 1:4 ( 1997 ), www.film-philosophy.com/vol1-1997/n4shaw ), for example. 6
Sex Gang Children in 1983, its cover a stylised depiction of the saint pierced by arrows. Anna Powell, ‘God’s Own Medicine: Religion and Parareligion in U.K. Goth Culture’ and Jessica Burnstein, ‘Material Distinctions: A Conversation with Valerie Steele’, in Lauren M.E. Goodlad and Michael Bibby (eds), Goth: Undead Subculture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), p. 361. Oscar Wilde, ‘The Grave of Keats’ (1881), The Ballad of Reading Gaol and Other Poems (London: Penguin, 2010), p. 121. Richard A. Kaye, ‘“Determined Raptures”: St. Sebastian and the Victorian
sympathetic portrayal of the vampire’ that has been ‘common in the past 20 years’, a character motif that ‘permits audience indulgence in his supernatural powers, particularly the seeming sexual irresistibility of the undead’. 1 Thus Gary Oldman’s tormented Romanian knight is ultimately a liminal recreation of Stoker’s vampire: remorseless, blood-thirsty killer and earnest
other, are explored by other films of the period which utilise the mise-en-scène of similar, New Town-type locations. For example, Psychomania (aka The Death Wheelers) (Don Sharp, 1972) tells the story of a biker gang that hangs out at a pagan stone circle situated in the English countryside. They commit suicide so they can return as the ‘undead’, and then take trips into town in order to wreak havoc on the living. The bikers, led by Tom (Nicky Henson), call themselves ‘The Living Dead’. A key sequence in this film features the gang terrorising shoppers in a
expression of a controlling impulse, albeit at the level of play. The sexualisation of the vampire figure also connects it with Eros. Vampirism is, after all, popularly known as the cult of the undead, or in other words, of the living corpse. For the vampire, blood, the life force, is an object of desire to be ingested in order to continue to live. In Glissements , blood has a special place, appearing and
we find with the destruction of the art object. With death and destruction, we tempt continuity to project this deceased entity forward in the form of a ghost or double, to give it the utility or consistency of things. It is this fixity that the creation of the thing attempts, perhaps compensating for our own change and noticeable dissolution and divergence (the loss of a time in a flat at Waterloo or a lovely front room with moldings in east London), and likewise the loss of this moment that displaces. In this, there is something conceivably undead in the desire