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As the introduction to Part II has already pointed out, there are many reasons why a new wave of undead films has come to populate cinemas since the 1990s. By the end of the second decade of the new millennium, the latest boom of zombie and vampire films has even reached the stage when self-ironic and parodic treatments are almost more common than serious and straightforward ones which use the undead as metaphors for direct social criticism, and this parodic intention is also characteristic of the Shakespeare-inspired works. The cross-pollination between
This tension between the Enlightenment notion of universal equality and the concentration on the ‘authentic life’ of marginalised others has been explored, wittingly or unwittingly, in many contemporary fictions of the Undead. Appearing deceptively human, animated, yet (despite the etymology of ‘animated’) without a soul, vampires have conveniently represented alterity, whether foreignness or deviant
As its title suggests, Danny Boyle‘s 28 Days Later is a zombie movie about procreation. While this idea – a human menstrual cycle alluding to the multiplication of the undead – may seem at first to be paradoxical, such an idea is hardly a new one in zombie mythology. Boyle‘s film borrows from the traditional Gothic through a number of standard Gothic tropes in order to define the character of the films female protagonist as one necessary for her biological or reproductive role and to ward off possible domestic chaos and invasion through her role as mother. The film acknowledges an idea of woman as objectified and violated in both a postfeminist, but strangely also traditionally Gothic definition of woman as sex object and mother who is necessary for this biological, reproductive role as well as her identity, not as survivor, but as domestic caretaker.
like, for example, the Skaters has had constantly to chop and change in order to keep one step ahead of its trendy imitators, the Goths (like Dracula) have had the luxury of timelessness. 75 Like Dracula, Gothic fashion is constantly revisited by the trope of the undead. It is continually undergoing a ‘revival’, despite the
11 Unreal cities and undead legacies: T.S. Eliot and Gothic hauntings in Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Barnes’s Nightwood Avril Horner and Sue Zlosnik By the mid 1930s, when Waugh’s A Handful of Dust and Barnes’s Nightwood were published, The Waste Land (1922) had been absorbed into high culture and T.S. Eliot was established as an important man of letters both in England and in the United States. The transatlantic nature of Modernism itself, exemplified by the lives and works of Eliot, H.D., Pound, Stein and Barnes, was part of a newly dynamised interchange
This chapter explores how love provided one way of knowing the dead in Rider Haggard’s She (1887), Ayesha: The Return of She (1905), Stoker’s The Jewel of Seven Stars (1903, revised 1912) and The Lady of the Shroud (1909). A dialogue across these novels centres on loving the femme fatale, where love provides an ambivalent, and often partial, way of comprehending ‘Otherness’. Such engagements should be seen as part of an Orientalist discourse concerning attitudes towards Egypt at the time due to tomb excavations, and continuing British political interest in the area because of the Suez Canal. Understanding the dead ‘Other’ through love effectively resurrects ancient Egypt but in troubled terms that reflect the political and theological instabilities that pertained in assessments of both modern and ancient Egypt. These heterosexual, although repeatedly homosocial, models of love can be contrasted with Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), which conceals same sex love by displacing discussion about desire onto art. This helps to establish Wilde’s text as a counterpoint to the masculine adventure story of Haggard and Stoker.
Many vampires in popular fiction have developed a conscience that mitigates their monstrosity and makes them objects of human love and admiration. With the advent of the reformed vampire, Western culture has, perhaps, lost an icon of true horror. As the vampire has become increasingly humanized and sympathetic, the zombie has stepped up to take its place. Zombies remind us that we will soon be decomposing flesh; the zombie horde embodies fear of loss of self and individuality; zombies expose the dark side of mass consumer culture; and zombies highlight the fragility of human identity in an advanced, globalised society.
In 1896, Maxim Gorky described the experience of watching the newly invented cinematograph as entering 'the Kingdom of Shadows'. This chapter demonstrates that Dracula underwent a process of experimentation wherein vampire imagery was used across a wide range of genres and to convey diverse meanings before it became consolidated into a recognised horror formula. It considers how the reimagining of the vampire through the technological language of cinema also serves both to celebrate modernity and to bring the vampire 'up-to-date with a vengeance'. The ambivalence towards modernity embodied in the vamp continued to be a key component of the cinematic vampire as the genre developed beyond pure metaphor. In it, the vamp is presented as vampire-like and into a genre about vampires, drawing upon nineteenth-century precursors.
With reference to films such as The Terror Experiment (2010) and Osombie (2012), this paper explores the figure of the zombie terrorist, a collectively othered group that is visually identifiable as not us and can be slaughtered with impunity. In cinematic treatments, the zombie terrorist operates within a collectivity of zombies, erasing the possibility of individuality when the transformation from human to zombie takes place. The zombie terrorist signifies otherness in relation to selfhood, and is characterised by a mind/body split. Emerging from the grave in the archetypal zombie primal scene, this reanimated corpse is undead in its animate corporeality coupled with a loss of all mental faculties. The erasure of individual identity and memory along with broader human characteristics such as empathy or willpower coincides with the zombie terrorist s physical movement and action.