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Swedish film Låt Den Rätte Komma In/Let the Right One In turns away from the representations of sexual threat and desire that have long typified – and currently dominate – vampire fiction and film, a significant generic, narrative, and aesthetic shift. Yet, while the film deliberately cuts sex from its story of love between a boy and a vampire, seduction is still key to its representation of vampirism, as the film plays, as is typical of gothic fiction more generally, upon our cultural investments in innocence.
This article discusses the manner in which the vampire fiction of contemporary Ukrainian author Halyna Pahutiak enters into a dialogue with the global vampire discourse whose core or ‘cultural capital’ finds its origins largely in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). Through discussion of thematic, stylistic, and structural similarities and differences between Pahutiak and Stoker’s portrayals of the vampire myth, my paper sheds light on the conscious mythmaking strategies that Pahutiak employs to return the vampire symbolically from the West to Eastern Europe where it originated, and reassess the core characteristics of the Dracula myth.
Vancouver is not necessarily the first topic that springs to mind when discussing the production of vampire television. In an attempt to remedy this, the vampire television series Blood Ties (2007) is considered in relation to its Canadian production context. I explore the series political economy within an international framework (its production and distribution in Canada and its scheduling/exhibition and reception in the UK), suggesting that the Canadian qualities of the series are often wilfully ignored in distribution and reception. The ultimate failure of the series (running for only one season) is then located in relationship to the recent explosion of vampire fiction on domestic screens, where I suggest that Blood Ties inspires a form of Gothic television distinct from the American vampire series True Blood (2008-).
The Open Graves, Open Minds project discussed in this book relates the undead in literature, art and other media to questions concerning gender, technology, consumption and social change. The story of vampires, since their discovery in eighteenth-century Europe, is one of transformations and interbreedings of genre, which mediate shifts in ways of knowing and doubting. It is marked by metamorphoses of the vampire itself, from monstrous to sympathetic, but always fascinatingly Other. Certain tropes, such as optical figures, and particularly that of reflection, recur throughout, calling attention to the preoccupation with epistemology in vampire narratives. The book focuses on various aspects of these themes as the story unfolds to the present day. It shows how the persona of Lord Byron became an effective vehicle for the vampire of fiction as a transformed Gothic mode, and grapples with the figure of the non-reflecting vampire who casts no shadow, moving deftly between Dracula and Wilde's Dorian Gray and the 'vampire painting' and installations of the contemporary artist David Reed. The book gives a luminous account of early vampire cinema as a 'Kingdom of shadows', and explores the undead at the interface, where knowing becomes problematic: 'unsettlement'. The book also unearths the folklore roots of vampire fiction and offers a glimpse of how contemporary writers adapt the perennial figure.
buggered. Vampire fiction with an explicit – rather than symbolic – gay content, where sexual acts are depicted and where discretely same-sex relationships are embedded within same-species alliances, however, takes full advantage of this introspection, and extends it somewhat beyond the limiting association with self-conscious guilt or perplexity. To be alone is in a sense to be heteronormative in
which Goth style has permeated contemporary Gothic discourses, from the vampire fiction of Brite and Rice to the representation of Goth girls in teen movies. In doing so, it hopes to foreground the dialectic between individual participants in the subculture and representations of Goth in a variety of media, from fashion journalism to fiction. While certain Goths may compete to be the most ‘authentic’ (it is possible
sexuality, or both. Vampire fiction is currently enormously popular; in part, I will argue, because of how easily it dramatises contemporary concerns with this politics of difference, in a new demonstration of the adaptability of the Undead as political metaphor. 2 Lately, zombies have been spotted lurching alongside their fellow Undead in greater numbers, embodying otherness in a different, perhaps less
associate with vampire fictions have disappeared alongside the diminution in the use of the vampire as symbolic of evil. Jules Zanger points out that most contemporary vampires ‘can no longer transform themselves into bats or mist or wolves or puffs of smoke; in addition, they need no longer wait to be invited over a threshold, and mirrors and crucifixes appear to have relatively little effect on them’. 11
vampire, such as their lack of reflection, casting no shadow, aversion to garlic and holy emblems, and their inability to cross a threshold uninvited. In turn, our contributors examine the significance of these motifs and how vampire fictions transform them in order to probe the unsettled definition of the vampire. The second criterion is one of restriction rather than definition; the vampire has had many
, and running through every sequel not only of that film but the Karloff Frankenstein series, The Mummy , and so on and so on. I was hooked. Not much later I started to read classic vampire fiction; Stoker, Le Fanu – the usual suspects. So why, after the publication of my first book, when I got a contract to write another book, didn’t I leap straight into writing a vampire novel? The answer lies in the