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Since its release in 1992, Francis Ford Coppola‘s Bram Stoker‘s Dracula has made a deep impression upon the vampire community, or more likely left an infamous hole in it. Critics received Coppolas movie with closed fangs. To Fred Botting, Bram Stokers Dracula is ‘The End of Gothic’, the final metamorphosis of a faltering convention into some strange and alien form that destroys all of Gothics power. Stokers novel brought to greatness a war between the establishment of gender roles, threatened by the overtly (homo)sexual presence of Count Dracula, who turned women into harlots and men into sissies, before Abraham Van Helsing and his Crew of Light end Counts reign of terror to reaffirm their own faltering masculinity. Coppolas version creates a new heterogeneous blend of the corrupted legends of Prince Vlad the Impaler woven together with the literary Dracula within a Harlequin Romance format. The homoerotic undertones of Stokers novel disappear under the overly-exaggerated romantic quest of Coppolas new vampire.
The insights of Gilles Deleuze‘s film-philosophy offers a distinctive theoretical approach to Gothics remarkable affects and temporal effects. Introducing key critical tools, I apply them to Neil Jordan‘s Interview with the Vampire (1994), as well as asserting the broader relevance of Deleuze to Gothic studies.
a shriek, Varney took one tremendous leap, and disappeared into the burning mouth of the mountain. 1 James Malcolm Rymer, Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood So ends the inglorious career of terror practised for over two centuries by the antagonist of James Malcolm Rymer’s sprawling 666,000-word penny dreadful, Varney the Vampire; or, The Feast of Blood , published serially from 1845–47. And while Bram Stoker’s Dracula , published fifty years later, is generally considered to
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.
Even people who don’t like vampires know what one is. The vampire is as common as a Big Mac. A vampire fan, qtd in Dresser if we celebrate hybridity and heterogeneity, we must remember that
Gothic fictions have, from their beginning, been fabrications. Shaped by their time, Anne Rice‘s vampire novels – Interview With The Vampire and The Vampire Lestat – participate in a logic of simulation: the former offers a nostalgic pastiche of Romantic and Baudelairean modernity; the latter an overblown reanimation of pagan and ancient mythologies. For all their nostalgia and recyclings, these postmodern romances remain tied to contemporary ahistorical and reversible axes of consumption and exhaustion, fatally in-human desiring and technological novelties, flaccid fantasies and tired trangressions.
Ever Since I Became a published author, in 2000, it was my strong ambition to write a vampire novel. Why? Well, simply, I thought it would be enormously good fun to do so. I grew up as a fan of vampire cinema and fiction. One summer in the early 1980s the BBC screened a series of classic horror double bills every Saturday night, beginning with Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula
The Problem of Vampires has always been a peculiarly religious one. When Professor Van Helsing explains to his ‘Crew of Light’ what is at stake in their quest to destroy the vampire, Dracula, he casts it in religious terms: My friends … it is a terrible task that we undertake, and there may be consequence to make the brave
The female vampire: Chantal Chawaf ’s melancholic autofiction Julia Kristeva opens her text, Soleil noir: dépression et mélancolie, with the claim that ‘Ecrire sur la mélancolie n’aurait de sens, pour ceux que la mélancolie ravage, que si l’écrit même venait de la mélancolie’ (‘For those who are racked by melancholia, writing about it would have meaning only if writing sprang out of that very melancholia’).1 This chapter explores the possibility of writing ‘de la mélancolie’ through focusing on the work of Chantal Chawaf, whose writing may be
Our lads crucified, babies spiked On bayonets by vampire Aryans. 1 Robert Greacen, ‘Hun’ (1995) In all men’s hearts it is. Some spirit old Hath turned with malign kiss Our lives