Vampires of Colour and the Performance of Multicultural Whiteness

1st ASSINDO International Conference and Congress, 2014

This paper endeavors to analyze the representation of vampire as a popular culture product of transnationalism in American horror films. In the development of American horror films, the monster’s presence strongly relates to urban legends, and it is emphasized by Noel Carroll, as the writer of Philosophy of Horror, who argues that one of horror film main characters is the monster’s presence. American horror films as product of popular culture need to determine what monsters that could represent American culture. Moreover, as a nation built by immigrants, the immigrants’ culture, urban legend, and believe have influenced American culture significantly. As a result, vampire’s legend which is famous in the Eastern Europe is taken into a part of American horror monsters. Dracula (1931), directed by Todd Browning, is the first vampire Hollywood movie based on Bram Stoker novel Dracula (1897). Elizabeth Tilley states that Bram Stoker is considered as a part of Anglo-Irish late Victorian Gothic writers who concern on fascination with the occult, terror on the psyche, repression, and monsters. In the 21st century Hollywood cinema, the emergence of vampire movies still becomes the main focus of the stories. One of the most successful vampire movies is Twilight Saga (2009-2012) based on Stephenie Mayer novel, an American novelist who successfully presents vampire as both romantic and threatening monsters. To analyze the representation of vampire as a product of transnationalism, the writer of the paper uses library and online research dealing with vampire, american films, and popular culture to obtain a comprehensive understanding. Therefore, the writer of the paper finds that the representation of vampire in the 21st American films, as a product of transnational popular culture, still strongly relates to Europe, but there are some variations influenced by the spirit freedom in American culture. Key words: Vampire, transnationalism, popular culture, American films, horror.

(introduction for download) Edinburgh University Press, 2017

In Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods, Dale Hudson explores the movement of transnational Hollywood's vampires, between low-budget quickies and high-budget franchises, as it appropriates visual styles from German, Mexican and Hong Kong cinemas and off-shores to Canada, Philippines, and South Africa. A consideration of vampire film production through the lens of transnational cinema The figure of the vampire serves as both object and mode of analysis for more than a century of Hollywood filmmaking. Never dying, shifting shape and moving at unnatural speed, as the vampire renews itself by drinking victims’ blood, so too does Hollywood renew itself by consuming foreign styles and talent, moving to overseas locations, and proliferating in new guises.

French Cultural Studies, 2011

Historically conceived as a ‘welcoming land’ (terre d’accueil), postcolonial France evokes a thresholdof tolerance (seuil de tolérance) in relation to immigrants and refugees. This article considers theillusions of universal citizenship, alongside the illusions of national borders, by examining the‘terror’ evoked by the transnational figure of the vampire within relations between France andFranco-Maghrebis in transnational French cinemas. Like the vampire, non-European nationals whoare racialised as ‘arabes’ are denied the universal rights of citizenship in postcolonial France.Vampirism, however, signals a potential collapse of republicanism, which, because it extendscolonialism, fails to recognise spaces for difference without the oppression of unidirectionalassimilation. The article examines the racialisation of immigration and the politicisation of assimilation in France since the mid-1970s as these processes are imagined in two films that rejec trealist conventions of ‘French national cinema’ for anti-realist conventions of transnational genre cinema.Dracula, père et fils (Molinaro, 1976) and Un vampire au paradis (Bahloul, 1992) exposethe ‘common sense’ and ‘science’ of racism within a transpolitical space of France and Algeria inways that canonical films would not dare. As such, the films prompt a rethinking of French cinemabeyond the often nationally or culturally discrete spaces of auteur cinema into global spaces of transnational genre films.

Draculas, Vampires, and Other Undead Forms: Essays on Gender, Race, and Culture, 2009

Unspeakable Images: Ethnicity and the American Cinema, 1991

International Journal For Multidisciplinary Research, 2023

Films as a Medium of Contemporary Politics Duncombre and Bleiker (2015) wrote a very interesting chapter entitled "Popular Culture and Political Identity" 1 which shows the film's strategic position in the development of political narratives in society. The beginning of this chapter shows how ISIS made a video beheading prisoners to show their hatred for America. The video, which was made in a cinematic manner, succeeded in creating terror in the global community and it did not take long for Western governments to be able to launch attacks to demolish ISIS to the end. The role of pop culture used by ISIS clearly shows how strategically popular culture is used as a medium of resistance and political media. This chapter attempts to explain how popular culture is not only inseparable from politics, but also supports one another in building and distributing narratives. Popular culture can create a political identity where we can finally determine who ‗we' are and who the ‗others' are. Contrary to popular beliefs that popular culture is an escapism platform from the exhausting political frenzy, it actually has such great political strength due to its closeness to the society's consumerist culture. Popular culture is able to strengthen one's political identity because it is not uncommon for popular culture to be supported by political leaders at the time to create a sense of national unity through entertaining media. Popular culture is also not necessarily considered as a unifying medium for a nation and then becomes a slave to the authorities. Because popular culture often criticizes and questions the truth of a big authority like the state, for example. Martinez. T.A.(1997) explains how rap music is a tool of Black resistance against various forms of racism and oppression from the police who often treat Black people discriminatively and also treat excessive violence to the point of causing death. 2 In the context of creating a spirit of nationalism and unity, this chapter tries to see cases where film and television as media have succeeded in instilling values to the people who consume it. As an example for this chapter, the role of Captain America as a superhero from America managed to create a wave of vague nationalism through the symbolism of this character. Captain America wears a costume that represents the American flag and the attitude he shows is a general reflection of American society which is always honest and brave. Hollywood as a producer of television programs and films has succeeded in using popular culture to be able to define and bind the values of togetherness and

Horror film scholarship has generally suggested that the supernatural vampire either did not appear onscreen during the early cinema period, or that it appeared only once, in Georges Méliès' Le manoir du diable/The Devil's Castle (1896). By making rigorous use of archival materials, this essay tests those assumptions and determines them to be incorrect, while at the same time acknowledging the ambiguity of vampires and early cinema, both being prone to misreadings and misunderstandings. Between 1895 and 1915, moving pictures underwent major evolutions that transformed their narrative codes of intelligibility. During the same years, the subject of vampirism also experienced great change, with the supernatural characters of folklore largely dislocated by the non-supernatural " vamps " of popular culture. In an effort to reconcile the onscreen ambiguities, this paper adopts a New Film History methodology to examine four early films distributed in America, showing how characters in two of them—Le manoir du diable and La légende du fantôme/Legend of a Ghost (Pathé Frères, 1908) have in different eras been mistakenly read as supernatural vampires, as well as how a third—The Vampire, a little-known chapter of the serial The Exploits of Elaine (Pathé, 1915)— invoked supernatural vampirism, but only as a metaphor. The paper concludes by analyzing Loïe Fuller (Pathé Frères, 1905), the only film of the era that seems to have depicted a supernatural vampire. Revising the early history of vampires onscreen brings renewed focus to the intrinsic similarities between the supernatural creatures and the cinema.

History of Representation of Vampires in Film and Moral repression, 2018

It seems rather difficult to imagine creatures of classic horror films, such as the monster of Frankenstein, the Mummy, the Wolfman or Doctor Jekyll and Mr Hyde as icons that an audience could admire and understand empathetically. Furthermore, the sins these monsters represent are recognised immediately as reprehensible, punishable and worst of all, unattractive. This is perhaps the reason as to why their appearance and themes in film have remained practically unchanged throughout their different iterations. Vampire films on the other hand are a different case altogether, as they are so varied in their themes that they have managed to become a film genre of their own. Vampires have fascinated generations of cinemagoers; with depictions of hideous vampires such as the rat-like Count Orlock in Nosferatu (1922), to the silent and sensualised Christopher Lee's Horror of Dracula (1958). These creatures have taken a hold of audiences all over the world. These vampire films would later go on to inspire a generation of filmmakers to pose the question of what it could mean for a human to become a vampire. As a result of this question the humanisation of the vampire was made possible. This change has altered entirely the vampire film genre and it provided the films -notably during the 1980s and 1990s- with a different narrative. In these films the vampire's role as the villain is not so clear anymore and the monster becomes the protagonist to the detriment of its victims. However, the vampire remains the representation of evil whilst allowing the audience to experience the power of the vampire. The fantasies vampires represent are those of sex, control of others and of nature and ultimately of guilt-free power. Jeffrey Weinstock observes in his work The Vampire Film, Undead Cinema: "What cinematic vampires have arguably done for much of their existence is to provide representations of tabooed sexuality in order to establish and reinforce proper sexual roles." (Weinstock, 2012: 8). It is precisely this idea that filmmakers and writers alike, employed to convey the attraction of becoming one of the undead, the possibility of enjoying an eternal life free of moral and physical boundaries. The film industry adapted Dracula for first time in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu (1922). This adaptation inherited Victorian models of horror literature, thus, it carried in its narrative the repression against the vampire's unnatural sexual behaviour. The Count's appearance did nothing but emphasise the horror of that which is both forbidden and unknown. It is precisely the forbidden nature of the vampire, which helped filmmakers to make them so appealing in the films of the 1980s. The vampire then becomes the figure of the renegade, helping those members of the audience who consider themselves different, or 'not normal' to identify themselves with this new generation of bloodsuckers. Milly Williamson explains this idea in her book The Lure of the Vampire: "Thus the vampire is no longer an expression of terror, it is the expression of the outcast and this helps to explain its enormous popularity" (Williamson, 2005, 183). There was yet another dramatic change to the vampire's narrative with the poorly critically received Twilight (2008). This iteration is perhaps one of its most puzzling transformations. This creature of unfathomable and uncontrollable power appears in these films to be submissive to the desires of what would have been its prey. It is the idea of the romanticised vampire that fuels this work. The primary aim of this project is to gain a deeper understanding of the nature of the vampire with regards to human fantasies of power. This will allow me to understand the reason as to why this supernatural creature has changed so much throughout its different iterations in film. In order to do this I will use a textual analysis on a series of films as well as academic texts to better analyse the libertine nature of the vampire and the repressive narrative in its different films.

One of the most popular cultural figures to be adapted within the comic book format is that of the vampire, a creature whose murky cultural origins have been prone to evolution throughout its long and varied history. A staple of both European and American Gothic traditions as well as the American horror comics of the 1950s, vampire literature has long been associated with the lower end of the established critical canon, particularly due to its sometimes violent and sexually explicit content within the 'low' form of the comic. 1 Yet, such an elitist view is to ignore some of the interesting insights and cultural evolutions that can be uncovered within the portrayal of the comic book vampire. From the eroticised, science fiction creation of Forrest J. Ackerman and Trina Robbins's Vampirella (1969) to the more viral and savage interpretations in Steve Niles's 30 Days of Night (2002), the comic format has become a valuable arena for the reinvention of a figure that has long since been at the forefront of popular culture. Yet, while many texts have offered surprising or sometimes

1997