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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. 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, the Philippines and South Africa. As the vampire's popularity has swelled, vampire film and television has engaged with changing discourses around race and identity that are not always addressed in realist modes. Here, teen vampires comfort misunderstood youth, chador-wearing skateboarder vampires promote transnational feminism, African American and Mexican American vampires recover their repressed histories. Looking at contemporary hits like True Blood, Twilight, Underworld and The Strain, classics such as Universal's Dracula and Drácula, and miscegenation melodramas like The Cheat and The Sheik, the book reconfigures Hollywood historiography and tradition as fundamentally transnational, offering fresh interpretations of vampire media as trans-genre sites for political contestation. Dale Hudson is associate professor (NTE) in the Film and New Media Program at New York University Abu Dhabi and is digital media curator for the Finger Lakes Environmental Film Festival. Cover image: Bill Nighy in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans, Patrick Tatopoulos, 2009 (c) Screen Gems/Photofest Cover design: [EUP logo] edinburghuniversitypress.com ISBN 978-1-4744-2308-3 Barcode
List of contents
INTRODUCTION: Migrations and mutations
CHAPTER 1: Blood, bodies, and borders
CHAPTER 2: "Making" Americans from foreigners
CHAPTER 3 : Classical Hollywood vampires: the unnatural whiteness of America
CHAPTER 4: International Hollywood vampires: cosmopolitanisms of "foreign movies"
CHAPTER 5: Vampires of color: a critique of multicultural whiteness
CHAPTER 6: Terrorist vampires: religious heritage or planetary advocacy
CHAPTER 7: Other vampires, other Hollywoods: serialized citizenship and narrowcast difference
CONCLUSION: History and Hollywood, mashed-up
BIBLIOGRAPHY
FILMOGRAPHY
About the author
Dr Dale Hudson is Associate Professor and Curator of Film and New Media at NYU Abu Dhabi.
Summary
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.
