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Vampires are arguably the most popular and most paradoxical of gothic monsters: life draining yet passionate, feared yet fascinating, dead yet immortal. Vampire content produces exquisitely suspenseful stories that, combined with motion picture filmmaking, reveal much about the cultures that enable vampire film production and the audiences they attract. This collection of essays is generously illustrated and ranges across sixteen cultures on five continents, including the films Let the Right One In, What We Do in the Shadows, Cronos, and We Are the Night,
among many others. Distinctly different kinds of European vampires have originated in Ireland, Germany, Sweden, and Serbia. North American vampires are represented by films from Mexico, Canada, and the USA. Middle Eastern locations include Tangier, Morocco, and a fictional city in Iran. South Asia has produced Bollywood vampire films, and east Asian vampires are represented by films from Korea, China, and Japan. Some of the most recent vampire movies have come from Australia and New Zealand. These essays also look at vampire films through lenses of gender, post-colonialism, camp, and otherness as well as the evolution of the vampiric character in cinema worldwide, together constituting a mosaic of the cinematic undead.
List of contents
Table of ContentsIntroduction (James Aubrey)
Australia
Children of the Night in a Sunburnt Country: Aristocrats
and Outback Vampires (Graeme A. Wend-Walker)
Canada
A Monstrous Showing: Movement and Deformed Discourse
in Guy Maddin's Vampire Ballet Film Dracula: Pages from a Virgin's Diary (Lorna Hutchison)
China
The Hong Kong Vampire Returns: Nostalgia, Pastiche
and Politics in Rigor Mortis (Fontaine Lien)
Germany
Nosferatu's Daughters: Radical Feminism, Lesbo-Vampirism
and Fluid Identities in Dennis Gansel's Wir sind die Nacht
(We Are the Night) (Kai-Uwe Werbeck)
India
Chutney Vampires: Contextualizing Bollywood's Undead
Cinema (Anurag Chauhan)
Iran
Reclaiming the Marginalized Female Body in Ana Lily
Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (U. Melissa Anyiwo)
Ireland and
Creating an Irish Neomyth: Byzantium's Feminist Vampires (James Aubrey)
Italy
Dario Argento's Dracula 3D: History, Genre and the Politics of Camp
(Vincent Piturro)
Japan
The Intertextuality of Moon Child: How Japanese Popular Culture Molds and Interprets Gender and the Vampire (Jade Lum)
Korea
Blood, Dust and the Black Universe: From Asia Extreme to the Vampire World-Image in Thirst, The Wailing and the New Korean Vampire Horror Cinema (David John Boyd)
Mexico
The Craft of Delicacy in Cronos: Rethinking Vampire Films
in Latin America (Roberto Forns-Broggi)
Morocco and
Only Lovers Left Alive: Expat Vampires and Post-Imperial
Cosmopolitanism (Wendolyn Weber)
New Zealand
"Don't ... don't believe the hype!" Vampiric Evolution
and What We Do in the Shadows (Charles Hoge)
Serbia
Vampire Privilege: Class, Gender and Sex in Serbian
Metaphysical Horror (Tatjana Aleksi¿)
Sweden
Unqueering Child Vampire Love in Let the Right One
(James Aubrey)
Museological Horror in Ganja and Hess and Da Sweet Blood
of Jesus (Cheryl D. Edelson)
"It's more like a disease": Compensatory Masculinities and Intersectional "Otherness" in The Transfiguration (Cain Miller)
Filmography
Bibliography
About the Contributors
Index
About the author
James Aubrey is a professor of world literature and cinema studies at Metropolitan State University of Denver. His previous publications include essays on British and Indian literatures and two other books about John Fowles. He lives in Denver, Colorado.
