Vampire Films Around the World

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.

James Aubrey is a professor of English at Metropolitan State University of Denver, where he teaches British and world literatures as well as film studies. He has published numerous articles on literature and three previous books.

Edited by James Aubrey

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 330
Bibliographic Info: 37 photos, notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2020
pISBN: 978-1-4766-7673-9
eISBN: 978-1-4766-3986-4
Imprint: McFarland

Introduction (James Aubrey) 1

Australia
Children of the Night in a Sunburnt Country: Aristocrats and Outback Vampires (Graeme A. ­Wend-Walker) 9
Canada
A Monstrous Showing: Movement and Deformed Discourse in Guy Maddin’s Vampire Ballet Film Dracula: Pages from a Virgin’s Diary (Lorna Hutchison) 28
China
The Hong Kong Vampire Returns: Nostalgia, Pastiche and Politics in Rigor Mortis (Fontaine Lien) 45
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) 64
India
Chutney Vampires: Contextualizing Bollywood’s Undead Cinema (Anurag Chauhan) 78
Iran
Reclaiming the Marginalized Female Body in Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (U. Melissa Anyiwo) 92
Ireland and UK
Creating an Irish Neomyth: Byzantium’s Feminist Vampires (James Aubrey) 109
Italy
Dario Argento’s Dracula 3D: History, Genre and the Politics of Camp (Vincent Piturro) 124
Japan
The Intertextuality of Moon Child: How Japanese Popular Culture Molds and Interprets Gender and the Vampire (Jade Lum) 138
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) 152
Mexico
The Craft of Delicacy in Cronos: Rethinking Vampire Films in Latin America (Roberto ­Forns-Broggi) 179
Morocco and USA
Only Lovers Left Alive: Expat Vampires and ­Post-Imperial Cosmopolitanism (Wendolyn Weber) 195
New Zealand
“Don’t … don’t believe the hype!” Vampiric Evolution and What We Do in the Shadows (Charles Hoge) 209
Serbia
Vampire Privilege: Class, Gender and Sex in Serbian Metaphysical Horror (Tatjana Aleksić) 229
Sweden
Unqueering Child Vampire Love in Let the Right One In (James Aubrey) 245
USA
Museological Horror in Ganja and Hess and Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (Cheryl D. Edelson) 260
“It’s more like a disease”: Compensatory Masculinities and Intersectional “Otherness” in The Transfiguration (Cain Miller) 276

Filmography 291
Bibliography 297
About the Contributors 309
Index 313