The media vampire has roots throughout the world, far beyond the shores of the usual Dracula-inspired Anglo-American archetypes. Depending on text and context, the vampire is a figure of anxiety and comfort, humor and fear, desire and revulsion. These dichotomies gesture the enduring prevalence of the vampire in mass culture; it can no longer articulate a single feeling or response, bound by time and geography, but is many things to many people. With a global perspective, this collection of essays offers something new and different: a much needed counter-narrative of the vampire’s evolution in popular culture. Divided by geography, this text emphasizes the vampiric as a globetrotting citizen du monde rather than an isolated monster.

Cait Coker is associate professor and curator of rare books and manuscripts at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Her research focuses on genre history, women’s writing, and the history of women in publishing.

Edited by Cait Coker

Series Editors Donald E. Palumbo and C.W. Sullivan III

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 251
Bibliographic Info: notes, bibliography, index
Copyright Date: 2020
pISBN: 978-1-4766-7594-7
eISBN: 978-1-4766-3733-4
Imprint: McFarland
Series: Critical Explorations in Science Fiction and Fantasy

Acknowledgments vi
Preface (and In Memoriam) 1
Introduction—Texts and Contexts: The Global Vampire in Popular Culture (Cait Coker) 3

The Americas and Canada
Biting, Sex and Blood: The New American Vampire Narrative (Candace R. Benefiel) 11
“I’ll give you blood to drink”: The New Vampire in Novels About the Salem Witch Trials (Marta María Gutiérrez-Rodríguez) 23
Wes Craven’s Vampire in Brooklyn: A Passing Narrative (Kendra R. Parker ) 35
The Transmediated Lesbian Vampire: LGBTQ Representation in a Contemporary Adaptation of J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla (Natalie Krikowa) 48
Éternelle Colonization: The Figure of the Vampire as Colonizing Factor in 21st-Century Québec (Maureen-C. LaPerrière and Julien Drainville) 60

Europe and the Mediterranean
“The creatures of the night, what bad jokes they make!”: Racism, “True” Humor and the Nationalistic Vampire on Film (Simon Bacon) 77
Amid and Beyond Gender(s): The Vampire as a Locus of Gender Neutrality in John Ajvide Lindqvist’s Let the Right One In (Marie Levesque) 90
The Economic Miracle and the Italian Undead in Tempi duriper i vampiri (Fernando Gabriel Pagnoni Berns) 104
“Time is an abyss”: The Role of History in Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu (1979) (Thomas Prasch) 116
There’s Water Here: Cities, Safety and the Global Environment in Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive (Karen E. Viars) 128

Asia and Australia
From Sunnydale to Seoul: The Vampire “Fan” in Korean Dramas (Cait Coker) 143
“Don’t adjust your life to mine”: Moon Child, Homoeroticism and the Vampire as Multifaceted Other (Miranda Ruth Larsen) 153
Aboriginal Australian Vampires and the Politics of Transmediality (Naomi Simone Borwein) 165
“In need of vitamin sea”: The Emergence of Australian Identity Through the Eyes and Thirst of Kirsty Eager’s Vampires (Phil Fitzsimmons) 177

Globalism: Real and Virtual Worlds?
The Ecohorror of The Strain: Plant Vampires and Climate Change as a Holocaust (Tatiana Prorokova-Konrad) 189
“Set to drain”: Vampirism as Mechanic and Metaphor in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion (Trevor Dodge) 200

Afterword (Amanda Jo Hobson and U. Melissa Anyiwo) 211
About the Contributors 215
Works Cited 219
Index 235