The Transmedia Vampire

This book explores vampire narratives that have been expressed across multiple media and new technologies. Stories and characters such as Dracula, Carmilla and even Draculaura from Monster High have been made more “real” through their depictions in narratives produced in and across different platforms. This also allows the consumer to engage on multiple levels with the “vampire world,” blurring the boundaries between real and imaginary realms and allowing for different kinds of identity to be created while questioning terms such as “author,” “reader,” “player” and “consumer.” These essays investigate the consequences of such immersion and why the undead world of the transmedia vampire is so well suited to life in the 21st century.

Simon Bacon is an independent scholar based in Poznan, Poland. He has authored and edited many volumes on vampires, monstrosity, science fiction and media studies.

Edited by Simon Bacon

Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 232
Bibliographic Info: 9 photos, notes, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2021
pISBN: 978-1-4766-7574-9
eISBN: 978-1-4766-4335-9
Imprint: McFarland

Acknowledgments vii
Foreword: We Are, All of Us, Renfields
John Edgar Browning 1
Introduction
Simon Bacon 3

Part I—Dracula: Adaptations and Re-Creations
We Are Dracula: Penny Dreadful and the Dracula Megatext
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock 20
“Better Parts”: Redemptive Portrayals of Count Dracula as Vlad the Impaler in Selected Film Adaptions of Stoker’s Dracula
Wayne Derek Pigeon-Coote 35
“I’ve crossed oceans of versions to find you”: Remediating Mina from Novel to Screen in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Cathleen Allyn Conway 47

Part II—Across Mediums, Platforms and Levels of Engagement
Byzantium Stage to Screen
Gina Wisker 60
Pixel Parasites: The Virtual Vampire as Enemy, Ally and Self in Video Games
Shawn Edrei 76
Vampire as Doll: Transformations of Meaning Through Play in the Vampirina and Draculaura (Monster High) Franchises
Derek Newman-Stille 88
“Do Vampires Get Their Periods?”: The Carmilla Web Series and the Politics of Bleeding Women
Alexandra Heller-Nicholas 103

Part III—Transnational Transmedia
Vampire Tourism: Transmedia Narratives, Cultural Histories and Locating the Undead
Lorna Piatti-Farnell 120
Thinking in Connections: A.A. Carr’s Eye Killers and F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu
Svetlana Seibel 134
From Revenants to Vampires: The Transmedia Evolution of the Jiangshi
Katarzyna Ancuta 146

Part IV—Interventions, Fandom, Ownership
Transmedia Interventions and Palimpsestuous Relations: Carmilla Meets Carmen Maria Machado
Natalie Wilson 162
The Originals and Family History Two-Fold: Caught Between Two Worlds
Verena Bernardi 174
Transmedia Vampire Stories and Their Consumers in Anne Rice’s The Vampire Chronicles
Laura Davidel 187
First-Person Gothic: Anne Rice, Vampirism, Authorship and Identity
Evan Hayles Gledhill 201

About the Contributors 217
Index 221

“A solid collection of essays with a wide view of an expansive topic…There is much worth to be found within the volume and it is recommended”—Journal of Vampire Studies