Jeremy Magnan: Allegories of vampire cinema

Jeremy Magnan

Department of English & Creative Writing

Allegories of Vampire Cinema is a theoretical film essay involving the

issue of spectator relations to vampire films before, during, and after

viewings. The piece closely examines which character the spectators are

truly meant to connect with. This is an interesting and important issue to

raise as it offers a new analysis that had not previously been explored,

aligning the spectators not with the protagonists of these stories, but with

the vampire itself. In my research, I gathered dozens of books, magazine

articles, and journal entries to delve deeply into the horror genre and

vampire subgenre. I also screened over three dozen vampire films, though

only a handful are cited directly. The essay was pieced together from the

beginning of January through March when, upon completion, I presented

my findings at the 2008 PCA/ACA National Conference in San Francisco.

Implications that are brought to light upon the revelation that the spectator

is being aligned with vampires include the notion that the vampire film

may not be an isolated case. With further study, theories and analyses may

bring about spectator relations and alignments with not only a myriad of

other antagonistic horror icons, but antagonists throughout the entire scope

of film.

Many authors have sought to lend insight into the metaphorical relationship between the

vampire, their victims, and even their spectators. On the spectators of horror films in

general, Joseph Biggs and Dennis Petrie offer that “...one goes to the horror film in order to

have a nightmare... a dream whose undercurrent of anxiety both presents and masks the

desire to fulfill and be punished for certain conventionally unacceptable impulses (Biggs &

Petrie, 2008, p. 484).” It is their position that the spectators of horror view these films due

to a subconscious desire to see their “unacceptable impulses” played out by the monster (in

our discussion, vampires) and to be punished for the surrogate actions that the monster

plays out in our stead. In regards to the vampire, Jorg Waltje sees our clear alignment with

the vampire as soon as we sit down in the theater. He explains:

“The vampire only comes out in the dark and spends the

rest of the time in his coffin. The spectators voluntarily sit

in a coffin (the darkened cinema), watching a screen on

which not only light but also (within and between every

frame) darkness is projected (Waltje, 2000, p. 29).”

While I agree that this is a startlingly clear example of our relationship to the vampire,

this vampire-spectator relationship can be further clarified through a common

iconographical object in most of these films in a way that has not as yet been established.

Lacan’s famous mirror stage is one of his pillars of seeking out the moment when the

identity of a child in relation to itself begins to develop. “The child... can already recognize

as such his own image in a mirror. This recognition is indicated in the illuminative mimicry

of the Aha- Erlebnis... This event can take place... from the age of six months... up to the

age of eighteen months (Lacan, 2004, p. 441-442).” Aha, you may say, but the vampire

casts no reflection, does it not? Stoker himself, Dracula’s keeper, has been the catalyst for

your exclamation: “This time there could be no error, for the man was close to me, and I

could see him over my shoulder. But there was no reflection of him in the mirror (Stoker,

2003, p. 30-31)!” So what would Dracula’s answer to Lacan’s mirror stage be in fact?

Fiona Peters states:

“Vampires have no need for an unconscious- nor can they

be seen in mirrors because they do not need to rely on the

process of identifications that Lacan describes; in other

words they have not become formed as human subjects,

and in the case of those who become vampires after being

human... they have evaded the symbolic order... (Peters,

2006, p. 180)”

In Peters’ argument, humans who become vampires have separated and transcended

themselves from the symbolism that is the vampire to become one of them. Interesting...

My question for Peters would be What if someone was a vampire and didn’t know it? Must

they still graduate from the fully-fledged human’s mirror stage? I believe they do. But who

ever heard of someone not knowing that they are in fact a vampire? Perhaps my line of

questions has no value... I believe Slavoj Žižek had it right when he said, “It is therefore

clear why vampires are invisible to the mirror: because they have read Lacan and,

consequently, know how to behave... (Žižek, 19992, p. 126)”

Aural Vampire (オーラルヴァンパイア,): Vampire Complex

Alfred Kubin: The Vampire

Alfred Kubin: The Vampire

Guillermo del Toro - Chuck Hogan: The Strain trilogy

The Strain

A plane lands at JFK and mysteriously ‘goes dark’, stopping in the middle of the runway for no apparent reason, all lights off, all doors sealed. The pilots cannot be raised. When the hatch above the wing finally clicks open, it soon becomes clear that everyone on board is dead – although there is no sign of any trauma or struggle. Ephraim Goodweather and his team from the Center for Disease Control must work quickly to establish the cause of this strange occurrence before panic spreads. The first thing they discover is that four of the victims are actually still alive. But that’s the only good news. And when all two hundred corpses disappear from various morgues around the city on the same night, things very rapidly get worse. Soon Eph and a small band of helpers will find themselves battling to protect not only their own loved ones, but the whole city, against an ancient threat to humanity.

The Fall

Ephraim Goodweather, director of the New York office of the Centers for Disease control, is one of the few humans who understands what is really happening. Vampires have arrived in New York City, and their condition is contagious. If they cannot be contained, the entire world is at risk of infection. As Eph becomes consumed with the battle against the total corruption of humanity, his ex-wife, Kelly, now a vampire herself, is ever-more determined to claim their son, Zack. As the Biblical origins of the Ancient ones are gradually revealed, Eph learns that there is a greater, more terrible plan in store for the human race – worse even than annihilation…

The Night Eternal 

After the blasts, it was all over. Nuclear Winter has settled upon the earth. Except for one hour of sunlight a day, the whole world is plunged into darkness. It is a near-perfect environment for vampires. They have won. It is their time. Almost every single man, woman and child has been enslaved in vast camps across the globe. Like animals, they are farmed, harvested for the sick pleasure of the Master Race. Almost, but not all. Somewhere out there, hiding for their lives, is a desperate network of free humans, continue the seemingly hopeless resistance. Everyday people, with no other options – among them Dr Ephraim Goodweather, his son Zack, the veteran exterminator Vassily, and former gangbanger Gus. To be free, they need a miracle, they need divine intervention. But Salvation can be a twisted game – one in which they may be played like pawns in a battle of Good and Evil. And at what cost…?

The Moth Diaries (director: Mary Harron)

Starring
Lily Cole
Sarah Gadon
Sarah Bolger
Anne Day-Jones

A vulnerable student is filled with a sense of foreboding about Ernessa, a mysterious new arrival at a girls' boarding schooll. Helped to recovery by her best friend Lucy after the suicide of her father, sixteen-year-old Rebecca soon begins to feel ostracised when Lucy falls under the spell of darkly moody newcomer Ernessa. Rebecca believes that Ernessa may in fact be a vampire and is trying to steal her friend's life force. When staff and pupils at the school suddenly begin to suffer a series of deadly freak accidents, Rebecca decides to uncover the truth about Ernessa once and for all.

Carl Jacobi : Revelations in Black

http://talesofmytery.blogspot.com.es/2013/01/carl-jacobi-revelations-in-black.html

M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo: Vampire meets girl: gender roles and the vampire’s side of the story in twilight, midnight sun and the vampire diaries

NeoAmericanist;2011, Vol. 5 Issue 2, January 2011

by M. Carmen Gomez-Galisteo, Universidad de Alcalá (Spain)

The Monday after New Moon, the film based on the second book of the Twilight saga by Stephenie

Meyer, opened worldwide, I asked my junior year students in my seventeenth- and eighteenth-century

American literature seminar if they had watched it. That in the middle of a discussion about Jonathan

Edwards’ fear-filling sermons about the dangers and the extreme pain awaiting sinners in Hell. Though

the looks on my students’ faces said — “This is it, she has lost it after reading so many sermons by wackos,”

my question was to the point. The Puritans lived in a world where they believed that supernatural

happenings could take place anytime, where the Devil was always lurking to stalk them by sending witches

or sea monsters, and where miracles might happen (though they were rather called instances of God’s

providence, reflecting the Puritans’ rejection of the Catholic terminology). That there exist men who can

transform themselves into wolves or evil creatures feeding on others’ blood would not have been a matter

of too much wonder for them. Even reputed Puritan divine Cotton Mather, author of over 400 books,

had devoted a section of his masterpiece Magnalia Christi Americana (The History of Christ’s Church in

America) to supernatural occurrences. The Puritans’ fascination with natural sciences and their interest

in the new scientific methods that were being developed at the time did not prevent them from believing

in the Occult or the supernatural, just the contrary. The Devil being a constant presence in their daily

lives, surely, the Puritans would have had no qualms in attributing vampires’ and werewolves’ special

characteristics to witchcraft or the devil’s doings — and put them to the bonfire right away. Because the

Puritans would have found it a perfectly logical explanation for the Cullens’ mysteriousness and their

sometimes bizarre behavior that they were vampires, the Twilight saga thus is heir to an early American

tradition of believing in the supernatural.

It is recurrent among twentieth-century rewritings of famous monster stories that the point of view

is no longer that of the more or less helpless victim or even that of the rather cold, and unsympathetic

(to the monster’s plight) omniscient third-person narrator; instead, we are privy the point of view of the

so-called monster, whose monstrosity comes to be questioned. In these retellings, the monster appears

to be much more human, having feelings and emotions that up to them had been impossible for him to

have due to his very characterization as a monster. For instance, Mary Reilly by Valerie Martin, through

the eyes of the homonymous protagonist, the servant of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, offered a much more

humane vision of the physician and his nemesis than Robert Louis Stevenson had provided. Mary

Shelley’s Frankenstein, the most recent cinematographic adaptation of the popular nineteenth-century

novel, brings attention to the story’s authorship to claim a version closer to the original, far from other,

somewhat sugar-coated and at other times frankly risible representations of Victor Frankenstein’s

creature as a man with a greenish face and screws from his temples. This Frankenstein’s creature is

far from being happy with his lot and pledges revenge on his maker for his present anguish. In these

contemporary, post-modern retellings, the focus (and thence, the reader’s sympathy) is on the monster

that cannot prevent his condition, much to his own chagrin, no matter his efforts to put an end to his

situation. These are monsters, indeed, but they try their best not to be. They also suffer from pangs of

their consciences, telling them not to kill unnecessarily and, even when forced to kill, they are plagued by

remorse and guilt. These monsters are, in way, moved by biological determinism: they try to avoid being

what they are, but they miserably fail, because of their very natures — or their genetic makeup, if you wish.

A sequel told from the point of view of a character from the original novel is a rather popular

literary development. Well-known examples include Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (off Jane Eyre

by Charlotte Brontë), The Wind Done Gone (off Gone With the Wind by Margaret Mitchell), March

by Geraldine Brooks (off Little Women by Louisa May Alcott), or Pemberley by Emma Tennant (off

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen), just to name a few. In 2008, Stephenie Meyer’s work in progress,

Midnight Sun, was posted all over the Internet, with all the efforts to put a stop to this violation of

copyright miserably failing. Eventually, given the multiplicity of pirate versions, Meyer decided to give up

writing Midnight Sun and instead posted the manuscript in draft form as it was in her own website (www.

stepheniemeyer.com). What was intended to be the fifth book of the Twilight saga represents Edward’s

side of the story. It is a very rare gift to have an insight into the male protagonist’s thoughts. See Pride

and Prejudice— we don’t know Darcy’s true thoughts till the end. This makes Midnight Sun so relevant to

the study and better comprehension of the Twilight saga. In Twilight we see Bella’s despair for receiving

the cold shoulder from her biology class lab partner during her first days in Forks. It is not until later in

the novel when we discover Edward’s reasons for such an attitude towards Bella. Midnight Sun analyzes

Edward’s thoughts at meeting his forbidden object of desire.