Rachel Klein: The Moth Diaries

At an exclusive girls' boarding school, a sixteen-year-old girl records her most intimate thoughts in a diary. The object of her obsession is her room-mate, Lucy Blake, and Lucy's friendship with Emessa, their new and disturbing classmate. Ernessa is a mysterious presence with pale skin and hypnotic eyes. Around her swirl dark secrets and a series of ominous disasters. As fear spreads through the school, fantasy and reality mingle into a waking nightmare of gothic menace, fuelled by the lusts and fears of adolescence. Is Ernessa really a vampire? Or is the narrator trapped in her own fevered imagination?

Vampegeddon (Director: Jeffrey Alan Miller)

Starring
Michael Alvarez
Richard Anderson
Josh Bingenheimer

Chased out of the old world, the dark vampire lord Giovanni flees to the American southwest where he sets up a new brood. Longshank, Brittan's premier vampire slayer follows him here, and in a final confrontation in the Arizona desert both are killed. A hundred years later Melissa, a gorgeous, goth, lesbian college student, is obsessed with becoming a vampire and escaping her terrible home life. Along with her four friends, Ted, Liz, Mona, and Kent, she regularly conducts ceremonies where she tries to commune with dark forces...

Luigi Capuana: A Vampire

“It is no laughing matter!” said Lelio Giorgi.

“Why shouldn’t I laugh?” replied Mongeri. “I don’t believe in ghosts.”

“Neither did I, once. .. and I’d still rather not,” went on Giorgi. “That’s why I’ve come to see you. You might be able to explain whatever it is that’s making my life a misery and wrecking my marriage.”

“Whatever it is? You mean whatever you imagine it is. You’re not well. It’s true that a hallucination is itself a fact, but what it represents has no reality outside yourself. Or, to put it better, it’s the externalization of a sensation, a sort of projection of yourself, so that the eye sees what it in fact does not see, and the ear hears sounds that were never made. Previous impressions, often stored up unconsciously, project themselves rather like events in dreams. We still don’t know how or why. We dream, and that’s the right word, with our eyes wide open. But one has to distinguish between split-second hallucinations which don’t necessarily indicate any organic or psychic disturbance, and those of a more persistent nature. . . But of course that’s not the case with you.”

“But it is, with me and my wife.”

“You don’t understand. What we scientists call persistent hallucinations are those experienced

by the insane. I don’t have to give you an example. . . . The fact that you both suffer the same

hallucinations is just a case of simple induction. You probably must have influenced your wife’s

nervous system.”

“No. She was the first.”

“Then you mean that your nervous system, haing a greater receptivity, was the one to be influenced. And don’t turn up your poetical nose at what you please to call my scientific jargon.

It has its uses.”

“If you would just let me get a word in edgeways. . . .”

“Some things are best let well alone. Do you want a scientific explanation? Well, the answer is that for the moment you wouldn’t get anything of the sort. We are in the realm of hypotheses. One to

day, a different one tomorrow, and a different one the day after. You are a curious lot, you artists! When you feel like it you make fun of Science, you undervalue the whole business of experiment, research and hypothesis that makes it progress; then when a case comes long that interests you personally you want a clear, precise and categorical answer. And there are scientists who play the game, out of conviction or vanity. But I’m not one of them. You want the plain truth? Science is the greatest proof of our own ignorance. To calm you down I can talk of hallucinations, of induction, receptivity. Words! Words! the more I study the more I despair of ever knowing anything for certain. It seems to happen on purpose, no sooner do scientists get a kick out of some new law they’ve discovered than along comes some new fact, some discovery, that upsets the lot. You need to take it easy, just let life flow by; what’s happened to you and your wife has happened to so many others. It will pass. Why must you try and find out how and why it happened? Are you scared of dreams?”

“If you’d just let me tell you. . . .”

“Go on then, tell me, if you want to get it off your chest. But I warn you, it can only make matters worse. The only way to get over it, is to busy yourself with other things, get away from it. Find a new devil to drive out the old—it’s a good saying.”

“We did all that. It wasn’t any good. The first signs. . . the first manifestations, happened in the country, in our villa at Foscolara. We ran away from it, but the very night that we came back to town. . .”

Eugene Roger: Preparatory Study for Ghouls

Eugene Roger: Preparatory Study for Ghouls

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