Lesson 8: Who do we think we are?

The figure of the vampire has been a rich source of ideas for films for almost 100 years.  Frederick Murnau's Nosferatu [1921] being the first great introduction to a figure familiar to audiences from literature and stage adaptations of the Bram Stoker novel.
The first talking Dracula - and the genre setting template - was Universal Film's DRACULA [1931] starring Bela Lugosi that went on to have a series of film's based around the immortal figure of the Count.  The Hammer Films series in the 1960s has become a classic representation of the vampire. the late 20th Century saw a glut of vampire inspired films - Francis Ford Coppola's DRACULA ; INTERVIEW WITH A VAMPIRE; VAMPIRE 2000; BLADE TRILOGY - all of which explored the vampire legend.
Post 9/11 the figure has seemingly developed into a much more sexualised figure with TWILIGHT franchise and representations on TV such as TRUE-BLOOD, BEING HUMAN.
Each generation has seemingly constructed a version that reflects that era's concerns and values: the zeitgeist
Consider that in the post WW1 era of the 1920s with concerns of re-populating a European society devastated by war and the destruction of the 'flower of humanity' the vampire was a figure that represented a homophobic ideology.  In the 1930s it represented the blood-sucking rich preying on the working poor [the time of the Great Depression].  In the liberated 1960s the representation was sexual and sexualised represented by the change in victims and their seduction by the creature. In the 1990s - with the repeal of capital punishment and a more liberal approach to mental health -  the vampire is no longer a monster but a figure to be understood rather than hunted and destroyed. Post 9/11 the desire for romantic escape from the horrors of an uncertain world and the issues of 'living together' underpin Twilight and True Blood and certainly Being Human.
Much of the enduring fascination has been ascribed by psychologists [and they should surely know!] to a sense of The Other.

,Vampire’s can be found in the folklore of virtually all cultures.  Their physical appearance may have changed but their social function has remained the same, suggesting that the vampire is as much a symbolic being as a supernatural one.

Within Eastern European lore vampires are often depicted as dirty, stumbling and mindless peasants whose victims are often their own family or neighbours. Their existence was used to explain sudden deaths or the spread of disease within the community, clearly indicating that the image of the vampire, for this culture at least, was one of a contagious pestilence. From what you have already researched it should be clear that such a description is dramatically different to the image most Western readers and audiences are familiar with. To us, [despite the gruesome representation in Murnau’s Nosferatu – which itself clearly owes much to the mid-European background of the auteur himself] the vampire of Hollywood has - in general - come to be represented as a clean and sophisticated creature, a supernatural being that is personified by the Count in Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula (1897). In this narrative, the vampire comes to English shores from abroad and begins its seduction of virginal young women, biting their necks and turning them into his undead brides. Even from this simple description of Stoker’s complex narrative, a similar symbolic value to the East European folklore emerges: this time the vampire is a sexual predator that infects the innocent with their disease.

From these examples emerge two of the vampire’s most potent symbolic qualities:

·         they are a direct threat to the safety of the family unit  

·         their primary symbolic function is to represent that which is Other.

The Other

As a broad definition, the term the Other refers to those characters who stand in opposition to characters who represent the ‘normal’ within any narrative. In essence, the Other is simply that which is wholly different to the ‘normal’. Relating this to the vampire, consider any adaptation of Stoker’s Dracula: here ‘normal’ is represented by the protagonists Jonathan Harker and Van Helsing whilst the Other is, obviously, Count Dracula and those he infects. The opposition is obvious in that Harker and Helsing are good, moral, and pure, whereas Dracula is evil, immoral, and diseased. To take the character’s symbolic values further, it can be suggested that the protagonists represent a patriarchal, heterosexual and (more than likely) Christian society that is attacked by the satanic force of the vampire.

Clearly then the vampire, in all of its manifestations, is a prime example of the Other. But, in recent years the figure of the vampire has steadily changed: although historically depicted as a disease-ridden, aggressive and uncommunicative creature, contemporary depictions of the vampire have given them back their humanity and their voice so that they can communicate the pain of their ‘illness’ and reflect, in a melancholy manner, upon the horrors of immortality. Films such as  Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Francis Ford Coppola, 1992) and Interview with a Vampire (Neil Jordan, 1994) all provide the opportunity for their vampire (anti)heroes to speak about their condition and so elicit the audience’s sympathy. Some vampires have such a loathing for their condition that they actively hunt and kill their own kind [Blade; Seline]. Such a transition clearly lends a certain sense of humanity to them as they talk of their human past, of those they have left behind and the horror of the vampiric infection. These recollections add a further sense of sympathy to these creatures, suggesting that most, if not all, contemporary vampires are as much victim as villain, and remind the audience that they were once us. In this context, these vampires can be read as ambiguous as they question their status as Other: their sense of disgust and regret for their condition implies a yearning to return to the normal, to be accepted as human as opposed to inhuman. Yet, for all of this, their fundamental sense of Otherness still remains: they are still vampiric regardless of their emotions, their regret and the ‘good’ deeds they perform. It would seem then that once one has become the Other there is no possibility of a return to the ‘normal’.

With this in mind, we can now begin to explore a very contemporary spin on the mythic tale of the Other, the ideas surrounding the representation of vampires in  David Slade’s 30 Days of Night (2007) returns the vampire to its original state as visceral and brutal monsters who crave only one thing – blood.
TASK:
From the sequence viewed [the arrest of the stranger to the group of survivors taking refuge in the attic] in what ways have the vampires been represented as 'Other'