DRACULAS, VAMPIRES, AND OTHER UNDEAD FORMS: Essays on Gender, Race, and Culture (Scarecrow Press, 2009)

Draculas, Vampires, and Other Undead Forms Essays on Gender, Race, and Culture Edited by John Edgar Browning Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart The Scarecrow Press, Inc. Lanham, Maryland • Toronto • New York • Plymouth, UK 2009 SCARECROW PRESS, INC. Published in the United States of America by Scarecrow Press, Inc. A wholly owned subsidiary of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www.scarecrowpress.com Estover Road Plymouth PL6 7PY United Kingdom Copyright © 2009 by John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Draculas, vampires, and other undead forms : essays on gender, race, and culture / edited by John Edgar Browning, Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8108-6696-6 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8108-6923-3 (e-book) 1. Dracula films—History and criticism. 2. Vampire films—History and criticism. 3. Sex role in motion pictures. 4. Racism in motion pictures. 5. Culture in motion pictures. I. Browning, John ( John Edgar) II. Picart, Caroline Joan, 1966– PN1995.9.D64D735 2009 791.43'675—dc22 2008054143 ! ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America. Contents Foreword David J. Skal Acknowledgments Introduction: Documenting Dracula and Global Identities in Film, Literature, and Anime John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart 1 2 3 4 5 Part I: Tackling Race, Gender, and Modes of Narration in America Manly P. Hall, Dracula (1931), and the Complexities of the Classic Horror Film Sequel Gary D. Rhodes The Dracula and the Blacula (1972) Cultural Revolution Paul R. Lehman and John Edgar Browning The Compulsions of Real/Reel Serial Killers and Vampires: Toward a Gothic Criminology Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart and Cecil Greek Blood, Lust, and the Fe/Male Narrative in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and the Novel (1897) Lisa Nystrom The Borg as Vampire in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994) and Star Trek: First Contact (1996): An Uncanny Reflection Justin Everett iii v vii ix 3 19 37 63 77 iv Contents 6 When Women Kill: Undead Imagery in the Cinematic Portrait of Aileen Wuornos Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart and Cecil Greek 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 Part II: Working through Change and Xenophobia in Europe Return Ticket to Transylvania: Relations between Historical Reality and Vampire Fiction Santiago Lucendo Racism and the Vampire: The Anti-Slavic Premise of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) Jimmie Cain The Grateful Un-Dead: Count Dracula and the Transnational Counterculture in Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) Paul Newland Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) as a Legacy of Romanticism Martina G. Lüke Part III: Imperialism, Hybridity, and Cross-Cultural Fertilization in Asia “Death and the Maiden”: The Pontianak as Excess in Malay Popular Culture Andrew Hock-Soon Ng Becoming-Death: The Lollywood Gothic of Khwaja Sarfraz’s Zinda Laash (Dracula in Pakistan [US title], 1967) Sean Moreland and Summer Pervez Modernity as Crisis: Goeng Si and Vampires in Hong Kong Cinema Dale Hudson Enter the Dracula: The Silent Screams and Cultural Crossroads of Japanese and Hong Kong Cinema Wayne Stein Identity Crisis: Imperialist Vampires in Japan? Nicholas Schlegel The Western Eastern: Decoding Hybridity and CyberZen Goth(ic) in Vampire Hunter D (1985) Wayne Stein and John Edgar Browning Index About the Editors and Contributors 93 115 127 135 153 167 187 203 235 261 279 295 311 Foreword David J. Skal The word vampire has almost become synonymous with Dracula in the 111 years since Bram Stoker wrote his indestructible novel, one of the best-selling books of all time. But Stoker’s conception of the vampire has shape-shifted and fragmented throughout the world in ways he would barely comprehend, and probably not even recognize. “Dracula” broke radically with an earlier, romantic conception of the vampire that had been popularized in literature, theatre, and opera, but itself was preceded by an animalistic, zombie-like creature of European folklore. However, as this eclectic anthology amply demonstrates, the vampire mythos was never confined to Europe, nor to Hollywood. Every culture in recorded time has had its own legends of hungry ghosts who feed on the energy of the living, in one way or another. And very few of them bear much resemblance to Bela Lugosi descending a staircase, holding a solitary, flickering candle that improbably lights the entire cavernous great hall of his castle for the legendary cinematographer Karl Freund. It would actually take a thousand points of light (black light?) to really do the job, and this book adds considerably more illumination to the shadows of Dracula’s abode by exploring “Draculas” rather than the vampire king in isolation. Dwight Frye’s Renfield is hardly Dracula’s solitary guest in Tod Browning’s landmark film, which, however flawed cinematically, galvanized centuries of world folklore, literature, and the performing arts into an image so indelible that it has blocked our appreciation and understanding of the much larger context of ravenous revenants. That empty castle hall is, in essence, a reeling ballroom of the unseen undead. It took a long time for horror as a category to be taken seriously by academics, and vampire studies in particular have exploded to the point that it is v vi David J. Skal difficult to keep up with every book, essay, or documentary on this bottomless subject. Draculas, Vampires, and Other Undead Forms takes a useful step back from the standard obsession revolving around Bram Stoker and his maddeningly problematic text, however influential it is. I hope you will enjoy this unique trans/cultural exploration of Transylvania as much as I have. Transylvania, of course, means “across the forest,” and this volume does much to let us deeply examine the forest, not just a single tree. Acknowledgments We owe a considerable debt of gratitude to all contributors to this book for their infinite patience, willingness, and encouragement. We would also like to extend our gratitude to several dedicated people—particularly Stephen Ryan at Scarecrow Press for his editorial guidance, Jessica McCleary and others at Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group for their editorial assistance, and our indexer, Jennifer Rushing-Schurr—without whom this collection could not have been brought to completion. Kay would like to thank her family, who has always been supportive of her numerous pursuits; John J. Stuhr, James Brummer, and Raymond Fleming, for their mentorship and collegiality across the years; and Jerry Rivera, for his love and faithful devotion. John would like to personally thank David J. Skal, for keeping an old dream alive; and Tim, for putting up with endless nights of editing. We would also like to thank and commend the following graduate students at Louisiana State University, whose copyediting skills and precision are matched only by their kindness (listed alphabetically): Andrew Banecker, Helana Brigman, Kevin Casper, Mel Coyle, Laura Keigan, Laura Marks, Kris Mecholsky, Anna Nelson, and Conor Picken. This collection has also benefited greatly from the generosity of the following (in no particular order): Boum Productions Ltd. and Andy Starke at Mondo Macabro; the Internet Movie Database (IMDb); PhotoFest; James Clatterbaugh at Monsters from the Vault; McFarland & Company, Inc., and Andrew Hock-Soon Ng and Jimmie E. Cain; Scarecrow Press and Donald Glut; the Chicago Sun-Times and Roger Ebert; Creaig A.Dunton at the Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture; Fairleigh Dickinson University Press; and Julien Yoseloff at Associated University Presses. Copyright in the illustrations is the property of the production or distribution companies concerned. vii Introduction: Documenting Dracula and Global Identities in Film, Literature, and Anime John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart We all know Dracula, or think we do, but . . . there are many Draculas—and still more vampires who refuse to be Dracula or to play him. . . . [V]ampires are easy to stereotype, but it is their variety that makes them survivors.1 P rompting this book are two things: First is the complex and highly porous framework that is Dracula’s, one that has accommodated an intricate web of interrelationships with historical, cultural, and literary counterparts since its inception. Most recognizable among Dracula’s offspring is a conventional body of cinematic works by studios like Universal (1930s–1940s, 1979, 2004) and Hammer (1950s–1970s), and more recently, Columbia (1992) and Dimension (2000). Partially illuminating, partially distorting, partly educating, partly stereotyping, this “mainstream” body of cinematic work includes horror/docudramas like Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992), for example, that blur the boundaries separating history from fiction. In addition are the earlier Hammer narratives like Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972) and Dracula (1958, Horror of Dracula [US title]), whose use of color and overtly sexual overtones are juxtaposed with the social ills and hysterias of the time to project the new symbolic and psychological other embodied by Christopher Lee as the Count. And even earlier are the black and white narratives by, among others, Universal, with films like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein (1948), Dracula’s Daughter (1936), and Dracula (1931). The prototypical use of symbolic fear, shadow (mise-en-scène), gender inversion, and genre hybridization inaugurated by these early black and white narratives, which help to found Dracula’s parentage in cinema, is essential for building our earliest conceptualization of “Dracula/ness” and entrenching Dracula’s popularity in global markets. But it’s not until Dracula goes into the ix x John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart public domain in the early 1960s that we really begin to understand just how entrenched Dracula had become in cultures outside of England and America; it is also here that Dracula’s transformation into a “cultural body” and performance space (wherein ideological tensions swell and contract) becomes realized. Foreign markets and nonmajor production studios begin to outproduce “mainstream” cinematic depictions of Dracula by a ratio of at least 3:1 over the next thirty years, literally affording him an almost ravenous multiplicity in markets outside of England and America, in venues besides film, and in genres beyond conventional horror.2 Second, it is this significantly larger, yet predominantly underappreciated (and less explored) body of cinematic work—again mainly fiction—that precipitates the bulk of the anthology proposed here. Little known, this body of cinematic work by mostly non-Universal, non-Hammer, and nonmajor American production companies is in dire need of discovery, cataloging, and critical commentary. These films remain mostly obscure as a result of their having little circulation and exposure in countries dominated by major production companies, and yet these films attest to Dracula’s tendency to transcend cultural, historical, and geographical boundaries. Furthermore, an intersectional analysis of not only gender, media (i.e., TV products and anime), and ideological tensioning, but also race and nationality (i.e., East-West, Dracula’s “cross-cultural fertilisation” [Ng’s term]) is instructive in understanding the complexity Dracula embodies outside of the conventional strain of films and analyses with which the vampire is typically envisaged in Western imaginary. Clearly, there stands a greater need to address this gap in current scholarship on Dracula and vampire films than any other. Questions about what it means to be Dracula, or a Dracula-type character, are increasingly germane to the dominant representations solidified by Universal and Hammer. Thus, the reach of this collection of essays is far ranging and varied, prompting us to examine the various theoretical frames and cultures that may be useful in analyzing Dracula’s global impact. However, while this anthology seeks to investigate and explore the impulse by which global communities continue to reinvent predominantly Dracula figures in film, it is also concerned with non-Dracula (i.e., pseudo) figures, culturally specific vampires, and various other vampire-type creatures (or hybrid undead creatures) as well, who, at times, may be better suited than Dracula to confront oppression or repression, or to embody social ills and taboos, as Dracula has done in various parts of the world at various times. Thus, theoretical analyses of the trans/national generation of Dracula’s cinematic offspring largely represent the focus of this collection of essays, but not completely. These essays examine Dracula films and the ways in which Dracula’s movement across borders of nationality, sexuality, ethnicity, gender, and film genre Introduction xi since the 1920s has engendered conflicting conceptualizations about the formation of the “other,” identity, and ideology that oscillate between conservative and liberal spheres of normalcy. Essays in this anthology utilize singlefilm, multifilm, literary, period-based, and geographically based analyses. With the focus of this book targeting predominantly Dracula and Draculatype characters, and to a somewhat lesser degree culturally specific vampires (or hybrid undead creatures), in film, anime, and literature from predominantly non-Anglo markets, this anthology offers perspectives that seek to ground, again, mainly Dracula depictions and experiences within a larger political, historical, and cultural framework. It seeks to identify how different ethnic groups and nationalities represent themselves and their distinct movements across borders in the Dracula cinema myth. Chapters may focus on isolating new developing tendencies toward trans/national modes of cultural production, or may instead excavate and trace past tendencies from older depictions. Chapters dealing with various thematic threads about Dracula research (e.g., the continuum between “fact” and “fiction” in Dracula visualizations; how gender, class, race, and sexuality are integral parts of the process of documenting the evolution of Dracula through film and other visual media; the less discussed aspects of the subgenre, such as representations of homosexuality or lesbianism, and of gender-specific violence), along with selected topics that examine variations of the Dracula cinema myth and vampirism, are crucial to giving this anthology its comprehensiveness. In specific, we intentionally sought chapters from both established and burgeoning scholars, who reside not only in the United States, but also in England, Canada, Spain, Ireland, Malaysia, and Australia, and whose analyses extend beyond commonly anthologized national borders like England and the United States. In addition to these conventional areas, this body of work also includes—in larger part—Slovakia, Europe, Germany, China, Japan, Pakistan, and Malaysia. TACKLING RACE, GENDER, AND MODES OF NARRATION IN AMERICA In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Victor recounts: It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain xii John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart pattered dismally against the panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, when, by the glimmer of the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs.3 It is a peculiar thing that we should liken a collection of essays on global depictions of Dracula to Frankenstein’s Monster. After all, Dracula is, or once was, human, whereas Frankenstein’s Monster is merely the sum of many human parts, his birth having parthenogenic origins (i.e., “male self-birthing”). (Dracula, at least, had a mother and came from a biological womb, as opposed to an artificial womb.) The story of the birthing of Frankenstein’s Monster, in many ways, is about our hopes and anxieties about the brave new worlds science can potentially make possible. In contrast, the narrative of Dracula seems its converse: it is about the primordial, dark matter that resists the rationalism of science—the “old magic” that science, as the “new magic,” cannot completely counter, as the eternal resurrections of Dracula attest, despite Van Helsing’s numerous stakings. But are Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula’s global progeny (examined holistically) really that different from one another? On the one hand, Frankenstein’s Monster is an amalgam of many parts. But on the other hand, Dracula has engendered and is engendered by many subspecies and subparts of himself all over the world, and his flexibility has played host to an entourage of geographies, divergent beliefs and religions, and culturally specific vampire(-types), like the Malaysian pontianak (always female) or the Chinese jiangshi (also chiang-shih, goeng si, or kiang shi, Stein notes). The following chapters engage the challenging ways in which global communities have accommodated Dracula and vampire configurations through their increasingly commercialized cultures. Individually, these chapters chronicle isolated moments in Dracula’s and the vampire’s filmography. However, the hybridization of these figures illuminates an ongoing cultural negotiation, wherein Dracula’s body is transformed into a sort of global community. Our comparison between Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula’s body as “global community” is consistent with Jeffrey Cohen’s postulation that “The Monstrous body is pure culture.”4 Nevertheless, the stitching and assembling we do here with Dracula’s body of films is ugly, bloody work that renders coherence only when all the pieces are together. Like Europe and Asia, America too has seen no shortage of variations on Stoker’s text or his infinitely porous aristocratic vampire. In part I, “Tackling Race, Gender, and Modes of Narration in America,” six essays seek to address the ways in which issues of gender, race, and narration have converged, hybridized, and complicated one another in American Dracula and vampire Introduction xiii narratives. Ambivalences surrounding narration and profit-driven serialization are particularly germane to Dracula’s earliest conceptualization in American cinema. We therefore begin this section with an essay by Gary D. Rhodes, an established Bela Lugosi scholar. Rhodes’s “Manly P. Hall, Dracula (1931), and the Complexities of the Classic Horror Film Sequel” explores a previously unmentioned film treatment for a Dracula (1931) sequel written in the late 1930s by Bela Lugosi’s friend Manly P. Hall. Hall’s “character names and actions,” Rhodes points out, “are an obvious variation on those created by Bram Stoker, and initially they seem to be the expected conclusion to a Hollywood vampire movie.” Instead, they describe the opening scene in Hall’s treatment; thus, the familiar chapel sequence that concludes Dracula (1931) is, in effect, a beginning, rather than an ending. Hall’s proposed sequel to Universal Studios’s Dracula, with Hall’s friend Lugosi in the title role, was a sort of “freelance effort,” Rhodes exclaims, “intended to revive a popular character.” However, by the time Hall had completed his somewhat belated Sequel to Dracula (working title), America’s horror film industry of the sound era (then, still in its infancy) had begun to face problems of its own between “clear narrative resolution,” as Rhodes puts it, that the three-act-structure Classical Hollywood Style demanded, and serialization, which resulting audience consensus and projected ticket sales necessitated. Ultimately, Rhodes brings into observation three distinct approaches to horror film serialization that Hollywood offered in the 1930s, while addressing Hall’s treatment in detail. If it is the narrative constraints of America’s horror film industry of the sound era that frame the first chapter, then it is the political and cultural importance of narration-as-change that inhabits the second. Relying heavily on primary materials, and to some extent on secondary ones, Paul R. Lehman and John Edgar Browning’s chapter, “The Dracula and Blacula (1972) Cultural Revolution,” offers an interesting reappraisal of AIP’s Blacula (1972) and Scream, Blacula, Scream (1973), arguing that, unlike the common variety of campy, self-parodying blaxploitation films by which scholars typically generalize films of this era, the Blaculas offer much more, in that they can be productively read against the backdrop of the 1970s cultural and civil rights movements, which “began to weigh in on the legitimacy of ‘racial’ division in America.” In Lehman and Browning’s view, these films function rhetorically to “alleviate and de-legitimize some of the ethnic biases ingrained in the ‘white’ and ‘black’ consciousness of the 1970s” by providing a model to the film industry from which to diminish African Americans’ negative stereotyped images and attitudes about themselves. In the next chapter, continuing the prior chapter’s trajectory of mapping out how the “reel” and “real” worlds of “monstrosity” interact with each other, “The Compulsions of Real/Reel Serial Killers and Vampires: Toward a Gothic xiv John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart Criminology,” Picart and Greek demonstrate the overlap of vampiric themes in serial murder films. The most gripping and recurrent visualizations of the “monstrous” in the media and film lay bare the tensions that underlie the contemporary construction of the “monstrous,” which ranges in the twilit realm where divisions separating fact, fiction, and myth are porous—a gothic mode. The constructions of two monstrous figures in contemporary popular culture—the serial killer and the vampire—blur into each other, and powerfully evoke not only our deepest fears and taboos, but also our most repressed fantasies and desires. Their presence shows how “primordial evil,” using Paul Ricoeur’s phenomenology, becomes recognizable as an essential narrative feature of the dread that “senseless murderers,” like serial killers, seek to inspire, eliciting the same type of response as a vengeful deity. This chapter also tracks a significant change in the depiction of the vampire in more recent literary Gothic popular novels; for example, in Fred Saberhagen’s The Dracula Tape (1975); Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire; and Jody Scott’s I. Vampire (1984)—novels wherein vampires acquire the authorial voice. In crafting their own narratives, such vampires become more sympathetic, more superhumanly human, and much less radically the “other.” However, where this move toward establishing the monstrous other as a site of identification becomes particularly disturbing is with the serial killer, the most compelling monster that dominates the last part of the twentieth century. While sympathy is not precisely the word to describe the response encouraged by serial killer narratives, as Picart and Greek point out in their analysis of fictional serial killer films, there is often nevertheless a certain ambivalence in the representations of modern monsters. In docudramas such as Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986) and Ed Gein (2000), the serial killer as an abused abuser emerges; in horror films such as The Silence of the Lambs (1991) and Immortality (1991), vampiric aristocraticism and Byronic sex appeal become key features of the mythic serial killer. The ongoing fascination with vampires and serial killers, both in the Hollywood film and criminological case studies, points to the emergence of a “Gothic criminology,” with its focus on themes such as blood lust, compulsion, godlike vengeance, and power and domination. Rather than assuming that film is a medium that tells us little about the reality of criminological phenomena, Gothic criminology as envisaged here recognizes the complementarity of academic and aesthetic accounts of deviant behavior. Continuing the examination of the complex ways in which behavior and identity converge (and diverge) in vampire narratives is Lisa Nystrom’s chapter, which examines feminist and masculinist discourses in Dracula. Nystrom’s “Blood, Lust, and the Fe/Male Narrative in Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) and the Novel (1897)” draws parallels between what she terms “Female power” in Introduction xv Francis Ford Coppola’s film version of Stoker’s Dracula and the novel itself. Nystrom problematizes the claim that Stoker’s text is one of patriarchal dominance, arguing instead “that behind the testosterone-fueled exchanges between Dracula’s male protagonists lies a second narrative, which is driven by a presence that is most definitely female.” Critics have argued, Nystrom aptly points out, that Coppola’s film version fails at times to translate “much of Stoker’s original vision from page to screen.” However, Nystrom maintains that Coppola’s film version does, at least, retain much of “Stoker’s individual commentary relating to women and to Female power” and, in fact, reenvisages the novel’s strong female presence, even extending the female subplot in the film. Thematically, Coppola’s film version elevates Female power by “allowing for a more layered and detailed female presence than [the novel originally] permitted,” but at the same time, this power is diluted, Nystrom notes, through the female characters’ association in the film with Dracula; thus, the female presence in Coppola’s film version is simultaneously liberating and restrictive. Continuing the analysis of gender and vampires in relation to Gothic themes, Justin Everett’s chapter, “The Borg as Vampire in Star Trek: The Next Generation (1987–1994) and Star Trek: First Contact (1996): An Uncanny Reflection,” examines the reworking of vampire and Gothic motifs through the characters of the Borg and the Borg Queen. Developed over a series of Star Trek: TNG episodes and a feature-length film, the foreboding presence of the Borg, Everett points out, forever darkens the “optimistic future” creator Gene Roddenberry envisioned for Star Trek. Through the television incarnations, “the Borg are used to explore the relationship between humanity and machine intelligence, and particularly the themes of individuality, perfection, and the desirability or horror of human/machine interfacing.” However, a largely unexplored aspect of the Borg becomes pronounced in First Contact through their “Gothic journey in the direction of vampirism,” and through their ruler, the Borg Queen, whose “corpse-like pallor[,] ‘royal’ status,” infectious “fanglike appendages,” “endeavor to acquire (i.e., assimilate) property (i.e., worlds) to which she is a foreigner,” and whose “role as a sensuous devourer” afford her Dracula-type qualities. In line with this theme, sometimes vampiric and Dracula-type qualities infectiously propagate with unconventional sex (i.e., nonmale) and gender (i.e., nonmasculine), as in the opposing extreme of inversion when the femme fatale figure (like the Borg Queen) is replaced by the hypermasculinized (i.e., “butch”) lesbian. Though the serial killer might seem to call for the most emphatic reassertion of social norms and the strongest reaffirmation of conservative values, this is, however, rarely the case in fictional narratives,5 at least for male serial killers. As Picart and Greek point out in the next chapter, xvi John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart “When Women Kill: Undead Imagery in the Cinematic Portrait of Aileen Wuornos,” when serial killers are female and lesbian (and poor), it is not the glamorous vampire, but the ambivalently fearful and pitiful creature envisaged by Mary Shelley that becomes the monstrous metaphor, as shown in the fictional and documentary depictions of Aileen Wuornos. Male rogue serial murderers are typically construed as having vampiric qualities and embody the primordial evil that such murderers seek to inspire, assuming the status of a vengeful deity in relation to their victims. However, once a female rogue serial killer (and particularly a lesbian one) becomes the object of the narrative, it is less that of the vampire (which is aligned with the archetype of the male serial killer in popular film) than the Frankensteinian Monster, who becomes the main analogue. The topic of this chapter is focused specifically on depictions of Aileen Wuornos (and in particular Charlize Theron’s interpretation of Wuornos) as a Frankensteinian Monster rather than a vampire or Draculatype figure. Because vampires have a certain glamour about them, this aristocratic glamour is denied female serial killers, in terms of the teratologic mythic imagery given to them. In giving Wuornos the Frankensteinian creature image (an unloved creature in search of love, betrayed by the woman she loved), the film renders her worthy of pity, and not of the kind of “awe” that male serial killers have, in the popular imagination. WORKING THROUGH CHANGE AND XENOPHOBIA IN EUROPE In part II, “Working through Change and Xenophobia in Europe,” four essays address the European geographies with which Dracula and vampires have come to be associated; British fears about the arrival of foreigners; the “horrors” of modernity and decadence on conservative value systems; and the presence of universalism and global hegemony through Dracula. In the first chapter in part II, “Return Ticket to Transylvania: Relations between Historical Reality and Vampire Fiction,” Santiago Lucendo investigates how the vampire is less of a “superstition imported from the ‘East’” than it is “a series of fears and fancies projected over a territory badly or totally unknown.” For many of us, Transylvania is neither a region of modern-day Romania, Lucendo points out, nor is it just Stoker’s setting for the novel, but a location that years of images, literature, cinema, and television have (mis)constructed. Lucendo argues that the geographical settings represented in Dracula and vampire literature “are not themes secondary to the vampire but main ones, and they are the result of many versions and remakes of the same places.” The sig- Introduction xvii nificance of geographical setting in vampire literature “transcends mere location,” Lucendo claims, because landscape, architecture, and maps “affect the image of the monster as much as its actions and its iconographic attributes.” The vampire is a construction that is under continuous development, an assemblage of words, images, and places especially that almost resembles a Frankensteinian creature. From the beginning, Lucendo contends, “the vampire has been a culturally constructed body, reflecting the historical, political and social frameworks surrounding it, and it has served, both racially and geographically, as a space in which the fears and desires of a particular (i.e., dominant, ‘ruling’) culture can be played out.” In a convergent argument, Jimmie Cain’s chapter, “Racism and the Vampire: The Anti-Slavic Premise of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897),” posits that the fascination with foreign landscapes is overshadowed by Victorian anxieties about and contempt for the persons residing there, particularly Eastern European and Russian Jews. Their immigration to England, and the threat of disease and contaminants with which they were associated, “engender[s] a profusion of anti-Semitic literature.” Stoker, according to Cain, incorporates in the villain of Dracula “such accounts of the immigrant Jews crowding the dilapidated and poorly drained slums of London’s East End. The Count’s residence at Carfax, in Purfleet, for instance, is well to the east of downtown London, near the Whitechapel district, the epicenter of the London immigrant community.” It is obvious that Stoker appropriates attributes of the Jewish immigrant in his conception of Dracula, but Cain contends that Stoker’s conceptualization equally “projects anxieties about a much more real and powerful threat to England and Victorian culture in the figure of the monstrous count: the Slavic menace posed by imperial Russia.” In Stoker’s research for Dracula, he consulted a number of works from that period about the geography, peoples, and customs of Eastern Europe that would have provided him with adequate materials for constructing a Slavic, Russian villain. The next chapter, Paul Newland’s “The Grateful Un-Dead: Count Dracula and the Transnational Counterculture in Dracula A.D. 1972 (1972),” moves forward in time and ideals about race. Newland’s chapter considers the ways in which Hammer’s Dracula A.D. 1972 (Christopher Lee’s second to the last installment as Dracula for Hammer) represents “a contemporary world of moral and socio-cultural ambiguity in which the figure of Count Dracula effectively remains on the periphery of events.” Despite the ensuing horror of Dracula’s resurrection in the film through a ceremony held by a countercultural group of young thrill-seeking friends, who at once represent multiple races, classes, and genders but “who seem unable to decide whether to resurrect older un-dead hippy ideals of ‘free love,’ to embrace coeval interests in satanic practices, or to embrace the bourgeois lifestyle of their elders,” Newland argues that the film’s xviii John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart real horror “derives from a playing out of these concerns.” Dracula A.D. 1972 has received very little critical attention, Newland points out, despite the film’s “resonat[ion] with the ruptures occurring across Western popular culture during the late 1960s and early 1970s.” A reappraisal of the film, Newland hopes, may “facilitate a broader understanding of the ways in which a complex array of transnational cultural identities came into conflict during this period, and how and why, at the same time, underground cultural practices were effectively inculcated into mass cultural forms.” Concluding part II is Martina G. Lüke’s chapter, “Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) as a Legacy of Romanticism,” which builds upon the Romantic literary and artistic traditions. Lüke surveys topics and motifs of Romanticism in this remake of F. W. Murnau’s magnum opus, such as conflicts between the individual and society, sanity and insanity, love and death, dreams and reality, as well as the film’s use of setting and music. Romanticism’s fascination with and repulsion by the “exotic” visually intersects here with the “foreign” figure of Dracula, who is not only geographically but physically “other” (e.g., long fingernails, pale skin color, and rat-like fangs). Often, however, the Romantics saw the “savage” as “purer” in some ways, or more “genuine.” A central feature of this adaptation by Werner Herzog can be seen in Dracula’s unconventional stylization. Klaus Kinski’s portrayal of Dracula in the film is neither the monster driven by bloodlust (e.g., in movies such as Stephen Norrington’s Blade [1998] or Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn [1996]) nor the elegantly suave nobleman Lugosi and Lee personify, nor is Kinski’s portrayal the phallic (i.e., “stiff ”), “mechanical nightmare” of Murnau’s post-WWI version. Instead, Herzog’s remake reveals a deeply disturbed Dracula who “longs for redemption. He is the lonely outsider who would love to join the others” but who is instead damned to harm others and live forever (or as Dracula [Kinski] sees it, “to be unable to grow old [and die]”). Herzog’s appropriation of Romantic themes foregrounds emotions and fantasies, Lüke writes, that unite global identities, thus highlighting the film’s relevance in a globalized community of Draculas. Of course, over time there have been different strains of Romanticism, and many of them have had a national temper; some are lighter, and others, darker. IMPERIALISM, HYBRIDITY, AND CROSS-CULTURAL FERTILIZATION IN ASIA The final six essays in this anthology make up part III, “Imperialism, Hybridity, and Cross-Cultural Fertilization in Asia.” Demons, ghosts, and cul- Introduction xix turally specific vampires more ancient than their American and European cousins have long haunted the literatures and folktales of Asia. Andrew Hock-Soon Ng’s chapter, “‘Death and the Maiden’: The Pontianak as Excess in Malay Popular Culture,” examines perhaps the most fearsome of Malay folkloric creatures, the pontianak, one of the vampire’s more cryptic and less familiar in-laws. The pontianak, a strictly female vampiric creature, is characterized by “ear-piercing shrieks, overflowing hair, and a penchant for the blood of children.” However, even though we attribute the term vampire to the pontianak, Ng exclaims, her Western nuances shy considerably in comparison to her roots in Malay folklore and popular culture, specifically through film. Various films during the 1950s–1960s in Malaysia (and again in 2004) helped to popularize the pontianak “as a hybrid creature that blends Eastern and Western vampiric characteristics.” However, these cinematic representations have confusingly blurred and multiplied “the pontianak’s signifiers to the point that it is no longer clear where popular culture ends and traditional belief begins.” Ng highlights, among other things, the pontianak’s ambiguous configuration, and how popular culture has reconstituted folklore for mass consumption. Ng also looks at the manner in which “cross-cultural fertilisation (East-West) has come to inform the construction of the pontianak,” particularly in one of Malaysia’s more recent films Pontianak Harum Sundal Malam (Pontianak of the Tuber Rose [2004]) by Shuhaimi Baba, which Ng examines in depth. Continuing the examination of “local” vampires, Sean Moreland and Summer Pervez’s chapter, “Becoming-Death: The Lollywood Gothic of Khwaja Sarfraz’s Zinda Laash (Dracula in Pakistan [US title], 1967),” examines the interesting phenomenon of a culturally specific “Dracula,” a rarity among films. Like Ng’s pontianak, Moreland and Pervez’s “local” vampire (i.e., Dracula) construction is obviously a transplantation of a Western model to Pakistan. However, instead of the “racially and linguistically coded outsider” we get with Dracula, the Dracula figure in Zinda Laash, Professor Tabani, “is recognizably a South Asian domestic, but one who bears stigma suggestive of a deleterious Western influence.” Professor Tabani, Moreland and Pervez write, is “the product of an invasion which has already long since occurred.” The actor who plays the professor stylistically mirrors (perhaps through a glass darkly) both Lugosi and Lee, a method that, combined with Tabani’s attire (iconic of the Western Draculas) and his hunger for knowledge and power in place of the cultural and religious mores he has outright rejected, “renders him a striking embodiment of anxieties surrounding the longterm effects of British colonial control, Western cultural influence, and unchecked technological change.” Moreland and Pervez assert that in decontextualizing Stoker’s narrative away from Orientalist xenophobia, Zinda Laash xx John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart simultaneously reterritorializes the Dracula text in a manner that foregrounds the film’s “ambiguous status as an uneasy hybridization of Western cinematic influence and Pakistani cultural identity, which is often perceived as threatened not just by the encroachments of Western culture per se,” but by Bollywood’s thriving industry in nearby India. The next chapter, Dale Hudson’s “Modernity as Crisis: Goeng Si and Vampires in Hong Kong Cinema,” also draws upon postcolonialism to examine its vampires. Ricky Lau Koon-wai’s Goeng si sin sang (aka Mr. Vampire [Hong Kong: English title], 1985) inaugurated a profitable cycle of goeng si (“stiff corpse”) films that relied on conventions from martial arts, comedy, and horror from major commercial film industries like Hong Kong, Hollywood, Japan, Britain, and others. Generally known in the Anglophone world as a “Chinese hopping vampire,” the goeng si, Hudson notes, is a trans/cultural figure that ushered in a new attraction for Hong Kong cinema that translated well into a regionally, if not globally, exportable commodity. However, with the cycle’s exhaustion by the late 1980s, a number of films emerged that placed the goeng si in dialogue, and sometimes in debate, Hudson exclaims, with European/Hollywood Dracula-type vampires. Hudson’s chapter attempts to situate a selection of such films against both Hong Kong’s ensuing crisis of modernity that followed its transition after 150 years as a Crown Colony to the future that awaited it as a Special Administrative Region of the People’s Republic of China, and against post–Cold War globalization. Ripe with “‘crisis emotions’ of nostalgia, fear, and despair as discussion about the handover commenced, and ‘crisis bodies’” gave to Hong Kong a “mutable cultural space that has been subjected to rapid transformations.” Also tapping into postwar(s) ambivalences about power, rule, and the impact of the West on the Far East is Wayne Stein’s chapter, “Enter the Dracula: The Silent Screams and Cultural Crossroads of Japanese and Hong Kong Cinema.” Stein problematizes the ability of very politicized Western narratives and figures, like Dracula and vampires, for example, to translate effectively in lands that share very different belief and value systems. More importantly, Stein adds, this mistranslation raises questions about these texts and figures that a purely Western politics, one that “defines normative behavior in terms of its own moral and religious conventions,” cannot answer. In specific, “horror as a genre presents a strong case in point where cultural transparencies can fail.” With only enough time to examine a short survey of Eastern films and animes that offer supporting examples of cultural mistranslation and failed attempts at relocating Westernized Dracula and vampire narratives onto Eastern shores, Stein discusses what, he terms, the lack of moral authenticity presents in Western-Eastern narratives. Such incommensurabilities emerge, for example, when Judeo-Christian religious underpinnings are pit- Introduction xxi ted against the metaphysics of Buddhism and Confucianism, as well as the more local traditions of Taoism (Hong Kong) and Shintoism ( Japanese). As in the case of our next chapter, Nicholas Schlegel’s “Identity Crisis: Imperialist Vampires in Japan?” Westernized Dracula and vampire narratives are sometimes less the product of cultural mistranslation and more projections of concerns about identity and modernity, and fears of foreign rule and occupation. Schlegel explores a trio of Japanese-financed, produced, directed, and distributed films commonly referred to as the Toho Dracula Trilogy: Legacy of Dracula (Yûreiyashiki no kyôfu: Chi o suu ningyô [ Japanese title], 1970), Lake of Dracula (Noroi no yakata: Chi o sû me [ Japanese title], 1971) and Evil of Dracula (Chi o suu bara [ Japanese title], 1974). Directed by Michio Yamamoto and written by Ei Ogawa, Hiroshi Nagano, and Masaru Takesue, these three vampire films draw from a Western Gothic aesthetic that has incited the authors “to structure a formal inquiry into the raison d’être behind their inception and creation.” These films uncover simultaneously a budding fascination with the West and a deep anxiety toward it, a dynamic that allows for Japanese national identity to manifest itself in the subtext of these films. However, key to locating this identity, Schlegel argues, is “defining what Japanese identity is and what it is not.” To close this corpus, Wayne Stein and John Edgar Browning’s chapter, “The Western Eastern: Decoding Hybridity and CyberZen Goth(ic) in Vampire Hunter D (1985),” takes us to the mid-1980s using a hybrid text that amalgamates various genres like action, horror, fantasy, sci-fi, and Western. Conceived in the tradition of the American frontier Gothic, the Japanese anime Vampire Hunter D (Bampaia hantâ D, 1985) grapples with themes previously examined in this section: the cultural mistranslation of East-West that we saw in the Stein chapter, and the Japanese national identity and the ways in which it is manifested through Japan’s fascination with and anxiety toward the West that we see in the Schlegel chapter. In this final chapter by Stein and Browning, we encounter a more effective juxtaposition of East-West cultural and religious identity, as Vampire Hunter D “uncovers or extends our understanding of a Gothic that is at once American frontier-defined and also uniquely Japanese” while at the same time “mak[ing] lucid the (inter-)complexities of what we call Japanicity.” In doing so, Stein and Browning help to identify a new mode of spirituality that defines what they call “CyberZen Gothic,” a construction that blends Eastern and Western Gothic/ness and transcends convention, identity, “as well as the forces of hybridity that surface from such a union.” The rich spectrum of these essays evoke how relationships connecting “fact” and “fiction,” sex and gender, Eastern and Western cultural exchange, are not easily demarcated relations, and that the construction of Dracula/ness xxii John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart lies uneasily across apparently simplistic binaries—such as the binary between Frankenstein’s Monster and Dracula. Ultimately, both are myths of origins (births) and immortality (death-rebirths). Both vampires and other undead creatures reveal and conceal our anxieties and hopes concerning possible utopic-dystopic new worlds, in their own culturally specific and historically grounded ways. These teratological accounts plot each culture’s attempts to define what is “the same” or “normal” and what is “other” or “monstrous.” Though rhetorical, literary, and film critics often cannot point to clear causal effects, the use of these various methodologies offers help in tracing the ways in which cultures and nationalities appropriate, mold, and reshape porous, malleable figures like Dracula and the vampire. NOTES 1. Nina Auerbach, “Introduction,” Our Vampires, Ourselves (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1. 2. John Edgar Browning and Caroline Joan (Kay) Picart, The Dracula Film, Comic Book, and Game Sourcebook ( Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, forthcoming). 3. Mary Shelley, Frankenstein: The 1818 Text, Contexts, Nineteenth-Century Responses, Modern Criticism. A Norton Critical Edition, ed. J. Paul Hunter (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1996), 34. 4. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” in Monster Theory: Reading Culture, ed. Jeffrey J. Cohen (London and Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), 4. 5. David Punter and Glennis Byron, The Gothic (Oxford, UK: Wiley-Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 265.