With the upcoming release of the latest Twilight movie and the popularity of at least two current TV series dedicated to vampires, it would seem that interest in the horror genre is peaking.
However, a new edition of an Indiana University professor’s book, The Living and the Undead: Slaying Vampires and Exterminating Zombies (University of Illinois Press), argues that each generation has reshaped the stories of vampires and other undead creatures to fit new times.
Author Gregory A. Waller, professor and chair of the IU Department of Communication and Culture, says that the changing meaning and scope of the violent confrontation between the living and the undead has often been at the heart of an ongoing story.
Waller examined a wide range of novels, stories, plays, films and TV movies, including
- Bram Stoker’s 1897 book Dracula;
- Film adaptations of Stoker’s novel;
- F. W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film Nosferatu;
- Richard Matheson’s 1954 novel I Am Legend;
- Stephen King’s 1975 book Salem’s Lot;
- Werner Herzog’s 1979 film Nosferatu the Vampyre; and
- George Romero’s movies
The new edition of The Living and the Undead: Slaying Vampires and Exterminating Zombies features a new preface in which Waller positions his analysis in relation to the explosion of vampire and zombie films, fiction, and criticism in the past 25 years.
The Twilight Saga is so Yesterday
Representations of vampires in the 1930s during the Depression often dramatized a threat on the modern world from an older civilization. Other versions, such as depicted in Richard Matheson’s 1954 book I Am Legend (not the one with Wil Smith) clearly are about genocide and only could have been written after World War II. Night of the Living Dead arguably is an allegorizes American society during the Vietnam War.
Waller said that the vampire legend has migrated successfully from one form of media to another through its history — from written fiction to theatrical plays to the screen to comic books and graphic novels to TV series and back to motion pictures. Waller focuses on how stories about vampires and zombies also are about the living beings in those stories — “especially the ones who get to kill the undead in the name of self-defense and survival.” The many books, plays, movies speak to our questions about violence, how we undertake it and who benefits from it and who pays the price.
“It is a story where the heroic act, in the older versions at least, was to find a comatose body, get this object that has no other use in the universe, a sharpened stake, and run it through the heart of that creature, who could often at times be a beautiful woman,” he said. “I was fascinated by the fact that my students almost all knew how to kill a vampire — utterly useless knowledge.”
Some of the most recent retellings, such as the Twilight Trilogy of books and movies and the TV programs True Blood, Angel and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, are more ambiguous in terms of heroes and villains — not only reflecting changes in social values, but also reflecting the way commercial media operates today. Because in previous generations vampires were not sex objects or “good guys”; vampires were evil and worth killing.
That’s Not All Folks
The popularity of vampire and zombie characters aren’t waning any time soon. Expect Hollywood to ride the vampire money train for as long as possible. Waller wrote. “Now seriality is key component of contemporary media – this idea that you tell ongoing stories through multiple iterations or even that you plan it as a franchise, which seems to be the case with the Twilight Trilogy.” And keep telling the story until the box office says “stop”.