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As economies and cultures morph due to technoscience, vampire entities also mutate so as to still provoke fear ‒their bodies change, their populations grow and their networks expand; yet the way to annihilate them becomes less obvious. Responding to these modern day changes, Guillermo del Toro and Chuck Hogan’s television series The Strain (2014-2017) uncannily echoes, or perhaps foreshadows, the social realities under an informational, networked, and epidemiological paradigm. The filmmakers here present viewers with hybrid monsters and environments that are highly interconnected and pathogenic, reflecting contemporary social fears regarding failing democracies and global pandemics. Drawing from Guillermo del Toro’s recent television collaborations, this article examines how twenty-first century vampiric bodies comment on a society altered by informational and technoscientific labyrinths. The labyrinths analyzed here, and the bodies hidden within them, are presented as looming threats that may destroy democracies in order to institute a totalitarian regime. Profit-driven institutions and governments, beholden to ominous masters in a more global and interrelated economy, invite malevolent actors who are allowed to dominate, exploit, and kill everyday citizens.

Contemporary cultural media illustrates the vampire as an important symbolic figure in the Brazilian imaginary. For example, in twentieth and twenty-first century Brazilian fiction, television, and political discourse, vampires have risen from their supposedly European origins as expressions of urban decay, comic excess, and government corruption in Brazil. Beyond these representations, I focus on three contemporary novels in which the vampire also plays a starring role. O vampiro que descobriu o Brasil (1999) by Ivan Jaf, Aventuras do vampiro de Palmares (2014) by Gerson Lodi-Ribeiro, and Dom Pedro I Vampiro (2015) by Nazarethe Fonseca stand out from other creative reimaginings of the vampire within a Brazilian cultural context. Exploring fiction’s potential for rewriting dominant national narratives, they cast vampires as historical actors in order to protagonize indigenous and black “Others” in Brazilian history. However, at the same time as they rewrite both the nineteenth-century European literary origins of the vampire and the history of Brazil, they also reinscribe the modern myths of racial mixture, or mestiçagem, and cannibalism, or antropofagia, popularized by Gilberto Freyre and Oswald de Andrade, respectively. In this way, the novels exemplify the complex tension between revising and perpetuating cultural stereotypes in fictional retellings of Brazilian history.

Resumen. De la multitud de seres maravillosos que protagonizan las leyendas y cuentos del folclore rumano, sobresalen los strigoi, figuras a medio camino entre la vida y la muerte que regresan al mundo de los vivos con distintos objetivos. Algunos de ellos vuelven para acosar y horrorizar a las víctimas, mientras que otros sirven de ayuda y consuelo para sus familiares. Con el fin de librarse de las maldiciones y penurias infligidas por algunos strigoi, existen mecanismos de defensa y diversos rituales que han de ponerse en práctica en todas las etapas de la vida del hombre, desde el nacimiento hasta el óbito. Abstract. Amongst the variety of wonderful beings with a leading role in the legends and tales of the Romanian folklore, the strigoi stand out. These characters are halfway between life and death, returning to the land of the living with different purposes. Some of them come back to harass and horrify the victims while others give help and comfort their relatives. To get rid of the curses and hardships inflicted by some strigoi, there are defense mechanisms and various rituals that should be put into practice in all the stages of human life, from birth to decease.

Life after People: Zombie Apocalypse and the Structures of the Post-Human Global Imaginary. The paper examines post-humanist representations in Anglo-American film productions from a perspective informed by global and hypermodern cultural theory. It is an enquiry into aspects of dystopian sensibility featuring in global cinema, which are seen as manifest in the prolific zombie genre of the post-apocalyptic strand. It is premised on the assumption that global society is endemically marred by a catastrophic horizon of expectation, whose most congenial form of expression is dystopia, a genre on the rise worldwide, especially productive in Anglo-American cinematic practice. Drawing on global cultural theory, I seek to narrow down the enquiry into dystopian modes and bring the zombie dominant to bear on what I construe as the post-apocalyptic imagination of globality. REZUMAT. Viața după dispariția omului : apocalipsa zombie și structurile imaginarului postuman în era globală. Lucrarea analizează reprezentări postumaniste în producții cinematografice anglo-americane din perspectiva teoriei culturale globale și a hipermodernității. Demersul își propune să trateze aspecte ale sensibilității distopice manifestate în cinematografia globală, aspecte considerate reprezentative pentru filmele zombie din cadrul genului postapocaliptic. Premisa lucrării este dată de teza conform căreia societatea globală este caracterizată de un orizont de așteptare catastrofic, al cărei forme predilecte de expresie este distopia, un gen care înregistrează, în general, o creștere spectaculoasă pe glob și, în special, în cinematografia anglo-americană. Demersul este fundamentat de o grilă teoretică ancorată în teoria globală și vizează fenomenul zombie perceput ca o dominantă a imaginarului postapocaliptic. Cuvinte cheie: postumanism; distopie; spirit apocaliptic; cinema; dezordine globală; vampir; zombie; teorie globală; hipermodernitate; disjuncție.

The present paper explores the connections between the radical sexual behavior of the main female characters in the TV show Lost Girl and Octavia Butler’s novel Fledgling, Bo and Shori respectively. This analysis works from a queer-ecological feminist perspective that understands that science ction as a genre presents rich opportunities for the development of feminist-queer sexual identities in female characters that in turn construct anti-patriarchal queer family structures that can truly transform the world. Este artículo explora las conexiones entre el comportamiento sexual radical de los personajes femeninos principales del programa de televisión Lost Girl y la novela de Octavia Butler, Fledgling, Bo y Shori respectivamente. El presente análisis trabaja desde una perspectiva feminista queer-ecológica, la cual entiende que el género literario de ciencia cción presenta enormes oportunidades para el desarrollo de identidades queer feministas que construyen a su vez estructuras familiares queer antipa-triarcales que pueden verdaderamente transformar el mundo.