Search

One of the earliest refutations of the Visum et Repertum (1732) by Johann Flückinger was from Johann Wilhelm Nöbling, a young student of philosophy and theology at the University of Jena, who attacked the findings from a position of scientific scepticism enshrouded with Lutheran theology in his thesis Concerning the Blood-Sucking Corpses of those so-called Vampires or People-Suckers. While he is best remembered for first proposing the incubus or nightmare of sleep paralysis as being the real cause of the superstition, his major contribution was theological, concerning the relation between body and soul. And yet while Nöbling provides a rigorous, scripture-based denial of vampirism, his framework necessarily accommodates contemporary medical theory, demonstrating both the adaptation of theology to science and the extent to which pneumatology still inhered in scientific enquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since 1947 and Siegfried Kracauer's seminal From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Weimar Film Studies has been dominated by discussions on the representation of power, which has only recently begun to fall away. This article breaks away from this tradition and contributes to a new range of approaches to Weimar cinema, which centre upon figures belonging to a group that has largely been excluded from the existing narrative: 'the Jew'. Though Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau's Nosferatu (1922) does not contain any characters explicitly identified as Jewish, I consider how the titular character is imbued with antisemitic tropes and thus steps into a similar role as enemy of mainstream German society. This article thus explores the notion of antisemitism as a socially generated projection formulated in response to the social experience of modernity, projected onto a representative of 'Jewishness' as the ultimate enemy of the national community. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The experimental audiovisual essay “Vampirizing with AI, Resignifying Images” offers a sequence of AI-generated reimaginings of classic film clips to reveal the aesthetics of image-to-image or video-to-video translation AIs. It proposes the vampire as a both an idée fixe for its AI tools and as a controlling metaphor for the nature of AI training – an appropriation or “sucking” of the creative energy in countless humans’ art.

There is a long tradition of aligning vampires with media, dating back to Dracula’s defeat by humans using modern communication technologies. This article examines an earlier, more elemental vampire in J.R. Planché’s 1820 stage melodrama The Vampire. Planché’s play was staged during a period when the definition of media was shifting from the natural elements toward human communication technologies. Building on John Durham Peters’ expanded notion of media as encompassing bodies and environments as well as minds and communication technologies, this article reads Planché’s nonhuman characters – spirits of the air and water and a vampire who disappears into the stage – as somewhere between characters and scenery. By showing how these nonhuman characters align with the melodrama’s pictorial renderings of environment in its ‘vision’ scene, the article suggests how the elemental both orders and complicates modes of signification grounded in the social world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, vision scenes became less elemental and more psychological in later melodramas such as David Leopold Lewis’s The Bells (1871). The Vampire’s vision scene thus suggests the elemental underpinnings of later melodramatic conventions for representing inner life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this text is to briefly determine certain apotropaic mechanisms directed against vampirization in the Balkans. From the wide corpus of such practices, the archaeological findings are singled out, through which one can gain an insight into how people protected themselves from the dangerous dead in a certain historical period; and with the help of ethnological and folklore literature followed by archival materials, plants, animals and rituals are contextualized as central elements in terms of prevention and protection from the folklore vampire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the practice of using the famous oboe theme Scéne, Moderato from Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake in horror films. A long-forgotten arrangement of it, found in the New York Public Library, helps to trace the origins of this practice in silent film and to document the beginning of the association between the Swan theme and vampires, specifically. The relationship between the two has proven to be a strong one and, crossing over from silent to sound film, has continued for almost a hundred years, from the iconic Dracula (1931) to the recent Abigail (2024). Analysis of the musical features of the Moderato and the individual narrative elements of Tchaikovsky's ballet shows that its use in horror films is not as strange as it might first seem and sound, but rather has an intrinsic rationale. If it was an accidental discovery of the filmmakers, it has nonetheless proven successful. Even though Tchaikovsky did not directly refer to the topos of horror in this movement, the generalized and indirect features appeared to be sufficient to combine it with the images of vampires on the screen to form an audiovisual metaphor of horror. For those audio-viewers who know this music first through ballet or, conversely, who have drawn their initial experiences from film, the curious fusion of the Swan theme and eerie cinematic scenes almost inevitably entails intertextual and intergenre crossovers. Ultimately, the case study of Swan Lake in horror film enriches our notions of this music as such and its expressive potential on the screen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When Mina first meets Van Helsing in Bram Stoker's Dracula, she plays a trick on him by giving him the shorthand version of her Whitby diary, which she anticipates he will not be able to read. This essay looks at the central positioning of Mina's practical joke as an opportunity to consider how Stoker represents women's capacity to be funny through Lucy, Mina, and Mrs. Bilder. the zookeeper's wife. The three major theories of humor-superiority, relief, and incongruity, along with nineteenth-century discussions of women and comedy-help clarify how sexualizing women's laughter through vampirism threatens conventional Victorian sensibilities and masculinity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary vampire story is an apt place to explore immortality, the afterlife and other dimensions in general. Additionally, there are numerous parallels between the vampire story and the Christian story. The vampire's 'maker', for example, can be compared to God, also known as 'maker', and a vampire's immortality offers a relevant parallel to the Christian idea of immortality in the afterlife. The CW network series The Vampire Diaries (2009–17) houses various narratives offering such comparisons, especially with regards to alternative dimensions ('worlds') that can potentially be construed as commentary on the afterlife. Interestingly, though, I believe that the most compelling narrative in this regard involves the witch Bonnie Bennett and not an actual vampire. Also interestingly, Bonnie often seems to hold more power than the vampires, even though she is not necessarily immortal (she is, however, considered a supernatural being). She perpetually saves her friends throughout the series, regularly willing to sacrifice her life for theirs and actually dies in Season 4 in effort to bring Jeremy Gilbert back to life. She embodies the New Testament verse in the book of John that states, '[g]reater love has no one than this: to lay down one's life for one's friends'. Despite that she is dead, she lives in a concurrent dimension, and only Jeremy is aware of her and can hear her. She is with him in the present. I posit that the storyline pertaining to Bonnie's character and her death in Seasons 4 and 5 in particular offers a possible and even compelling read on the biblical description of heaven and the afterlife – and God on the whole – per Judeo-Christian scripture and scriptural interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The contemporary understanding of the vampire trope is not solely a literary construct but also the outcome of its theatrical adaptations, often following closely after the publication of the seminal works that shaped the myth. Despite the occasional reading of vampires as tragic figures, works featuring these creatures have yet to be staged as tragedies, translating instead to melodramas and musicals. This article examines theatrical renditions of John Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1819), Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897), and Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and The Vampire Lestat (1985), demonstrating that although these literary works offer varying interpretations of the vampire trope, they consistently diverge from the tragic form once thet are adapted for the stage. At the same time, vampires represent a world of post-tragic plots, where tragedy is impossible since they live too long after the tragic event had already occurred. Our theory is that the staging of vampire narratives coincides with historical contexts in which audiences experience disillusionment with tragedy’s promise of catharsis, opting instead to look to other dramatic formulas for a reflection of their times. While tragedies often depict the protagonist’s downfall due to an internal fatal flaw, vampire melodramas and musicals, in most cases, explore the collective trauma caused by external flaws, thus resonating more with the social and cultural milieu of their times. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Marx's analysis of labor exploitation in "The Working Day," highlighting themes such as the dehumanizing conditions faced by workers, and symbolic use of colors like black, white, blue, and red. Topics include Marx's critique of capitalist exploitation through vivid descriptions of worker suffering, his strategic use of historical reports to expose societal injustices, and his metaphorical depiction of capitalists as vampires sucking the lifeblood of the working class.

The purpose of this essay is to investigate the way in which gothic topoi intertwine with the background of folk and fairy tales in Ní Dhuibhne's fiction, in terms of characters, setting, motifs, situations and atmosphere. Recognising the presence of gothic tropes can highlight the dynamic intersections of genres, and sharpen the reading of Ní Dhuibhne's short stories. In her very personal and unique approach to fiction, Éilís Ní Dhuibhne intertextually reworks traditional stories and juxtaposes them to their modern counterparts, thus expanding a sort of 'palimpsestic memory' that Maria Tatar identifies in the continuous rewriting of fairy tales. And the fairy tale's instability as a genre has its counterpart in the gothic, a restless form and an unstable genre, whose influence can be seen in many of Ní Dhuibhne's narrative and stylistic strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Universities and management consultants are locked in a danse macabre. We turn to the vampire genre to elaborate on the relationship of consulting companies to the university sector, focusing on the University of Alberta in Canada and Monash University in Australia. We are academics with long experience of the consequences of change management and the employment of consultants in universities. Deb is sufficiently "long in the tooth" that her entire career spans the period of heightened government and private sector intervention in Australian universities that began in the late 1980s and more recently she has had the experience of watching this process occur again, at speed, in Canada. Ben is a representative of the National Tertiary Education Union at Australia's largest university. He is also an experienced journalist who has reported on Australian higher education and public policy for more than two decades. The essay argues that consultants and universities are engaged in a mutually dependent relationship designed to sustain each other at the expense of the public. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]