Description
BLOOD SUCKERS: VAMPIRES IN FILM AND ART
This course deals with the evolution of the vampire in art and film, after vampire folklore was spawned in the mid- 1700’s in the Serbian countryside. The Vampire is at the center of many crucial mythologies and gender constructions. This undead creature exists on the vital essence of other living creatures. The vampire has become a flexible symbol for: colonialism and/or nationalism; for gender relations/sexuality; for sexual repression; for perversion or dissidence; for class relations; for the embodiment of aristocracy; for the embodiment of the bloodsucking process of capitalism; for exploitative human relationships. And, since the advent of the first silents (Nosferatu, 1922), the vampire has been a mainstay of film monsters. This course will puzzle out this topos--the rich and tangled role of the vampire, male and female, in the history of film and how the vampire derives from and builds on cultural norms of gender in popular cultur