The Vampire Film: From Nosferatu to Twilight
2014; Liverpool University Press; Volume: 55; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2047-7708
Autores Tópico(s)Cinema and Media Studies
ResumoAll Things Vampire. Alain Silver and James Ursini. The Vampire Film: From Nosferatu to Twilight. 4th ed. Milwaukee, WI: Limelight Editions, 2010. 488 pp. ISBN 9780879103804. $29.99. pbk.Reviewed by Michael J. KleinAmerica is fascinated with vampires. The only other undead creature giving the vampire a run for its money is the zombie, which is almost as entrenched in our culture as the bloodsucker. Whereas the zombie shambles forth as a member of a group of beings comprised of mindless dead flesh, however, the vampire glides, usually by itself, to seduce its victim rather than just devour it. Everywhere you look, vampires have risen (no pun intended) to be an important part of the popular culture. They're on TV with Dark Shadows, Fluffy, and True Blood; they're on movie screens in Blade (1998), From Dawn to Dusk (1996), and Twilight (2008). And this fascination is not a new one: vampires have been all the rage for the better part of a century.It's no wonder, then, that Alain Silver and James Ursini have released a fourth edition of their encyclopedic compilation, The Vampire Film. The 2010 release is the first update in almost 15 years. Like its predecessors, the book is an amalgam of critical examinations (sometimes scholarly) of the vampire genre in film and on TV, as well as a compendium of photos and bibliographic information from vampire films. As such, the book treads a fine line between scholarly and pop worlds, appealing to both camps as a resource for specific tastes.Since its first publication in 1976, the book has gone through three subsequent editions, adding more text and images, and illustrating more recent and timely examples of the genre. However, the format and scope of the book has remained fairly consistent as evidenced by its retention of a sole scholarly chapter (I define scholarly here to mean identifying specific sources). In chapter one, Sources of Lore in Vampire Film, Silver and Ursini argue that the reason vampires and their tales hold such sway over us is because the legends informing these stories appear in almost all cultures of the world. The fear of premature burial and loss of essence through the loss of blood resonate in the tales of the semi-dead rising from the graves to suck blood from the living. Long before Bram Stoker wrote Dracula (1897), Homer included tales of the dead drinking blood in The Odyssey (circa eighth century BC).It is the rest of Silver and Ursini's text that seeks to support this claim. Beginning in chapter two, the authors trace the appearance of the creature in popular media. While Dracula (with black cape and widow's peak) might be what most of us think of when we envision the typical vampire, it is F. W. Murnau's 1922 film Nosferatu that introduced this creature to international audiences. As they have in past editions, the authors choose to treat male and female vampires separately-quite literally-by having separate chapters (two through five) dedicated to each gender. …
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