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The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema ( Jeffrey Weinstock)

2014; Penn State University Press; Volume: 3; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.5325/preternature.3.2.0413

2161-2196

Joshua Coonrod,

Cinema and Media Studies

Jeffrey Weinstock's The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema is a recent edition of Wallflower's Short Cuts series, described on the publisher's website as “a comprehensive list of introductory texts covering the full spectrum of Film Studies, including genres, critical concepts, film histories/movements and film technologies.” Such a description might prepare readers for the general approach the author takes to discussing the vampire film and its tropes. Throughout the text, Weinstock reviews some of the relevant scholarship on vampire cinema (that is, if the term can be used to describe vampire films, an issue Weinstock addresses), mainly offering subtle tweaks to existing ideas plus new readings of a variety of films, as opposed to radically new analyses. Newer readers on the subject will likely see The Vampire Film as a solid introduction to this discourse.Weinstock opens the text with a marshaling of “a handful of governing principles that … hold true for the vast majority of films and underlie the hypnotic hold the vampire has exerted over the Western imagination for over a century” (6). These ideas speak to the lasting popularity of the vampire as cinematic subject matter, and include notions such as the cinematic vampire defying genre, consistently being related to sex, engaging understandings of technology, and acting as a representation of cultural “others” (7–19). He chooses the latter three concepts in particular as lenses for exploring the vampire's enduring appeal, doing in-depth readings of numerous films across cinema history to illustrate the importance of these ideas to vampire cinema. Readers new to this discussion should find his consideration of classic vampire texts such as Dracula, as well as his references to earlier academic writing on vampire films, important to tracing the topic back to its roots; those already versed in this scholarship will find interesting readings of a variety of films, a number of which have rarely been discussed in theoretical considerations of the genre.Among the most interesting elements of Weinstock's approach is his work on rarely addressed films, be it because of their obscurity (1915's A Fool There Was; 1971's lesbian vampire films Vampyros Lesbos, Requiem for a Vampire, and Daughters of Darkness; 1973's Ganja and Hess) or their status as diluted Hollywood fare (the Blade, Underworld, and Twilight franchises; 2004's Hugh Jackman–starring Van Helsing; 2007's Will Smith–starring I Am Legend). While the introductory nature of the text leads to some more traditional readings of films such as Interview with the Vampire, the Blacula films, or David Cronenberg's Rabid, his approach to the previously mentioned texts yields newer insights and more nuanced readings. In regard to the films of the 1970s, Weinstock uses them to discuss shifting sexual norms in his opening chapter on vampires and sexuality. He points to lesbian vampire films in particular as a “titillating engagement with transgressive sexual desires and taboos” that “implicitly code specific behaviors as acceptable and unacceptable, thus reifying and reproducing sexual stereotypes and cultural understandings of what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable sexual behavior, even as they trouble those same social expectations by raising questions … about their naturalness” (22). While many readers may be aware of this notion of the hyper-sexualized vampire, Weinstock argues that previous scholars such as Richard Dyer, Ken Gelder, and David Pirie see eroticism in vampire films as “latent,” whereas he is more interested in considering the explicitness of sexuality around cinematic vampires (21). In the process, the chapter provides an intriguing insight into the complicated ways that the eroticism of the vampire myth becomes visualized in a film era with loosening constraints around depictions of sexuality.Another valuable element of Weinstock's text is the discussion of popular vampire films that are often pushed to the liminal spaces of the genre. While films such as those in the Twilight, Blade, and Underworld franchises are often considered with varying levels of disdain, often critiqued for the changes they make to vampire lore, Weinstock addresses each as an important modern evolution of the vampire myth. In these moments—partially because of the films' contemporariness and partially because of the changes they make to the traditional vampire narrative—Weinstock finds some of his richest information. For example, his chapter on sexuality frames Twilight protagonist Edward Cullen as “an apotheosis of one model of hyperbolic modern masculinity. He does not transgress gender expectations … rather, his is their perfection” (30). While the “perfection” of gender norms might seem like a standard feature of vampire films, Weinstock points out that what makes Cullen interesting is that he “shows us first that ideas of what it means to be a man are a product of converging lines of social and historical forces and second that no man can fulfill all cultural expectations completely” (30). As opposed to dismissing the Twilight films, or relying on the typical criticism of their gender politics, this tactic allows Weinstock to theorize how recent developments in depicting vampire sexuality complicate historical understandings of the vampire's place in reflecting current social norms.The same can be said for his work on Van Helsing and I Am Legend. Both films are blockbuster star vehicles that were critically derided, in part for jettisoning standard vampire mythology for takes on the creature that offer opportunities for spectacular action sequences. Weinstock's thoughtful readings of the films, though, point to the very relevance of the technology on display, stating that “when we think of vampire movies, we are also on some level thinking about the conflicted relationship to tools, science, and cinema itself” (57). The chapter's early claim that “the vampire is defined by its relation to and association with various specific technologies, primitive as they may be, of creation and destruction,” sets the foundation for an exciting focus on updated technologies in recent vampire films (59). His discussion of the futuristic weaponry in Van Helsing and the Blade films presents an inventive perspective on how Hollywood's interest in constantly displaying new technologies and ways to dispatch people causes a re-envisioning of the vampire myth. Similar insights can be seen in his observation of how “primitive” vampires in these films harness new technologies in order to further their reproduction and exist in the modern world. While these innovations may not sit well with classical vampire purists, Weinstock makes a strong case for their relevance in the vampire's constantly evolving metaphoric possibilities.Those same anxieties around reproduction also make for the most interesting aspect of his final chapter, focused on metaphors of otherness in vampire films. Again, the general connection between vampires and representations of otherness is a largely traditional argument, and readers of Judith Halberstam's Skin Shows, Barry Keith Grant's The Dread of Difference, and Barbara Creed's The Monstrous Feminine (to name but a few), will have seen it explored in more depth previously. Returning to the concept of reproduction, though, Weinstock's discussion of depictions of miscegenation in recent vampire franchises, such as Blade and Underworld, is the chapter's most intriguing claim. Reviewing the narratives of both franchises, he writes that they “clearly present an allegory of contemporary race relations in which the key to solving racial animosity is miscegenation” (111–12). He references key plot points in each franchise that involve vampires as an upper-class elite, hampered by the insistence on pure bloodlines, and making the propagation of the vampire race hinge on intermingling of vampires with other groups, acting as a metaphor for “progress and social harmony” (113). Weinstock's point here, that the “otherness” of the cinematic vampire has largely been shifted from an oppressed other to an elite one, marks an important change in how vampiric representation operates in our current society. Once again, this exploration of typically dismissed vampire franchises as capable is both fresh and complex.For an introductory text, however, Weinstock goes light on a review of existing literature on the vampire film, which is possibly the reason for some of his broader points. Early on, he states that there is “a relative absence of critical attention to the thousands of vampire movies in existence” (19) (later he restates the claim, referring to the “limited (but rapidly growing) scholarly literature on cinematic vampires” [20]). He does point out some important existing scholarship on vampire films, referring to key texts such as Ken Gelder's Reading the Vampire, David Pirie's Vampire Cinema, and Nina Auerbach's Our Vampires, Ourselves. However, these references are fleeting, and none of their arguments is considered in depth. In particular, more consideration of Judith Halberstam's Skin Shows might have been useful in the chapter on vampire cinema and otherness. Other integral works on the vampire film, such as Gregory Waller's The Living and the Undead, Cynthia Freeland's The Naked and the Undead, and Alain Silver and James Ursini's The Vampire Film, among others, go untouched here. A brief introduction to vampire films does not necessarily need to incorporate every major text, but their absence is made notable by Weinstock's point about the limitedness of work on the topic. He does, however, mine the scholarship on lesbian vampire films in great depth for his chapter on sexuality, making this an excellent place for exploring the material on that subgenre.In general, though, Weinstock succeeds in his deep readings of films in order to establish the existence of his three main tropes—sexuality, technology, and otherness—in numerous forms of vampire films. At times, these discussions are heavy on plot summaries, and some of the films selected seem to orient his point less around general vampire films than historical time periods (for instance, his focus on the lesbian vampire film amid the sexual revolution, or the tech-focused vampire films during the explosion of 1990s digital culture). Not to say the historicity of these films invalidates the points he makes, but more that these examples might show how the vampire films deal with current cultural dialogues in general as much as they consistently depict sexuality, technology or otherness. In fact, Weinstock's text almost seems to work better as analysis of how the tropes of vampire cinema have progressed in contemporary film. But that would take too much away from the worthwhile reads he does of 1970s films such as Daughters of Darkness, Rabid, and Ganja and Hess. Each of the tropes discussed here is inarguably an important concept for understanding our cultural fascination with the vampire film, and Undead Cinema at the very least presents worthwhile readings of a variety of commonly dismissed texts to illustrate their importance. Particularly for readers who are unfamiliar with the current scholarship on vampire films, it acts as a clear, concise entryway to an important ongoing academic dialogue.