6 Questions for Silvia Moreno-Garcia
2023; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 98; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2024.a916065
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Crime, Deviance, and Social Control
Resumo6 Questions for Silvia Moreno-Garcia Michelle Johnson Click for larger view View full resolution Photo by Martin Dee In October 2023 Restless Books published a new, illustrated edition of Bram Stoker's gothic masterpiece, Dracula, with a foreword by Alexander Chee and an introduction by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. Moreno-Garcia is the author of Certain Dark Things, a vampire tale set in Mexico City; Mexican Gothic; and The Daughter of Doctor Moreau, among other novels. Q In your introduction to the new edition of Dracula, you write about the influence of disease on portrayals of vampires—the vampire as virus—contrasting them with more palatable versions like Buffy and Twilight. How do you think the Covid-19 pandemic could alter portrayals? A It's nearly impossible to predict the future. Right now vampires are not hot in literature or pop culture, and the pandemic didn't move the needle on that. This doesn't mean there are zero books being published with vampires, but there hasn't been a big, earth-shattering cultural moment like we had with Twilight, which really opened the tap on a certain kind of vampire. And although the TV adaptation of Interview with the Vampire seems to be doing okay, films such as Renfield or The Last Voyage of the Demeter haven't found an audience. But vampires are an eternally evolving narrative concept. One thing I haven't seen, which would be interesting, would be to see vampires clash with modern technology. In 1949 Fritz Leiber wrote "The Girl with the Hungry Eyes," which is about a psychic vampire, a model who seems to cause the death of the men who look at her image. I always found it an interesting interpretation because the power of the girl derives from mass media. It is her image, reproduced in billboards or calendars, that allows for the vampirism to happen. I wonder if you could do a similar concept but utilize social media as the tool by which a vampire could consume its victims. And social media goes "viral," you know. There is this element of contagion inherent in our modern technology. Q Writing about your novel Certain Dark Things, Lavie Tidhar said, "Not since Anne Rice's seminal Interview with the Vampire has the vampire story been so radically reimagined." How are you and others reimagining the vampire story? A It's impossible to give you a single answer because there is not a single vampire story, and vampires are always shifting. For a long time we had the traditional Dracula figure in literature, the vampire who springs from the gothic imagination. This includes characters such as Barnabas Collins from the soap opera Dark Shadows, Anne Rice's vampires, and Chelsea Quinn Yarbro's Saint-Germain series. But then in the 1980s we got movies such as Near Dark and The Lost Boys, or books such as The Hunger or Lost Souls, where [End Page 32] the traditional castle and gothic trappings vanished and the vampires were enmeshed in contemporary spaces. Vampires could play rock music or be yuppies at a fashionable nightclub. Then in the '90s we had the rise of urban fantasy, and the vampire occupies a different space at that point. For example, with novels such as Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter and TV shows like Angel, the vampire was often coexisting with other supernatural entities (werewolves, ghosts, demons, etc.). Further changes occurred with the popularity of young adult and romantic themes in the 2000s. Recently we have seen queer vampires making more of a splash; the TV adaptation of Interview with the Vampire makes explicit what was once implicit in this regard. The vampire therefore keeps shifting, from a figure of repulsion to one that seems to fulfill fantasies and beyond. Q While reimagining the vampire story, how are these contemporary novels also Dracula's literary offspring (or not)? A Many vampire stories owe a huge debt to Dracula, sometimes without even realizing it. There is a certain "canon" that gets formalized and that few people think to take apart. For example, we don't see many vampires that become vampires because they've been cursed due to their terrible behavior...
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