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- Volume 8, Issue 2, 2017
Horror Studies - Volume 8, Issue 2, 2017
Volume 8, Issue 2, 2017
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‘Look who’s got a case of dark prince envy’: Dracula, televisuality and the golden age(s) of TV horror
More LessAbstractWhile Dracula’s presence within the cinema has fuelled extensive scholarship, little attention has been played to his role within television. Where television adaptations are discussed, the analyses are primarily removed from their televisual contexts or discussed as anachronistic, their televisuality used to reaffirm the notion that within a world of modern horrors, Dracula is not scary any more. In contrast, this article examines the relationship between Dracula and television with a specific focus upon Dracula’s contribution to a changing landscape of televisual horror. The article focuses its analysis upon two key periods of TV horror – 1950s–1970s and post-2000 – examining the role that Dracula plays on TV and considering how it embodies the increasingly provocative nature of horror. It examines the role that Dracula plays within children’s, family and prestige drama. It considers how Dracula adaptations interrogate the uncanniness of the televisual medium. It examines the impact of the seeming over-familiarization of Stoker’s Count by challenging the perception that this familiarity has neutered Dracula as an icon of horror. Instead the article argues that television offers a space in which Dracula continues to function as horror, destabilizing questions of normality and the comforts of quality television programming.
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‘Last night I dreamt I went to Collinwood again’: Vampire adaptation and reincarnation romance in Dark Shadows
More LessAbstractTim Burton’s 2012 film adaptation of the television soap opera Dark Shadows (1966–71) was controversial with fans, who saw it as failing to capture what they loved about the original. This article explores the gothic properties of doubling and repetition in the 1966–71 series and the ways in which they both pre-empt the discourses of adaptation and destabilize the notion of an ‘original’ text from which the adaptation departs. It argues that the reincarnation romance plot, in which an immortal being seeks to find the reincarnation of his or her lost love, extends the vampire/adaptation metaphor in significant new ways. The reincarnation romance also offers a useful model for understanding the adaptation of cult texts, as fans enact their own ‘reincarnation romance’ with the object of their passion. As such, it illuminates the responses of critics and fans to Burton’s film and the broader problems of adapting cult texts. If the television vampire has, until very recently, been overlooked in favour of its cinematic variants, then the case of Dark Shadows reveals the value judgements informing this oversight and restores the television vampire to its full significance.
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Stephen King’s vampire kingdom: Supernatural evil and human evil in TV adaptations of Salem’s Lot (1979, 2004)
By Simon BrownAbstractThis article compares the representation of evil in the two TV mini-series adaptations of Stephen King’s 1975 vampire novel Salem’s Lot. The first adaptation for CBS in 1979 was directed by Tobe Hooper, and used a heightened gothic style in order to depict the takeover of the town by an atavistic European vampire who is presented in the style of Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). In contrast the 2004 version for TNT, directed by Mikael Salomon, takes a more realist stance, downplaying the gothic in favour of suggesting that it is much more petty and human forms of evil that are the principal force behind the town’s destruction. As articulated by failed catholic priest Father Callaghan, the distinction between supernatural and human evil lies at the heart of King’s novel, and arguably at the centre of his writing more generally, and so by examining the way evil is depicted across these two adaptations, this piece will consider the duality that lies at the heart of King’s vampiric metaphor.
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The curious case of the Spanish televisual vampire
More LessAbstractThis article explores the birth and development of the Spanish televisual vampire within the context of a similarly nascent national television and, more specifically, that of its first horror programme, Historias para no dormir (Stories to Keep You Awake) (1966–82), as well as the career of its director and scriptwriter, Narciso Ibáñez Serrador. The article reads the intrinsic qualities of the first Spanish televisual vampire, its literary credentials and its reliance on adaptation from canonical cultural sources as more largely indicative of the role and perception of horror television in that country. Substantial space is dedicated to a study of the historical and contextual coordinates of the Spanish vampire as it manifests in ‘La pesadilla’ (‘The Nightmare’) (2.1, 1967), but a brief overview of the legacy of this figure in later Spanish television is also provided. The main aim is thus to understand the ways in which the vampire has been adapted and appropriated in Spain, and, to this end, the article considers its parallel appearance in national literary and cinematic texts.
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A very special vampire episode: Vampires, archetypes and postmodern turns in late 1980s’ and 1990s’ cult TV shows
More LessAbstractThis article evaluates the importance of the TV vampire on-screen in science fiction, gothic and horror-based cult TV series from the late 1980s to the late 1990s. The inclusion of the vampire as a peripheral character in series including Quantum Leap (1989–93), The X-Files (1993–2002, 2016–present), Tales from the Crypt (1989–96) and Friday the 13th: The Series (1987–90) indicates, in light of postmodern cultural turns, that there exists an imperative to re-evaluate, satirize and reflexively explore the vampire as a necessary and evolving stock gothic character within the narrative and generic frameworks of each show. In looking at these postmodern vampiric evaluations in their own right, where the vampire is featured as the ‘monster of the week’, this article argues that these understudied yet apposite representations of the television vampire, prior to and following on from the success of Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula (Coppola, 1992), documents a distinct cultural shift and maturation in representing vampires in non-vampire-based gothic television shows. Whether it is to reify, satirize and re-mould the vampire as a variant of ‘the Dracula template’ on the small screen or to move beyond mere stock conventions, these specific vampire episodes document the continuing fluidity of screen vampires through TV’s episodic ‘creature feature’ framework and offer differing and dynamic alternative representations of undeath beyond vampire-centric TV shows.
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‘When there’s blood involved, a line been crossed’: Spike/Eric slash and the fascinations of the crossover text
By Bethan JonesAbstractBuffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and True Blood (2008–14) are arguably two of the most popular vampire television series. Given the many similarities between them this is, perhaps, not surprising: both focus on a female character who falls in love with a vampire; both draw on the notion of the Byronic hero; and both feature a blonde bad boy who quickly became a fan favourite. Indeed, an August 2016 search on Fanfiction.net for stories featuring Spike yields 10,476 hits, while Eric appears in 2,923 works (Angel features in 6153 and Bill in 708). Henry Jenkins suggests that fanfiction is born from a combination of both fascination and frustration: if fans were not fascinated with a series they would not continue the storyworld, but if they were not frustrated with aspects of it they would find nothing to write about. In this article I argue that fascination with a text occurs across multiple storyworlds and that the crossover text is one way in which fans make this fascination transparent. I further argue that while much work on slash fiction exists, it has primarily focused on pairings from within the same narrative: Harry/Draco; Sherlock/John; Mulder/Krycek and analysing slash featuring characters from across storyworlds offers us a fruitful understanding of fans’ intertextual knowledge and the way in which this knowledge is applied in fanworks. Furthermore, I contend that the crossover slash story complicates current academic discourse around slash and ask how we might begin to theorize the slash crossover both in relation to existing slash fic and representations and rewritings of gender.
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Original sin: Frontier horror, gothic anxiety and colonial monsters in The Vampire Diaries
More LessAbstractThis article focuses on the CW television series The Vampire Diaries (TVD) (2009–17) and explores how the show uses literary tropes from the early American period commonly used to represent Native Americans. The television series reimagines colonial contact in a way that allows for a range of critical interpretations. The show at turns reproduces colonial rationalizations and rhetoric of land claim and discovery that disenfranchise Native peoples but also allows for ambivalent critiques of the colonial project. More particularly, this article asserts that the Mikaelson vampires (also referred to in the series as ‘The Originals’) replace Native Americans through their assumption of a proto-American identity, then displace actual Native American peoples to occupy the position of surrogate Indian, and finally erase what Native Studies scholars term the tribal real by reproducing fakelore that helps legitimize their American roots. The vampire characters in TVD see themselves as both elite and oppressed and position themselves as ‘surrogate Indians’, a characterization that harks back to some of the earliest depictions and records of historical Virginia as a royal colony filled with displaced elite supporters of the English monarchy.
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Horrible histories? Vampire television, period drama and spectacle
By Lorna JowettAbstractVampires are essentially immortal and thus, while contemporary vampire television series are generally set in the present, the epic scale of a vampire’s existence affords vast potential for period drama via flashback. This article examines the different ways vampire TV has accessed the spectacle of period drama, presenting an alternative version of its usual televisual self, and playing with a different set of genre conventions. Period flashbacks are designed to provide novelty and spectacle, and also afford the pleasure of seeing a different version of a well-known character appearing in a new context. Yet, this article argues that contemporary vampire television series, exemplified by Angel (1998–2004), The Vampire Diaries (2009–17), True Blood (2008–14) and Being Human (2008–13), tie this new perspective to recurring characters and ongoing thematic preoccupations, balancing novelty and the epic sweep of historical period with the familiarity and repetition characteristic of serial drama on television. Thus, vampire TV shows integrate elements and conventions of period drama but use them, sometimes subverting and disrupting them, to feed ongoing development of narrative, characters, themes and aesthetics common to many vampire representations. This article identifies and examines similarities between vampire television and period drama, and the ways in which the combination of two sets of televisual conventions both mesh harmoniously and produce interesting tensions in the former.
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