New Vampire Cinema

Description

New Vampire Cinema lifts the coffin lid on forty contemporary vampire films, from 1992 to the present day, charting the evolution of a genre that is, rather like its subject, at once exhausted and vibrant, inauthentic and ‘original’, insubstantial and self-sustaining. Ken Gelder’s fascinating study begins by looking at Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Fran Rubel Kuzui’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer – films that seemed for a moment to take vampire cinema in completely opposite directions. New Vampire Cinema then examines what happened afterwards, across a remarkable range of reiterations of the vampire that take it far beyond its original Transylvanian setting: the suburbs of Sweden (Let the Right One In), the forests of North America (the Twilight films), New York City (Nadja, The Addiction), Mexico (Cronos, From Dusk Till Dawn), Japan (Blood: The Last Vampire, ), South Korea (Thirst), New Zealand (Perfect Creature), Australia (Daybreakers), and elsewhere. In a series of exhilarating readings, Gelder determines what is at stake when the cinematic vampire and the modern world are made to encounter one another – where the new, the remake and the sequel find the vampire struggling to survive the past, the present and, in some cases, the distant future. Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgments Preface 1. Inauthentic Vampires Bram Stoker’s Dracula Shadow of the Vampire Buffy the Vampire Slayer Interview with the Vampire and Queen of the Damned 2. Our Vampires, Our Neighbours Frostbitten, Let the Right One In and Let Me In Night Watch and Day Watch 3. Citational Vampires Irma Vep Vampire Hunter D: Blood Lust and Blood: The Last Vampire Thirst 4. Vampires In The Americas Nadja, The Addiction, Habit, Vampire in Brooklyn Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse Cronos The From Dusk Till Dawn trilogy, the John Carpenter’s Vampires trilogy 5. Diminishing Vampires Blade, Blade II and Blade: Trinity Underworld, Underworld: Evolution and Underworld: Rise of the Lycans Ultraviolet, The Breed, Perfect Creature, Daybreakers Notes Bibliography Index