The Global Vampire

The media vampire has roots throughout the world, far beyond the shores of the usual Dracula-inspired Anglo-American archetypes. Depending on text and context, the vampire is a figure of anxiety and comfort, humor and fear, desire and revulsion. These dichotomies gesture the enduring prevalence of the vampire in mass culture; it can no longer articulate a single feeling or response, bound by time and geography, but is many things to many people. With a global perspective, this collection of essays offers something new and different: a much needed counter-narrative of the vampire's evolution in popular culture. Divided by geography, this text emphasizes the vampiric as a globetrotting citizen du monde rather than an isolated monster.

This encyclopedic and exquisitely eerie guide is as elegant and menacing as the creature it describes. With nearly 200 photographs and illustrations, this entertaining and erudite collection of myth, folklore, literature and popular culture is seductively priced in its new paperback edition.

"Monsters of the Market" investigates modern capitalism through the prism of the body panics it arouses. Examining "Frankenstein," Marx s "Capital" and zombie fables from sub-Saharan Africa, it offers a novel account of the cultural and corporeal economy of global capitalism.

Throughout history vampires have been viewed as hideously repellant, strikingly attractive, dangerously evil, and piteously gloomy. This title explores vampire beliefs from the blood sucking beasts of ancient times to the immortal teen heartthrobs of the twenty-first century.

 The origins of the vampire can be traced through oral traditions, ancient texts and archaeological discoveries, its nature varying from one culture to the next up until the 20th century. Three 19th century Irish writers—Charles Robert Maturin, Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu and Bram Stoker—used the obscure vampire of folklore in their fiction and developed a universally recognizable figure, culminating in Stoker’s Dracula and the vampire of today’s popular culture. Maturin, Le Fanu and Stoker did not set out to transform the vampire of regional folk tales into a global phenomenon. Their personal lives, national concerns and extensive reading were reflected in their writing, striking a chord with readers and recasting the vampire as distinctly Irish. This study traces the genealogy of the modern literary vampire from European mythology through the Irish literature of the 1800s.

A new war is dawning...

Mark Jenkins’s engrossing history draws on the latest science, anthropological and archaeological research to explore the origins of vampire stories, providing gripping historic and folkloric context for the concept of immortal beings who defy death by feeding on the lifeblood of others. From the earliest whispers of eternal evil in ancient Mesopotamia, Greece, and Rome, vampire tales flourished through the centuries and around the globe, fueled by superstition, sexual mystery, fear of disease and death, and the nagging anxiety that demons lurk everywhere. In Vampire Forensics, Mark Jenkins probes vampire legend to tease out the historical truths enshrined in the tales of terror: sherds of Persian pottery depicting blood-sucking demons; the amazing recent discovery by National Geographic archaeologist Matteo Borrini of a 16th-century Venetian grave of a plague victim and suspected vampire; and the Transylvanian castle of "Vlad the Impaler," whose bloodthirsty cruelty remains unsurpassed. Jenkins navigates centuries of lore and legend, adding new chapters to the chronicle and weaving an irresistibly seductive blend of superstition, psychology, and science sure to engross everyone from Anne Rice’s countless readers to serious students of archaeology and mythology.

Vampires are arguably the most popular and most paradoxical of gothic monsters: life draining yet passionate, feared yet fascinating, dead yet immortal. Vampire content produces exquisitely suspenseful stories that, combined with motion picture filmmaking, reveal much about the cultures that enable vampire film production and the audiences they attract. This collection of essays is generously illustrated and ranges across sixteen cultures on five continents, including the films Let the Right One In, What We Do in the Shadows, Cronos, and We Are the Night, among many others. Distinctly different kinds of European vampires have originated in Ireland, Germany, Sweden, and Serbia. North American vampires are represented by films from Mexico, Canada, and the USA. Middle Eastern locations include Tangier, Morocco, and a fictional city in Iran. South Asia has produced Bollywood vampire films, and east Asian vampires are represented by films from Korea, China, and Japan. Some of the most recent vampire movies have come from Australia and New Zealand. These essays also look at vampire films through lenses of gender, post-colonialism, camp, and otherness as well as the evolution of the vampiric character in cinema worldwide, together constituting a mosaic of the cinematic undead.