Vampires In The New World

This book provides an engaging historical survey of the vampire in American popular culture over 100 years, ranging from Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula to HBO's television series True Blood. Vampires in the New World surveys vampire films and literature from both national and historical perspectives since the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula, providing an overview of the changing figure of the vampire in America. It focuses on such essential popular culture topics as pulp fiction, classic horror films, film noir, science fiction, horror fiction, blaxploitation, and the recent Twilight and True Blood series in order to demonstrate how cultural, scientific, and ideological trends are reflected and refracted through the figure of the vampire. The book will fascinate anyone with an interest in vampires as they are found in literature, film, television, and popular culture, as well as readers who appreciate horror and supernatural fiction, crime fiction, science fiction, and the gothic. It will also appeal to those who are interested in the interplay between society and film, television, and popular culture, and to readers who want to understand why the figure of the vampire has remained compelling to us across different eras and generations.

This book provides an engaging historical survey of the vampire in American popular culture over 100 years, ranging from Bram Stoker's classic novel Dracula to HBO's television series True Blood. Vampires in the New World surveys vampire films and literature from both national and historical perspectives since the publication of Bram Stoker's Dracula, providing an overview of the changing figure of the vampire in America. It focuses on such essential popular culture topics as pulp fiction, classic horror films, film noir, science fiction, horror fiction, blaxploitation, and the recent Twilight and True Blood series in order to demonstrate how cultural, scientific, and ideological trends are reflected and refracted through the figure of the vampire. The book will fascinate anyone with an interest in vampires as they are found in literature, film, television, and popular culture, as well as readers who appreciate horror and supernatural fiction, crime fiction, science fiction, and the gothic. It will also appeal to those who are interested in the interplay between society and film, television, and popular culture, and to readers who want to understand why the figure of the vampire has remained compelling to us across different eras and generations.

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.

The world is not what you think. Beneath skyscrapers' leering gargoyles, factories belching smoke and streets packed with the human throng lurk things we are not meant to see. Creatures dwell in the shadows and hidden places. They watch you, stalk you and prey upon your body and soul. The life you lead is a lie. Your darkest fears aren't make-believe. They're real. And now that you have glimpsed this world of darkness, there's no place to hide. The Storytelling System Rulebook is a stand-alone game for the World of Darkness, and is meant for use with Vampire: The Requiem, Werewolf: The Forsaken and Mage: The Awakening.

The nightmare of the dead rising from their graves and sucking the blood of the living has haunted us since prehistory. Legends, literature and terrifying case histories trace the survival of vampires from antiquity to the gaslit streets of London. From age to age, the same terrifying myth has adapted itself to the beliefs of the time. Today it is kept alive through fiction and the cinema, which have distilled our worst fears and most secret desires. The world of the undead lives on.

From the steaming jungles of the Amazon, to the ice-bound Arctic, the Sonora Desert, and the dark forests of the Appalachian Mountains—North, Central, and South America have their own unique varieties of vampires and shape-shifting man-beasts. A rich tradition of frightening myths and ghastly folk tales going back centuries before the Europeans came to the New World, blending with the folklore of newer immigrants, and rising like an eerie mist from the fertile mix of American cultures, our part of the world has no shortage of blood-drinking monsters and werewolves. Native Americans told tales of night-stalking corpses rising from their graves, the Ancient Aztecs with their blood-soaked cosmology left a legacy of terror tales to modern Mexico, and the howling of wolves (or is it the loup garou?) still pierces the bitter Quebec night.

"Because one can't simply fire a Novak..." Prepare to be sucked back in to the breathtaking new world of The Shade!

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,