Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are: On the New Vampirism

Who is the vampire monster, existing in the popular folk imagination as the living dead, who has been transformed into a romantic figure burdened by life as he appears in the contemporary popular culture? Traditionally the vampire is understood as an allegory of otherness and of a superhuman alien; he is a foreign body – a body foreign to the human species, which he is threatening with colonization. Such is the manifestation of the classic vampirism in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Contemporary popular moldings of the vampire figure, such as in the TV series True Blood and in Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, have made the vampire undergone socialization, the intervention of the law and Americanization i.e. the intervention of the West. Nowadays the vampire, who once used to be an incomprehensible alien with ambivalent characteristics of terror-attraction, is repetitively marketing the western fantasies embodying the desire of the monstrous other to integrate into the human, the western, »our« society.

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