A Cinematographic Vampire's Tale: Understanding the Symbolism Behind the Horror Icon

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ENG 5210 : Film, Technology and the Literary Canon

A Cinematographic Vampire 's Tale: Understanding the symbolism behind the horror icon

Graziella Scicluna

University of Malta
Faculty of Arts

A Cinematographic Vampire 's Tale: Understanding the symbolism behind the horror icon

Cinema is the place where we as viewers engage in sharing a collective dream. Certainly, horror movies enrich us as viewers with the most dream-like of plots. This is because they open a portal into another world where we are allowed to engage with our nightmares. All over time various horror movies show us how normality is endangered by a monster, but the creature who has haunted the screen like no one is undoubtedly the Vampire. According to Ivan Phillips the figure of the Vampire has

‘drifted and shifted through the pages of newspapers, travel journals, novels, poems, comics, and plays for 300 years, it has haunted cinema and television for almost a hundred, its shadow is creeping into the social, narrative and ludic networks of the digital’.

The image of the Vampire is constantly present in the virtual and literature culture of the twenty-first century. Although this being moved from its folkloristic origins in which he appeared in works of J.Sheridan Le Fanu, John Polidori and Bram Stoker, the vampire still remains an iconic figure in Western Culture. This personage provides paradoxical fascination as it exists ‘at the edges of what is deemed normal, acceptable and safe, the vampire embodies the foreign and the unfamiliar’. Although, the vampire is often seen as a bringer of death, there are numerous metaphorical meanings and readings of this being. Through Marxist discourse the vampire is portrayed as the monster of monopoly capitalism and the agent of foreign ownership. This idea of the ‘bloodsucking capitalist’ is perceived in a negative way the Marxist community. In a xenophobic society this idea of the vampire embodies a general fear of the

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