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Chapter 2 performs close readings of transcriptions of a nationally syndicated, travel themed radio show—to which Kinship Records president Jon Cohen was a regular contributor—and of the recent popularity of the “Afro-Indie” genre, which is understood as those African-derived musics in U.S. indie rock. This chapter develops the concept of “aural imaginary” as that mechanism through which the aural other is instrumentalized in the constitution of a listening self not simply through appropriation but through incorporation into the subject. This chapter narrows in on sound’s capacity to materially structure social relations, formations, and actors. The WMCI, as represented in Kinship Records, has disassociated itself from the shunned and taboo practice of cultural appropriation and has assumed a new business model, described in this chapter as “aural incorporation.” Aural incorporation represents that means by which listeners structure racialized sounds to which they may have no birthright into their origin narratives laying claim to various musical traditions as their own. This chapter explores these various biopolitical tactics employed by the WMCI.

This chapter examines religion's coding in the television programs Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Angel. It analyzes how these programs refer to organized religion and to the lore of vampires and how they embrace a romantic notion about an individual's need for community and her capacity for transformation. It reviews four episodes and explains how the programs express a postmodern, relativistic approach to religious belief.

This chapter is all about high falls—backward and forward. Every fall is different, and the type of fall dictates the position of the airbag the stunt person falls into. Highlighted are stuntwomen Sophia Crawford, who started out in Hong Kong doing wirework and later doubled Sarah Michelle Gellar in Buffy the Vampire Slayer, as well as high-fallers Nancy Thurston, Leigh Hennessy, and Lisa Hoyle, who jumped off a ten-story building in Charlie’s Angels (2001). Also examined is the death of Sonja Davis in a backward fall off a building.

This chapter interrogates the role of being a feminist in Whedon’s branding, arguing that, while he successfully branded himself as feminist for two decades, closer analysis and subsequent revelations demonstrate this to be far more style than substance. Whedon’s branding as a fanboy, by contrast, is more robust and permeates his public persona, from his casual fashion to his texts to actively participating in his own and other fandoms—though the chapter notes that these practices are in tension with his auteur status. Finally, the chapter argues, Whedon actively leverages the illusion of intimacy enabled by Twitter and fan site Whedonesque to extract the unpaid fan labor that has powered his career.

This chapter offers a brief consideration of the role that the renewed popularity of the vampire and zombie plays within popular culture. Through consideration of the growing popularity of zombie walks, zombie runs, vampire fashion, vampire cosplay, this chapter argues that a fascination with the undead is a response to an unsettling cultural climate in which we are bombarded by the threat of annihilation but also serves as evidence of a cultural appropriation of this apocalyptic threat.

Excavations at early medieval cemeteries in Poland often reveal traces of mortuary behavior which deviate considerably from the normative treatment of the dead. Most of these atypical practices involved interring the corpses in prone position, laying or throwing stones on them, or cutting their heads off, but other variants have also been recorded, e.g., covering the bodies with clay or piercing them with stakes and other sharp objects. Graves of this kind have always been difficult to interpret. In the early twentieth century, Polish scholars only mentioned them briefly in their publications, without offering any detailed commentary about their possible meanings, while in the 1970s, the problematic term “anti-vampire burials” was coined, implying that these were burials of vampires. This article provides a critical overview of past and present studies on atypical burials in Poland by drawing on the results of a research project entitled Bad Death in the Early Middle Ages: Atypical Burials from Poland in a Comparative Perspective. The discussion incorporates new and previously unpublished evidence and a reassessment of archival documentation kept in a range of Polish museums and scientific institutions, which challenges the previously accepted “vampire” interpretation and sophisticates our understanding of unusual funerary phenomena.

Greece has a long tradition of vampire beliefs that often involved treating corpses or graves to dispel vampires, practices that should be archaeologically visible and fairly common. However, proposed archaeological cases are surprisingly few. Here we review normative burial traditions in early modern Greece, as well as documentary and ethnographic evidence for vampire-related mortuary ritual. This clarifies the archaeological signs these rituals should leave behind and their deeper significance as attempts to restore the smooth course of a disrupted death journey. Two Ottoman-era burials recovered on the island of Lesbos are discussed as likely instances of vampire ritual, and we consider why vampire burials might be underreported archaeologically and offer some suggestions for their improved detection and study in the future.

This chapter examines the use of Gothic symbols, settings and archetypes in the context of gender. It pays particular attention to the use of the double, the Other, and associated symbols such as mirrors and masks, arguing that these are used to explore the limits of female identity and to interrogate issues of control and change. It also analyzes the settings of the Misty stories, demonstrating that these often contain an intrusion of the past into the present, creating the ‘Gothic cusp’, which manifests as an uncanny feeling of dislocation. It concludes by exploring the treatment of Gothic archetypes (focusing particularly on witches, vampires, and ghosts), and reveals that these appear less than might be expected, and are frequently handled subversively or sympathetically.

Taking as its point of focus E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire (2000), a cinematic mise-en-abîme homage to, and a self-referential twenty-first century commentary on F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu, this essay examines vampire cinema as an emblem of ‘technological necromancy’ that mediates our ambivalent responses to modernity, its proliferating technologies, and death in the wake of the secularising Enlightenment whose driving ideal – rational empiricism – undermined long established Christian certainties about the existence and nature of a soul and an afterlife. This essay reads Shadow as a compelling and sedimented, twenty-first century meditation on the nefarious, desensitizing impact of our cultural addiction to visual technologies, in which the vampire is used to mirror its audience. Shadow is also assessed as an interrogation of the gender and racial politics of cinematic spectatorship – particularly the influence and impact of pornography and propaganda cinema.

Nordic vampire films, comprising films produced in Denmark, Sweden and Finland, are not a coherent or regular phenomenon. Although they are familiar with and even borrow the conventions of Anglo-American vampire lore, their features often differ from the international horror mainstream in specifically Nordic ways. Rochelle Wright (2010: 56, 67) describes Nordic cases as being characterised by a fusion or hybridity of genres, including both the Anglo-American horror genre and Nordic socio-psychological drama, and argues that as a consequence, in Nordic vampire films the supernatural merges with realism. Internationally most vampires are social outcasts whose blood-desire and unnatural relationship with death mark them as evil, yet the Nordic vampires are not necessarily evil, but sympathetic characters whose social exclusion is often unrelated and prior to their vampirism (Wright 2010: 59).

When Stevenson tackled Scottish subjects for the first time in his fiction it was, as Stephen Arata has observed, ‘by way of the Gothic’ (2010: 59). ‘Thrawn Janet’, ‘The Body Snatcher’ and ‘The Merry Men’ were all written on the author’s return to Scotland from North America, during a sojourn in Pitlochry and Braemar in the wet summer of 1881. This chapter will propose that from these Scottish roots Stevenson went on to develop the Gothic genre to explore his sense of the nature of human identity and, beyond that, the conditions of material existence itself. It will trace such mutations at work in three specifically ‘Gothic’ texts, ‘Thrawn Janet’ (1881), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and ‘Olalla’ (1885), in order to demonstrate Stevenson’s evolving engagement with the genre, and its importance to any critical understanding of his work.

Byron has always been considered to belong to the canon of Romantic literature, but the place he occupies in the canon has been a special and recently a marginalised one. Byron’s phenomenal success and his special position within literary history is mainly the result of what is called the medial construction of “Byron”. The melancholic Byronic hero of the earlier works together with the narrative voice lead to rhetorical constructions of “Byron” that easily cross authorial and medial boundaries and turn into the Byronic vampire in Polidori’s novella, in the theatre and in the opera. In this reading of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, Byron is shown as the construct of medial and public perception.

By 2001, producer and programme had become inseparable; writers, agents and United Paramount Network's target demographic of younger viewers were said to be attracted not just by Buffy but by Joss Whedon's high-profile public image. The thirty years between the publication of Muriel Cantor's 1971 book, The Hollywood TV Producer: His Work and His Audience and UPN's acquisition of Buffy the Vampire Slayer saw fundamental changes in the television industry in the United States. Cantor's book was published during the height of three network dominance, a period that Michele Hilmes has dubbed the classic network system. When UPN acquired Buffy, the number of television networks had doubled from three to six, all of which struggled for ratings in a multi-channel, fragmented audience environment. The transformation of the industry resulted in the television writer-producer playing a much more prominent role in the industry than ever before.

This chapter presents a reading of Joann Sfar's Little Vampire (2008), which chronicles the escapades of a diminutive monster and his preteen Jewish friend Michael. It demonstrates that Little Vampire brings vampires, Judaism, and masculinity into an illuminating convergence. The result is a text that implicitly provides a recuperative contribution to vampire studies by empowering two fictionally and culturally demonized figures through a friendship that challenges the constraints of normative western masculinity. Although most children between the ages of nine and eleven, the recommended American reading age for Little Vampire, will not understand how Sfar rewrites a metaphor with anti-Semitic overtones by making a Jewish boy and a vampire friends, they will readily appreciate the protagonists' highly comedic adventures and the child-friendly themes that emerge from the text.

This chapter shifts the focus from superhero comics to the medium of television, and specifically the kinds of long-form, continuity-rich dramas (such as Star Trek and Buffy the Vampire Slayer) that draw heavily upon the narrative traditions of both comic books and soap operas. It also briefly explores how some film franchises, such as Star Wars and Saw, have adopted the retcon technique, as well.

Contemporary Hollywood horror is frequently marked by its spatial relocation to the American landscape and its temporal relocation to the present and also focused on the ‘other’ within the nuclear family and specific social groups, particularly teenagers. With the advent of cable and satellite broadcasting, the replaying of these tensions as postmodern pastiche in contemporary television programming has been a tactic taken on by a television industry regrouping to capture a teen marketplace. This chapter investigates this phenomenon by focusing on the Warner Brothers television network in order to link political economy to traditional studies of gender. Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Smallville exist within the broad conceptual terrain of genre and seriality. By ‘reading’ Buffy's body, among others, this chapter explores the manner in which the teen body is attached to a political economy whose values it serves to celebrate and promote, and considers the specific connection of this body to contemporary national consumer-goods advertising.

Supernatural shows by their nature often incorporate themes such as survival, community, revenge, resurrection, and (the dark side of) humanity -- themes which take on a new meaning in the post-9/11 period. Chapter Six analyzes how these are incorporated into 21st century vampire narratives, such as HBO's True Blood (2008-2014), CW's The Vampire Diaries (2009-2017), and the film adaptations of Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga (2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012). Through a recurrent focus on "us versus them," these storylines bring attention to the cultural divides within the United States caused by things such as continued racial conflict, progress in the LGBTQA rights movement, and ongoing (religious and political) debates concerning family values. This essay also analyzes the ways in which the Civil War backstories present within each of these narratives reflect problematic nostalgia for bygone eras (and societal orders).