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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 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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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 article discusses Carl Theodor Dreyer’s Vampyr (1931) within the larger context of the vampire film. While Vampyr is commonly believed to be inspired by J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872 tale of a lesbian vampire, “Carmilla,” the film is less an adaptation of this Gothic tale than an appropriation of certain modes of narrative representation surrounding earlier vampires. In the opening credits, the film explicitly names its source: Le Fanu’sIn a Glass Darkly. This collection contains not only “Carmilla,” but four other stories as well. Dreyer uses, “The Room in the Dragon Volant,” as the model for the most iconic sequence in Vampyr in which a man meets his own corpse and faces the horror of being buried alive. Turning the representation of this experience into a depiction of the filmic condition per se, Vampyr goes beyond conventional views of adaptation and negotiates film as itself a vampiric medium.

This chapter presents a more detailed critique of the monolithically negative view of consumption characteristic of Jean Baudrillard. It also explores the popular Fordist construction of “consuming youth.” Youth culture becomes a prominent site of advertisement's social hegemony. It then proposes to deploy, dialectically, both metaphors of vampiric consumption — one foregrounding a controlling system, the other a voluntaristic self-fashioning — in the analysis of youth-culture vampire texts. It introduces Somtow Sucharitkul's science fiction novel Mallworld. This novel potently demonstrates the three meanings of consuming youth. Karl Marx's dialectical image of the vampire-cyborg remains a more compelling metaphor for youth consumption than either the vampire or the cyborg considered by themselves. Vampire Junction and The Lost Boys capture and express the dialectical dynamic of youth consumption.

This chapter explores how the ideal Fordist image of youth consumption has been impacted by the socioeconomic realities of post-Fordism. It specifically looks at youth-consumer vampirism in the 1970s. It is interesting to observe that George A. Romero's Martin emphatically depicts family relations as powerful constraints on vampiric freedom. It then considers how Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, like Martin, marked an epochal moment in the history of the youth-consumer vampire. Vampirism functions in the novel as a means of escape from a dull, yuppified existence. Suckers and The Judas Glass illustrate the yuppie vampire novel taking to heart a sharp critique of its consumerist ethos. The Bloodsucking Fiends displays the slacker vampire novel admitting, however grudgingly, its own implication in the values and pleasures of consumption. It shows the slacker vampire's undead perceptions activating the aesthetic richness latent in consumerist glitz.

This chapter concentrates on the “homosexual panic” aroused by Anne Rice's vampires. It specifically covers Lestat's career as a youth-culture icon. The yuppie vampire contains both progressive and reactionary elements, and it is imperative (if at times quite difficult) to disentangle them from one another. Tony Scott's The Hunger reveals how narcissistic objectification and utopian eroticism function together within the libidinal economy of the yuppie vampire text. David Bowie's appearance in The Hunger marked a crucial stage in the evolution of the youth-consumer vampire, showing the convergence of this figure with a cybernetic logic; it also exerted a profound influence on subsequent vampire texts. Rice's Vampire Lestat discusses the glamorous portrait of rock-star vampire Lestat de Lioncourt. Mainstream bands — those who, like Lestat, depend on extensive commodity chains — emerge as vampiric in a negative sense, as implicit exploiters.

This chapter offers a selective history of fictional films about Abraham Lincoln. Beginning with the Edison Film Company’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1903) and concluding with Stephen Spielberg’s Lincoln (2012), this chapter describes and analyzes dozens of films about America’s sixteenth president.