Description
The Global Vampire and National Identity explores vampire cinema and media from cultures and nations beyond the dominant influence of Hollywood, examining the cultural, political and social significance of the vampire across diverse cultures and societies. Each chapter uses a single film or television series as a lens through which to look at the chosen country’s cinematic or televisual output, incorporating national and local lore and mythologies, to examine how it speaks to individual and collective concerns from both within the nation from which it emerges and in relation to wider regional or global imaginaries. Drawing on contemporary theories of culture, identity, and horror, the volume illuminates the ways in which the construction of global vampires reveals specific characteristics of the particular culture who created them, as well as the cultures who influence and subsequently interpret them. This integrated and intersectional perspective provides a thorough and dynamic consideration of the global vampire on screen showing it to be not just a point of interest to the initiated but as a timely, vital and necessary lens through which to explore the development of national and global identities in the twenty-first century. This volume will be a key resource for all scholars and students of national and global vampire, horror, and gothic cinema, as well as cultural studies, film studies, and television studies.