Vampire Notes

Nosferatu

-       Went from yellow tones to grey when the mood changed

-       Not an attractive vampire

-       Stolen story

-       Almost destroyed because the story was so close to Bram Stoker’s Dracula

What made the “look” of Vampires change?

-       Social transgression

-       Fist world war- shows the problems with the Victorian Age (puts the end to Victorian Ideals)

-       Bella Lugosi Dracula “ brings the Tuxedo” to Dracula

-       Interview with a vampire – is charming

-       Both detached and completely immersed in humanity

-       Creepy only in his perfection

-       Becomes a vey popular take on this genre

-       Claudia – frozen as a child (her own daughters death?)

-       A lot of Catholicism in the book

-       Religious doubt is a big subject line of the book

-       Religion goes hand in hand with Vampires

-       Sense of religion being the demonic power that fuels vampires

-       She went in depth on explanations on what vampires thing, ingestion of blood- live blood

-       Through the e yes of an interviewee a “wannabe” vampire

-       Fetishistic qualities to it

-       Plays off of wanting to be in the position of that fear and helplessness

-       We build the rules for these beings so that it’s a situation we know how to get out of

-       Ann Rice opens up the genre “ Supernatural romance”

-       Twilight domesticates the Vampire  (the high you get from being chaste)

Rules

-Fictional worlds “have” to have rules

            -Defining fiction in game terms

            -What are the rules so that we can see them bent broken or otherwise

            - Change the rules just enough to fit our own vampires

            -Have we exhausted the vampire?

- Interview with a Vampire and sex, do they have it>?

- Something more compelling then sex and that’s feeding

- Drugs are the metaphor because you keep coming back for more.

-  You are what you are accept it (Beatniks) 

Oppositions you see in the work

-       Past v the present

-       Privileges the past as a genre

-       Interviewer represents the present

-       The way the vampire works in the frame of media (no longer a gothic tale) 

-       Religion (belief vs. Disbelief) damned and saved

-       Are you damned because of your nature of because of your actions///what exactly is redeeming

-       Destiny and predestination

-       Mortality vs. immortality

-       Humanity vs. inhumanity

City of Lost Souls

-       The appeal of animal sexuality

-       Separation of the mind and the body

-       Sexual subtext

Other Notes

-       Ann Rice novel is not entirely heterosexual

-       One of the first novels to lay out in strong terms that it doesn’t matter if your gay, straight, it matters if you are top or bottom, the dominant or the submissive

-       Accepting what you are and pair up with the right combination otherwise you aren’t going to be happy (all inclusive)

Lost Boys

-       Homoerotic undertones

-       Unites the vampire motifs with the teenage rebel

-       Manipulative

-       Origin of Twilight

-       *80’s glitter 

-       The vampires influence the town but no one knows that they are the reason for everyone missing

= subtle manipulation