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ABSTRACT OF THE THESIS

A Tale of Two Monsters; or, the Dialectic of Horror

Lauren Spears

Master of Arts in English

San Diego State University, 2012

In this thesis, I examined the complex interrelationship between the literary vampire

and zombie both in literature and pop culture depictions such as film and television. I
explored whether these fictional revenants are clearly distinct or aspects of a single, larger
undead archetype. Revenants are currently immensely popular as evidenced by such works as
“Twilight” and “The Walking Dead,” and have endured as popular literary devices or figures,
in one form or another, for centuries. Countless readers and viewers have been exposed to
these figures, and it is therefore crucial that we understand their popularity and what kind of
impact it may have both on individual consumers and on western culture at large. I examined
the story of the revenant by interrogating both primary and secondary sources beginning with
the prehistoric mythical genesis of the walking dead, through the Romantic literary elevation
of the revenant into the Byronic vampire and Shelley’s Creature and the mid-twentieth
century rise of the zombie movie into contemporary literary, film, and television depictions
of revenants. I found that both types of undead tell facets of the same larger cultural narrative
about class and consumption: while sharing the same humble origins in folklore, over time
the vampire comes to represent the aristocratic elite while the zombie mirrors the struggles of
the poor, making each monster a representative of a soldier in class warfare.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

PAGE

ABSTRACT ............................................................................................................................. iv

CHAPTER

1 THE BIRTH OF THE UNDEAD ..................................................................................1

The Folkloric Vampire .............................................................................................2

The Vampire and the Creature in the 19

Century ..................................................5

2 THE VAMPIRE OF THE 19TH CENTURY ..............................................................10

Lord Byron, the Quintessential Vampire ...............................................................10

The Lordly Vampire ..............................................................................................12

The Rape Metaphor in Vampire Fiction ................................................................13

Gender Politics and the Female Vampire ..............................................................16

The Dichotomy of Women in Dracula ...................................................................22

3 CONTEMPORARY DEPICTIONS OF THE UNDEAD IN POPULAR

CULTURE ...................................................................................................................31

A History of the Zombie throughout Different Cultures .......................................31

The Reemergence of the Zombie and the Vampire in Early 20

Century

Film ........................................................................................................................33

Zombies and Science .............................................................................................37

The Struggle for Power between Monsters ............................................................39

Zombies and Brains ...............................................................................................42

From Shelley’s Creature to Romero’s Zombie ......................................................44

The Zombie Today .................................................................................................48

The Vampire’s Brief Decline into the Proletariat ..................................................49

The Reemergence of the Byronic Vampire ...........................................................51

The Age of Progress in Vampire Fiction ...............................................................53

The Backsliding of Progress in Early 21

Century Vampire Fiction ....................55

WORKS CITED ......................................................................................................................60

CHAPTER 1

THE BIRTH OF THE UNDEAD

A familiar question among horror buffs is this: which do you prefer, zombies or

vampires? Popular culture usually establishes a clear line between the two. There are vampire

stories and there are zombie stories but rarely are there vampire/zombie stories. These

seemingly polar opposite but equally wildly popular depictions of the undead are not all that

different, or at least they did not begin that way. To better understand the differences

between vampires and zombies from the perspective of American contemporary popular

culture, we must interrogate their respective histories and evolution, both of which are long

and immersed in fact, fiction, superstition, film, politics, and culture. These two monsters

originate from the same place: fear and misunderstanding of ourselves. A close examination

of the shifting social and historical contexts surrounding these cultural touchstones reveals

such close links that the very question of their distinction may itself warrant further

investigation. Vampires and zombies might embody tactile differences that are widely

apparent to those who know their lore but in reality the two are in perpetual flux, morphing

one into the other, then back apart. Through this perpetual ebb and flow of old and new

myths, they continue to both evolve and regress, all the while borrowing bits and pieces from

the other’s respective story, thus blending each back together into a singular core being.

Vampires and zombies are not as different as they seem but are really two sides of the same

coin, and their similarities become evident when reading these two creations together.

Although both born of the graveyard, vampires and zombies walk different paths in their un-

lives because of the social framework placed upon them by their respective cultures

throughout history. Essentially, they are divided by class and social hierarchy. While sharing

the same humble origins in folklore, over time the vampire comes to represent the aristocratic

elite while the zombie remains true to its roots and mirrors the struggles of the poor,

undereducated masses, thus making each monster a representative of a soldier in class

warfare. Because of the fascination with both vampires and zombies in contemporary

American pop-culture, we can presume that these creatures resonate deeply with people.

Whether or not people are attracted to their more superficial elements—the sensuality of the

vampire or the goriness of the zombie—ultimately, there is a deeper connection at hand

between people and their monsters. Monsters represent the fears we see within ourselves, and

this thesis will argue that our fear of an extreme binary class system manifests in the stories

of the zombie and the vampire. Because of the immense popularity of these revenants,

especially in contemporary American culture, to ignore the political commentary behind their

representations is to ignore the fears within ourselves of ourselves.

OLKLORIC

AMPIRE

Stories of the undead, which continue to haunt the living, predate Bram Stoker’s

popularization of the myth with his classic 1897 novel Dracula. Although much of the

vampire’s identity that is recognized today originates from this widely popular novel, prior to

its popularity the vampire was a very different being. Bela Lugosi, the actor famously known

for playing the titular role in the 1931 film Dracula, acknowledges the hybridization of the

character a melding of fact and fiction when he explains:

Although Dracula is a fanciful tale of a fictional character, it is actually a story
which has many elements of truth. I was born and reared in almost the exact same
location of the story, and I came to know that what is looked upon merely as a
superstition of ignorant people, is really based on facts which are literally hair-
raising in their strangeness—but which are true. (Glut 111)

If the vampire of today is a hybrid of folklore and fiction, to understand his current state of

grandeur is to understand his humble origins which predated Stoker by hundreds, even

thousands, of years.

The animated corpse, or “revenant,” has been a fixture in cultures across the world

dating back to ancient times. In his book Vampires Unearthed: The Complete Multimedia

Vampire & Dracula Bibliography, Martin V. Riccardo catalogues the widespread and ancient

belief in the revenant: he explains how “Paleolithic man coated their corpses in blood-red

ocher” (4); how in the British isles “large stones … were placed on graves, perhaps in an

attempt to prevent the dead from rising” (4); how ancient Greeks “pour[ed] blood onto graves

in the belief this could nourish the dead”(4); and how the Assyrian Empire had “a well-

defined concept of a being that returned from the dead and fed on the blood of the living” (4).

Riccardo demonstrates a vast range of superstitious belief in varying times and cultures that

the dead may rise from their graves, which shows a fundamental uniformity in human’s fear

of the undead. According to the anthropologist Charles Wallace, in many of these same

Paleolithic burials, the legs of the corpse were bound. This practice suggests both a belief

that the dead could potentially walk, and a desire to prevent this from happening. Thus,

reading these preliterate burials as texts, stories of malevolent revenants may be the earliest

stories told. Theresa Bane echoes Riccardo's research regarding the Assyrian’s fearful myths

of the undead in her expansive Encyclopedia of Vampire Mythology, and tells us that one of

the earliest extant examples of human writing is a spell to ward off this Assyrian “Ekimmou”

(7).There is no doubt that people feared death, or the dead, across the world but they differed

in their perceptions of the dead. In some cultures, such as the ancient Greeks and those of the

Paleolithic period, the living dealt with the dead by appeasing them with blood. This

relationship seems to show more acceptance of death, or at least a willingness to cooperate

with it. Those in prehistoric Europe and the Assyrian Empire, according to Riccardo, do not

show this same desire to work with the inevitability of death. Instead, they try to run or hide

from it, which in turn leads to haunting, or sometimes worse: their own demise. Being a

reflection of any given culture, as the culture changes so does its vampire. The vampire is the

monster in the mirror: a reflection of ourselves. While the vampire in contemporary pop-

culture is multi-faceted, just as we are, our original relationship with the vampire remains.

Although vampires are known for being blood-suckers, not all folkloric vampires had

such refined tastes and preferred the consumption of human flesh to blood, much like the

contemporary zombie. More of a walking corpse, he simply rose to feed on or harm the

living with no other drive; his actions were mindless, primitive, and zombie-like. In a Greek

myth, the revenant rises from his grave to consume the entrails of the living (Lee 303),

behavior modern readers would associate more strongly with zombies. This particular

creature, called the vrykolaka, might “torture a man or kill him so as to eat his liver and other

inner organs” (Lee 303). The brutal behavior of the ancient revenant is atypical of the

modern vampire who is delicate and refined when preying upon his victim: some even

imbibe blood out of crystal chalices.

As Paul Barber points out, when discussing some of the

This happens in Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire.

differences between the folkloric and fictional vampire, “The [fictional vampire] sucks blood

from the neck of the victim, for example, while the other—when he sucks blood at all—

attacks the chest area of the victim, in the vicinity of the heart, with only rare exceptions” (4).

Again, here is an attack on the body—the vital organs, specifically—which is a target for

modern zombies. The gorging of vital organs is a key trope in the contemporary zombie

genre, especially seen in any of George A. Romero’s films.

His zombies tear away at a

person and go straight for their entrails. Later, after Romero establishes the zombie in film,

another popular trope which appears is the need for zombies to eat brains—again, another

vital organ—which becomes their primary source of food. Although the contemporary

zombie won’t make an appearance for several hundred years, the genesis of its myth sprouts

from that of the vampire. This blurring of lines between vampire and what eventually evolves

into the zombie occurs several times throughout history as vampires begin to establish a more

complex identity.

Unlike most literary vampires, those who became folkloric vampires upon death were

often the dregs of society in life. Harry Senn, in his work Were-Wolf and Vampire in

Romania, writes:

The lesson of vampire creatures in Romania is that there are people who are
wretched from life before they are ready to give it up; that is, who die a violent,
sudden death. Or, there are others, who commit suicide, whose relationship with
life is no less unresolved. And finally, there are those who die without benefit of
the ceremonies of the Church, and who therefore wander between life and the
other world, unable to enter the latter. (40)

Whereas in folklore those who differed from the norm and were considered socially

unacceptable or sinful were fated for vampirism, subsequent fictional vampires are generally

chosen because something about them is special.

Whereas the fictional vampire tends to be tall, thin, and pale, the folkloric vampire is

usually short, plump, and ruddy or dark in complexion. The two would be unlikely to meet

socially: the fictional vampire resides in castles and is often wealthy and of nobility, while

Romero is the father of the contemporary zombie who will be discussed at greater length in chapter three.

i.e. in Interview with the Vampire, Louis is chosen for his beauty; in Twilight, Bella is chosen because of

her ability to block vampires or telepaths from reading her mind.

the folkloric vampire takes his rest in graveyards and is of peasant stock (Barber 4). The

folkloric vampire is born from the imagination of the poor who had limited resources and

education, while the fictional vampire was spawned by the nobility, who gifted him with all

of their invaluable assets. There are no reports of folkloric vampires showing any sort of

cunning, strategy or intelligence. Whereas the folkloric vampires rely mainly on brute force

and fear, the fictional vampire possesses the powers of manipulation, coercion, and seduction

to acquire his needs; the last of which has become the trademark for the modern vampire and

one that is absent in the folkloric vampire.

AMPIRE AND THE

REATURE IN THE

ENTURY

It is in the early 19

century when the shift from undead corpse to undead Casanova

occurs in John Polidori’s 1819 novella, “The Vampyre”. This drastic change is primarily

rooted in the class promotion the vampire receives when he is taken out of the Eastern

European peasant graveyard and placed into Regency England. Because of his newly

bestowed aristocratic rank, the vampire now enjoys the fruits of his privilege: wealth,

mobility, and power. Although the Romantics gave the vampire reflections of their own

sexual liberties and progressivism in gender politics, they also passed onto it their

(respective) nobility.

The vampire appears in previous English texts such as Byron’s 1813

“The Giaour” and Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1816 “Christabel” but vampire literature does

not become a genre unto itself until John Polidori’s “The Vampyre”. It is perhaps no

coincidence that this genre was born in England. As Carol A. Senf writes in her book, The

Vampire in 19

Century English Literature, “While the belief in vampires is almost

universal, England seems to have been singularly free from this superstition. Both Kittredge

in Witchcraft in Old and New England and Summers in The Vampire in Europe refer to the

twelfth-century accounts of William Newburgh and William of Malmesbury as the only

historical accounts of this belief in England” (19). The 19

century British Romantic

movement was a perfect laboratory for the development of the literary vampire. Well-

On the issue of gender politics, see “Christabel” and Carmilla, two texts which will be discussed at

length in the duration of this chapter.

traveled writers, such as Coleridge, the Shelleys and Byron, brought back with them the

spores of various cultural vampire superstitions to England, whose relative lack of

preexisting vampire myths made it a perfect Petri dish in which the idea could grow. The

English were unique in that they were free from the governing constraints of the more-or-less

universal superstitions that the rest of the world held and were therefore able to create a new

vampire: a hybrid that sprung from a mixture of various folkloric myths coupled with the

untapped imagination of writers who were willing to explore and play with the possibilities

of a creature that had evoked dread in humanity for thousands of years.

In the following chapter, vampire fiction, which began in the early 19

century and

led up to Bram Stoker’s Dracula, is explored. Although Dracula is famous for putting the

vampire on the literary map, it is born out of Polidori’s earlier, lesser-known work, “The

Vampyre”. However, regardless of its lack of success in comparison to Stoker’s novel, “The

Vampyre” is responsible for both the inception of the vampire in literary fiction and for

creating the pivotal archetypal vampire which continues to inspire us today. Although

Polidori’s work is the first that contains a vampire in fiction, which in turn influences

countless future authors, he, as a singular entity, is only marginally responsible for the

popularization of the vampire. Byron, although not the author of “The Vampyre”, arguably

had a large amount of influence upon its creation: he is the person on whom the vampire,

Lord Ruthven, is based and the person who inspired Polidori to write the character into

existence. In 1816, during a stormy night in Geneva, Byron challenged his society friends to

a ghost-story-telling competition. The game not only yielded the first vampire story in

literature but is equally responsible for inspiring Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.

The vampire and the Creature, born together, remain inextricably bound to this day.

Shelley imposes folkloric vampire traits upon the Creature by making him a hideous pariah

while Polidori elevates his vampire beyond these crude characteristics making him a

handsome socialite. After establishing that Dracula is the offshoot of Poldori’s monster and

the Creature and the vampire were born together, Franco Moretti argues:

The novel credited for being the first work of science fiction (Ginn).

Frankenstein and Dracula lead parallel lives. They are indivisible, because
complementary, figures; the two horrible faces of a single society, its extremes:
the disfigured wretch and the ruthless proprietor. The worker and capital: ‘the
whole of society must split into the two classes of property owners and
propertyless workers.’(67-68)

As brothers, the vampire and the Creature represent the twin-faced nightmare of social

extremes: the wealthy elite who prey upon the less fortunate and the oppressed nameless

member of the working class who is exploited by his oppressors and marginalized outside of

the ranks of high society. Reborn as children of the industrial revolution, the revenants of

folklore take on new life in popular and literary culture beginning with the Romantics and

their new twist on an old story. With several people involved in crafting these horror stories,

ideas were borrowed, exchanged, and refined within their peer writing group: Lord Byron is

often credited ownership of the ideas for the respective works despite not having written

either. It is then no surprise to find that the Creature and the vampire are more similar than

realized at first glance. Both are, essentially, the typical Byronic hero: a brilliant but self-

destructive type who wanders and searches, usually plagued by some dark secret or sin, who

appeals to modern readers because he stands apart from society. He is “larger than life”, and

“with the loss of his titanic passions, his pride, and his certainty of self-identity, he loses also

his status as [a traditional] hero” (Thorslev 187). Although we dislike them, we understand

and feel compassion for their flaws, which conflicts our feelings about their behaviors or

achievements. Although Lord Ruthven is far less of a sympathetic character than the

Creature, he still evokes a sense of excitement in his readers when juxtaposed against the

rather impotent Aubrey. In all actuality, it is probable that the Creature is the more likeable

and more “human” in character of the two monsters; initially, the Creature’s only flaw is his

hideousness while internally he is filled with empathy, compassion, and caring for others.

Lord Ruthven is the inverse of the Creature: although he is stunningly handsome, his internal

qualities do not match his exterior. He is selfish, cruel, and enjoys the suffering of others.

Whereas the Creature longs for companionship and acceptance among humans, Lord

Ruthven is a solitary creature, “a lover of solitude and silence” (Morrison and Baldick 13).

Physically, outside of their aesthetic appearances, both wield supernatural strength and the

ability to destroy at will with the slightest of touches. Both display keen intelligence,

although Lord Ruthven is introduced as already cunning while the Creature (like all humans)

must work for his wits and toil through books and histories in order to attain an

understanding of philosophy, art, and language—in a word, humanity. Because his fictional

birth coincides with his textual birth, he is more malleable as a character, unlike the vampire

whose birth is implied before his appearance in text. The Creature models himself after the

De Lacey family, saying, “I looked upon them as superior beings, who would be the arbiters

of my future destiny (Shelley 81). He isn’t born with the extraordinary gifts of knowledge

and compassion, he must learn them and although he acquires some of this knowledge

through books, the rest must be learned by observing humanity itself. Lord Ruthven already

possesses intelligence and understands how to work within human culture, thus he doesn’t

appreciate these gifts as well as the Creature might. In fact, he uses his knowledge of

humanity directly against humanity itself by hunting in plain sight throughout the upper class

streets of London.

Examining the monsters side by side, it becomes apparent that while the Creature

looks and is treated like a folkloric revenant, he possesses more internal traits of the

contemporary vampire than Lord Ruthven does. Lord Ruthven, although now at a substantial

distance from his humble folkloric predecessors, is far less sympathetic than the Creature and

the contemporary vampire he so closely resembles. The contemporary vampire remains in

perpetual struggle with his “nature” and conscience. He is drawn toward humans, no longer

just to feed, but to observe, understand, and even love them. He values their mortality as a

gift of fleeting beauty that he is no longer capable of holding. Many contemporary vampires

have become quite similar to Shelley’s creation of 1816. Yet when most people today think

of the Creature, they often don’t recollect him for his admirable traits. Popular depictions

have reduced him into a mindless hulk that seeks to destroy thoughtlessly. Consider the way

he is portrayed in popular culture, whether it is in film or a Halloween costume. He does not

speak or think, he only grunts or growls. Although never described as nimble, Shelley’s

Creature did not have difficulty getting around, whereas today he walks laboriously, hulking

around slowly and dragging his feet, at times with his arms outstretched as if under

hypnotism. Upon his inception, Victor describes him as having yellow skin, while today’s

Creature is generally depicted as having green skin. In observing the combination of these

new depictions of the Creature, it becomes clear that over time he has changed. Yet, his

change is not as gracious as that of the vampire. Although his potential for humanity far

outshines the 19

century vampire, because he is a social outcast, the Creature is degraded in

future depictions. Despite his efforts to become part of the world, the world consistently

shuns him—whereas—the vampire, who is socially accepted, has no interest in society other

than exploiting it. Despite his honorable intentions, without property, wealth, or social status,

the Creature is destined for failure in a growing capitalistic society. Regardless of how hard

he tries, instead of evolving into something more like us, the Creature, at the hand of society,

devolves into what the vampire once was—a zombie. However, this transformation doesn’t

even begin for at least another hundred years, and the Creature as a character outside of

Frankenstein is non-existent in the 19

century. It is only in the 20

century when

Frankenstein’s Creature is resurrected from his grave and given a new face. Meanwhile,

during the remainder of the 19

century, the vampire receives ample literary attention.

Therefore, the second chapter traces the literary history and career of the vampire and its

relation to cultural mores in the 19

century while the third explores the vampire’s place in

century culture, when the Creature/zombie figure of folkloric origin—repressed in 19

century depictions—returns in force.

CHAPTER 2

THE VAMPIRE OF THE 19TH CENTURY

When the 19

century Romantics retold the folkloric stories of Eastern Europe, they

forever altered the face of the vampire making him an enemy of both the lower class and

women. By removing him from serfdom and placing him among aristocrats in Regency

England, he became the quintessential rags-to-riches story. Whereas vampirism was

previously fated for the allegedly worst members of society who deviated from social norms

such as the insane, the sinful, and the outcasts (Senn 40), it is now reserved for the social

elite. This accelerated promotion in class allowed for a creature that operated on pure id to

now disguise himself amidst the highest ranking socialites, thus introducing the hybrid of

monstrosity and elitism, a combination that remains characteristic of the vampire today. His

newfound aristocratic provenance grants him unmitigated freedom to indulge his primal

desires, principally his sexuality. Whereas the folkloric vampire certainly indulges his

primordial instinct by force, he would not be described as sexual or sensual, two terms

frequently applied to later vampires. The Romantic vampire enjoys seduction and revels in

the conquest of his victims, a pivotal point in the vampire’s evolution. This chapter focuses

on the social advancement of the 19

century vampire and how his endowment of power,

wealth, and rank makes him sexually desirable and grants him allowance for greater sexual

freedom than in his preceding years, while simultaneously acknowledging the roles and

gender politics of women, both as vampires and victims of vampires. Tension over the false

dichotomy of female identity, with women being categorized as either pure or unholy, begins

as early as “Christabel” and eventually “The Vampyre”, but after the popularization of

vampire fiction through the 1845-47 series, Varney the Vampire, it becomes a clear and

recognizable trait of the genre in Dracula.

ORD

YRON

THE

UINTESSENTIAL

AMPIRE

The vampire of the 19

century is unprecedented. He is able to exist within society,

masquerading as human. He has learned social mannerisms, politeness, grace, and etiquette.

Yet despite all of its extraordinary new human characteristics, he still embodies the sign of

Other to its human companions and acquaintances. Although he is able to fit into society for

the first time, upon closer inspection he is recognized as something different. He is an

outcast, a rebel, a melancholy tortured soul. These new traits can be traced back to the source

of the newly emerging vampire of the 19

century as we look back at the Byronic hero found

in Byron’s first widely popular work, Childe Harold, in 1812.

Lord Byron’s thinly-veiled autobiographical work, Childe Harold, lays the

groundwork for the emergence of the soon-to-be vampire. Particularly in Cantos 1 and 2,

Byron paints himself (via his protagonist) as larger than life. Harold is “shameless” and

“given revel to ungodly glee” (McGann 14-15). He has grown bored of “earthly things”

(McGann 16) as he has exhausted himself with lechery and sexual escapades. Harold simply

goes through the motions of life; although he is alive, he doesn’t find much that makes life

worth living. He is, metaphorically speaking, the living dead. These descriptions become

synonymous with future vampires as they, too, lead lives of decadence and lechery which

almost always gives them reason for unhappiness and lack of fulfillment throughout their

eternal damnation. Infamous vampires of the 20

century like Angel from Joss Whedon’s

1997-2003 television series, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Edward Cullen of Stephanie Meyer’s

2005 novel, Twilight, and Louis from Anne Rice’s 1976 novel, Interview with the Vampire,

and future segments of her series, The Vampire Chronicles, all share this fate, a topic that

will be explored more deeply in the subsequent chapter. Both Byron and the literary vampire

crave something beyond what they already have—in Byron’s case, Lady Charlotte Harley or

Ianthe (her fictional characterization in the poem), the person to whom the poem is dedicated,

and in the case of the vampire, his former mortality. They are both driven by the

unattainable, and in pursuing it they wreak havoc on those who stand in their paths—usually

young women.

Byron’s personal physician and friend, John Polidori, had firsthand insights into

Byron’s proclivities for women and witnessed the way in which he abused his position of

The concept of women as vampire victims also becomes popularized in the 19

century. This literal

attack upon women becomes more deeply explored throughout the chapter while interrogating future texts
which are modeled after Byron’s.

power as a nobleman. After experiencing his fill of his friend’s exploitations, he produced

“The Vampyre”, the novella responsible for fusing together the many disparate parts of the

vampire myth into a coherent literary genre (Hamilton 138). As Ana María Hernández notes

in her article “Vampires and Vampiresses: A Reading of 62”, by “deal[ing] with the

destructive effects of an uncontrolled boundless egoism” (571) and directly modeling his

antagonist Lord Ruthven (the same name used for another thinly-veiled and negatively

portrayed Byron in Lady Caroline Lamb’s novel Glenarvon) after Lord Byron, Polidori

created the prototype for generations of future vampires to come—a seductive nobleman who

delights both in preying upon the innocence of women and in the misery that consequentially

plagues their male protectors after he defiles their women.

ORDLY

AMPIRE

“The Vampyre” is both historically and mythologically significant in that it moves

vampire folklore out of the village and into upper-class society. By giving him high social

rank and the means for international travel, Polidori sets the momentum of the aristocratic

vampire in motion and inspires later vampire nobles such as Sir Francis Varney in Thomas

Peckett Prest’s 1845-47 series, Varney the Vampire, Countess Mircalla Karnstein in J.

Sheridan Le Fanu’s 1872, Carmilla, and undoubtedly the most famous vampire to date,

Count Dracula in Bram Stoker’s 1897, Dracula, the novel that superseded Polidori’s in

defining lordly vampirism for over the last century (Morrison and Baldick xii).

But before

examining his successors and understanding the influence his work had upon them, it is

necessary to study the crucial transformations that begin to take place with Polidori’s “The

Vampyre”. Polidori critically changes the mythos when he graduates the vampire from

haunting the decrepit graveyard to strolling along the bustling streets of high-society. Beyond

his material conditions having changed he also evolves from grotesque to dapper and from a

mindless hungry beast into a polite, well-spoken socialite who dazzles and charms. Herein is

born a new hunting ground, not to mention a new hunter, with new prey. Lord Ruthven is a

Scholars often contest to whom the work, Varney the Vampire belongs, the main credit usually attributed

to Thomas Peckett Prest or James Malcolm Rymer. Also, some scholars believe that due to the epic length of
the text, various other unknown authors may have contributed to the series as well.

threat to polite society and its values of chastity and purity: “…his character was dreadfully

vicious, for that the possession of irresistible powers of seduction, rendered his licentious

habits more dangerous to society” (Morrison and Baldick 7). He enjoys corrupting the core

of these values from the inside out as he purposely seeks to defile the innocent and pure,

most notably women. Lord Ruthven’s victims “should be hurled from the pinnacle of

unsullied virtue, down to the lowest abyss of infamy and degradation” (Morrison and Baldick

7). Not only do his powers of seduction gain him the blood he needs to “live,” but he also

enjoys the game of cat and mouse that goes along with it and the surge of power he

experiences in bringing someone high-class down to the lowest depths of society. Lord

Ruthven, or the vampire itself, has at this point in history become more than the stuff of

nightmares born from the villages of peasants. He sits at the top of the food chain as a

symbol of wealth and nobility, and here begins his reign of class and sexual warfare upon the

less privileged or fortunate. Lord Ruthven’s nobility is worth more than human nobility

because he is literally a superior being to humans; he is a new class or übermensch who treats

those beneath him as mere playthings. The vampire, through his nobility and superhuman

powers, is thereby able to have anything or anyone he desires.

APE

ETAPHOR IN

AMPIRE

ICTION

Although it is obvious that Lord Ruthven preys upon women in a sexual sense, this

trope of the vampire does not become overt until the next majorly popular piece of vampire

fiction, Varney the Vampire. Not generally praised for its literary quality, the monstrously

lengthy serial (estimated at over 650,000 words) was published in cheap pamphlets known as

“Penny Dreadfuls”, which were inexpensive at a penny per purchase and thus widely

accessible to larger audiences. In James Twitchell’s book The Living Dead: A Study of the

Vampire in Romantic Literature, he writes that “Varney established the vampire solidly in

the culture of the most common reader, where he has still continued to thrive” (124). If

Varney is responsible for popularizing the genre of vampire fiction because of its

accessibility to the middle-class masses, then it is equally accountable for popularizing one of

the most infamous literary tropes in vampire fiction emulated nearly 50 years later in

Dracula and countless other vampire stories today—the vampire attack as metaphor for

male-on-female rape:

With a sudden rush that could not be foreseen—with a strange howling cry that
was enough to waken the terror in every breast, the figure seized the long tresses
of her hair, and twining them around his bony hands he held her to the bed. Then
she screamed […] Shriek followed shriek in rapid succession. The bedclothes fell
in a heap by the side of the bed—she was dragged by her long silken hair […]
The glassy, horrible eyes of the figure ran over that angelic form with a hideous
satisfaction—horrible profanation, he drags her head to the bed’s edge […] He
forces it back by the long hair still entwined in his grasp. With a plunge, he seizes
her neck in his fang-like teeth—a gush of blood and a hideous sucking noise
follows. (Prest)

The entwining of Sir Varney’s hands in his victim’s hair implies a direct controlling of her

sexuality: her hair is described as “long” and “silken” and mentioned several times

throughout the passage as a reminder of her fairness and femininity—here— juxtaposed with

a violent and aggressive act committed against her. The link between hair and sexuality is a

common symbolic device, as seen in other well-known 19

century English works such as

Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Robert Browning’s “Porphyria’s Lover”.

In “Goblin

Market” Laura “clipped a precious golden lock […] then sucked their fruit globes fair or red”

(Abrams 126-128) in a clearly sexual exchange, while in “Porphyria’s Lover” the narrator

focuses several times on her “yellow hair” (Abrams 20) that tumbles freely around her “white

shoulder bare” (Abrams 16) and eventually her hair, as symbol for her sexuality, becomes the

very thing which destroys her when the narrator strangles her. One still might argue that

Varney’s passage contains coincidental symbolism between hair and female sexuality, but

when looking at the description of “the bedclothes […] in a heap by the side of the bed”, it

might be hard to defend why Varney would need to disrobe the bed of his victim before

dining upon her. The imagery of the sheets and blankets upon the floor suggest the need to

clear the bed of any obstacles that might interfere with his conquest of her. The use of the

word “bedclothes” may also imply the nightgown of his victim, that which raises an entirely

new question: why would Varney need to unclothe his victim before sucking her blood? He

also takes delight in the victimization of the woman, just as Lord Ruthven is entertained by

defiling innocence. As Judith E. Johnson notes in her article, “Women and Vampires:

There are no page numbers in the serial, only chapters.

Her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, also is known for his artwork in which women are depicted with

long luxuriant hair. In addition to this familial connection, Christina Rossetti is also the niece of John Polidori.

Nightmare or Utopia”, “He wakes her in order to enjoy her screams while he yanks her about

by the hair in an exaggerated, stereotypical cave-man style violation” (74) as his eyes run

“over than angelic form with a hideous satisfaction” (Prest). And perhaps the most forward

language of all that depicts rape is the “plunge” of his fangs followed by “a gush of blood”;

the loss of a girl’s maidenhead, followed by “sucking noise”, a parallel to the erotic sucking

heard in Rossetti’s Goblin Market: “She sucked and sucked and sucked the more / Fruits

which that unknown orchard bore; / She sucked until her lips were sore” (Abrams 134-136).

David Morrill explains the correlation between Rossetti’s vampiric imagery and her Uncle

John Polidori’s work, “The Vampyre”: “The implications of pleasure, pain, sucking, and

enervation suggest some sort of vampirism, however muted and altered, and Polidori’s work

would have given Christina Rossetti free and unmistakable access to the psychodynamics of

the myth” (2). Rossetti also perpetuates the vampiric trope of male-on-female rape when the

goblins violate Laura by both physically harming her and forcing sexually symbolic foreign

objects into her mouth. The goblins:

Elbowed and jostled her

Clawed with their nails,

Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,

Tore her gown and soiled her stocking,

Twitched her hair out by the roots,

Stamped upon her tender feet,

Held her hands and squeezed their fruits

Against her mouth to make her eat. (Abrams 400-407)

This now commonly critiqued trope of male-on-female rape, as well as other now-common

vampire tropes in contemporary vampire tales, was popularized by Varney and its mass

following. Vampire scholar, James B. Twitchell argues:

One cannot dismiss Varney, especially because of its clear and continuing impact
on the vampire stories of the midcentury, to say nothing of our own cultural
resurrections of the vampire. The initiation of the heroine through sex, the
vampire’s middle-European background, the quasi-medical scientific
explanations, the midnight vigils, the mob scene (which became so stylized in
James Whale’s horror films at Universal Studios), the hunt and the chase, all these
and more are in Varney. They have all become clichés today, not because we have
sifted through the story to find the moments of impact, but rather because our
great-grandparents did. In fact, much of the credit we give Bram Stoker really
belongs to the authors of Varney. (124)

Often overlooked because of its poor literary quality, Varney does not receive the amount of

attention warranted in literary criticism concerned with the vampire fiction genre. Although

the story is at times irregular, haphazardly written, and lacking depth, it is important because

its wide contemporary popularity makes it responsible for diverse changes in the face of the

vampire in fiction. Though still a nobleman, Varney, the first vampire available to the

masses, is written as an ambassador of the larger cultural mores of the time, rapidly

approaching Victorianism, and the vampire’s sensuality becomes more about male assault

and less about female sexuality, as it was in Coleridge’s earlier work “Christabel”.

ENDER

OLITICS AND THE

EMALE

AMPIRE

Carmilla, the novel based upon “Christabel”, despite being published after Varney, is

far ahead of its time: it depicts an overt sexual relationship between the first female vampire

in fiction, Carmilla, and her female victim/lover, Laura. In addition to the progressive themes

of bringing a female vampire into the genre and using solely female characters as the focal

points for the story, Anne Williams, editor of Three Vampire Tales, claims:

Carmilla (1872) is the most significant of the Victorian vampire tales because it
links Romantic vampires and their late-Victorian ‘grandchild,’ Dracula. Like
Coleridge’s poem, “Christabel”, which LeFanu had read and admired, Carmilla
concerns the introduction of a female vampire into the household of a widowed
father (whose name we never learn) and his motherless daughter Laura. (11)

The presence of the female vampire in this story, and in its spiritual forebear, Coleridge’s

“Christabel,” makes the absence of female agency in Stoker all the more remarkable: clearly,

by Dracula’s time, it is possible to imagine both a female vampire and a vampire story in

which demonstrate agency.

In addition to influencing LeFanu and Stoker, Coleridge’s “Christabel” is an

important component in the development of the vampire myth in literature. Although

composed in 1797, it was not published until 1816—at Byron’s insistence, according to

Coleridge. Also at Byron’s request, the Romantic poet party of 1816 at Villa Diodati amused

themselves by reading Gothic novels as well as Coleridge’s poem, “Christabel” and only

after exhausting the entertainments of the poem did Byron propose the ghost story

competition (Williams 7). “Christabel”, an undeniable influence upon the works created that

evening, echoes similar themes to those of Mary Shelley. Both are interested in gender

politics and equality. Shelley, the renowned female Romantic, was concerned with such

social issues partially due to the influence of her mother Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the

1792, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. Other than creating a monster that represents

the disenfranchised class, Shelley also uses him to demonstrate the costly price of oppressing

women—every woman who comes in contact with his prideful, selfish creator dies. As the

daughter of the woman who composed the first feminist text, while influenced by the

progressive views of women in Coleridge’s work, Shelley and her peers explore more

progressive depictions of women in the Romantic age.

In “Christabel”, the first female vampire, Geraldine, is a brand new take on viewing

the female as both monstrous and alluring. Geraldine is a direct representation of sin as she is

described with serpent-like features and makes hissing noises as she “[draws] in her breath

with a hissing sound” (Coleridge 447) and looks out with “those shrunken serpent eyes”

(Coleridge 591), both allusions to the biblical serpent that represents sin. Yet upon her first

introduction, she is described as a lovely vision in white with jewels in her hair and a soft,

sweet voice. Although women have been cast in a role of sin many times before (most

notably in the Bible’s account of the Garden of Eden, what makes Geraldine more

threatening than usual is not just that she tempts others into sin, but specifically that she

tempts another woman into sin and thus defiles her innocence. Whereas men are typically

accepted as being those who eventually take a woman’s innocence, and society has no

qualms with this, Geraldine steps into this prescribed male role, thus stripping power and

privilege from them. She feminizes men and takes from them what they conceive of their

right—sexual access to a woman’s body—and therefore becomes demonized for being a

woman who behaves in the same way a man might. When the story is retold much later at the

outset of the Victorian era, this possibility of female sexual empowerment is quickly stifled, a

good reason why many contemporary readers are unfamiliar with LeFanu’s work. Christabel,

on the other hand, represents all that is pure and holy. Her name is an overt Christian

hybridization of the biblical characters Christ and Abel, both of whom are figures of purity

who inevitably are forced to suffer for their goodness. Although the poem exhibits mutual

attraction and fascination, as opposed to the rape scenes described in other vampire literature,

“Christabel” juxtaposes sin and evil against virtue and innocence by casting each extreme

respectively on Geraldine and Christabel, and in doing so reveals that all that is both pure

and sinful originates from women and thus that all moral responsibility must lie upon

women. The choice to make all characters in these stories women is no oversight. Arthur H.

Nethercot writes, “Geraldine and Carmilla are female vampires; and female vampires are

comparatively rare, at least in the earlier period of vampirology. More than this, the main

victims, Christabel and Laura, are women; and such restriction of sex—women to women—

is even rarer” (32). Coleridge places women in a great position of power by labeling them as

binary extremes within a moral framework which in turn leaves no place of worth for men.

In addition to the threat that a woman can defile another woman’s purity, another threat

present in both stories is that of women in positions of socio-political power. Geraldine’s

father is a Lord, and it is therefore inferred that she, too, is of nobility. She introduces herself,

“My sire is of a noble line, / And my name is Geraldine” (Coleridge 77-78). When the story

is essentially retold in LeFanu’s novella, Carmilla is not just a young maiden in distress but

also a powerful Countess hailing from a “family [that] was very ancient and noble” (LeFanu

30). Coupled with her powers of temptation and sin, arguably female traits, the new female

vampire also possesses the power of the noble elite and thus becomes a larger threat than her

male vampire predecessors. This threat to male patriarchy is further exposed in Carmilla

because of the work’s length and development of ideas in relation to the much shorter poem,

“Christabel”. A long courtship and intimate portrayal of Laura's and Carmilla's relationship

is shown throughout the novella. Whereas Geraldine and Christabel are thrown into a

seemingly torrid encounter during the first night of their acquaintance, Laura and Carmilla’s

relationship grows over many years. Within a few hours of meeting one another, after

drinking wine, Christabel lays upon her bed in a relaxed pose, propped up by her elbow and

watches Geraldine sensually undress herself:

Beneath the lamp the lady bowed

And slowly rolled her eyes around;

Then drawing in her breath aloud,

Like one that shuddered, she unbound

The cincture from beneath her breast:

Her silken robe, and inner vest,

Dropt to her feet, and full in view,

Behold! her bosom and half her side—

A sight to dream of, not to tell! (Coleridge 239-247)

The unbridled display of passion between the two women is found in Geraldine's languid eye

rolling, the sucking in of her breath while shuddering, and of course by disrobing before her

newfound acquaintance, Christabel. The stripping of the bedclothes, although this time

sensual and welcomed instead of a forceful violation, echoes the scene in which Varney, too,

removes the “bedclothes” of his victim prior to ravishing her. Yet this time, the vampiress

Geraldine removes her own clothing before Christabel’s eyes and lures her with sensuality

rather than imposing her sexuality upon her as Varney does to his victim. The enjoyment of

the encounter is mutual as it is written that the sight of her nudity, only visible to Christabel

is “a sight to dream of, not to tell” (Coleridge 247). Assuming this is Christabel's perception

of the situation, being that she is the only person available to react to the display of

Geraldine's body, it means her response is conflicted. While she sees Geraldine's nudity as

something dream-worthy, it is also perceived as something she must never divulge to

anyone—not the experience she witnesses nor her pleasurable reaction to it. Christabel fears

her awakening sensuality because it threatens her sexual innocence while concurrently

stirring her sexual desire for another woman.

Despite the prudish patriarchal climate in late19

century mainstream English

society, under the influence of Coleridge, LeFanu shifts the typical vampire novel from a

dominating, heterosexual, male-centered point of view and revolutionizes the traditional

vampire story. Carmilla gives voices to women, one of whom is an all-powerful vampire.

Although while initiated by metaphorical rape, which Laura seems to enjoy, their relationship

is free of male dominance and concentrated on female desire. Prior to Carmila the sensuality

of the vampire solely resided in his skills of seduction, but she is the first vampire to make

the bite itself overtly sexual and pleasurable to her victim—a similar reaction of pleasure in

conjunction with violation is found in Laura of Rosettti’s “Goblin Market”. Carmilla begins

the affair by forcing herself on Laura when she is a small child. She metaphorically rapes her

by sneaking into her room at night, like a succubus, and as Laura accounts, “She caressed me

with her hands, and lay down beside me on the bed, and drew me towards her, smiling; I felt

immediately delightfully soothed, and fell asleep again. I was wakened by a sensation as if

two needles ran into my breast very deep at the same moment, and I cried out loudly”

(LeFanu 8). The experience, although an obvious euphemism for rape like most vampire

attacks, is one that Laura recalls fondly. It is a memory she calls upon year after year until

Carmilla eventually comes to visit her once more, as a young adult. Here is not the vicious

attack of Varney but a memory of delight which she invokes repeatedly throughout the novel.

Then, of course, that is disrupted by the penetration into her breast. Although some folkloric

vampires have been known to feed upon the chest, the deliberate word choice of “breast”

creates a sexual implication that is not present in prior vampire literature. Never before has a

vampire feeding taken place in such an intimate and sexualized part of the female body. But

much like the feeding of the vampire, the sucking of fruits found within “Goblin Market”

specifically mirrors the female sexual relationship of Carmilla and Laura when sisters Lizzie

and Laura enjoy the erotic fruits together.

Lizzie cries to Laura:

Did you miss me?

Come and kiss me.

Nevermind my bruises,

Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices

Squeezed from goblin fruits for you,

Goblin pulp and goblin dew.

Eat me, drink me, love me;

Laura make much of me. (Abrams 464-472)

Although Lizzie and Laura are sisters who overcome the goblins together, they find

redemption for their sexual sins in one another’s love. While continuing to “suck juices”

from one another, Rossetti perpetuates the eroticization of the poem by retracting the power

of sexuality from the men and placing it within the hands of the women. Between Laura and

Lizzie, there is no forced penetration of objects into their mouths, as with the goblins, only

mutual consenting love. Carmilla, however, forces her fangs inside of Laura’s body and

stands in accordance with a more phallic style of rape.

Whereas Laura and Lizzie feel unabashed love for one another, Laura’s feelings

towards Carmilla are conflicted. She describes feeling “drawn towards her but there was also

something of a repulsion. In this ambiguous feeling, however, the sense of attraction

immensely prevailed. She interested and won me; she was so beautiful and so indescribably

engaging” (LeFanu 27). Once again, the motif of the female vampire being both beautiful

and hideous rears its head but despite the nagging unease in Laura’s stomach she gives

It is interesting that the character name “Laura” appears in both texts.

herself over to the mystical allure of Carmilla. Finally, in one of the most overtly sensual

scenes that depicts their fully blossomed romance, Laura recalls:

…my strange and beautiful companion would take my hand and hold it with a
fond pressure, renewed again and again; blushing softly, gazing in my face with
languid and burning eyes, and breathing so fast that her dress rose and fell with
the tumultuous respiration. It was like the ardor of a love; it embarrassed me; it
was hateful and yet over-powering; and with gloating eyes she drew me to her,
and her hot lips traveled along my cheek in kisses; and she would whisper, almost
in sobs, ‘You are mine, you shall be mine, you and I are one forever.’ Then she
had thrown herself back in her chair, with her small hands over her eyes, leaving
me trembling. (LeFanu 32)

This slow building of desire and friendship between the women, which literally takes years,

demonstrates a more realistic view into their relationship not only as lovers but as individuals

as well. Instead of characterizing each woman as the embodiment of either good or evil, they

are written as whole characters, each driven by their own personalities and desires. Despite

the immense growth LeFanu gives these characters, they are still subject to the rules of the

patriarchy. For engaging in a sexual relationship, one that completely omits men, they are

both punished for their sins.

Stoker responds to this new breed of vampire by painting

Dracula as the only male and central vampire while four of the five women are vampires

subordinate to him: eroticized monsters solely driven by their lust for blood. Daniel Farson

points out that Stoker’s personal life may have led to a negative view of women. He writes,

“When his wife’s frigidity drove him to other women…Bram’s writing showed signs of guilt

and sexual frustration…He probably caught syphilis around the turn of the century, possibly

as early as the year of Dracula, 1897” (Farson 234). By feeling forced to indulge in improper

sexual relationships outside of his marriage during a chaste Victorian era, it is likely that

Stoker resented women because of his wife’s rejection and the illness, and eventual death,

brought upon him by a sexually transmitted disease. Filled with resentment for women, by

eventually omitting the echo of Carmilla in the deleted chapter of Dracula, entitled

“Dracula’s Guest”, and also by recasting the female vampire as subordinate to her male

Carmilla is sentenced to a beheading and Laura is haunted by the memory of her.

counterpart and by stripping her of her nobility, keeping her sinful sexuality as her sole

defining trait, he reduces her to a pittance of her former self.

ICHOTOMY OF

OMEN IN

RACULA

Bram

Stoker’s

Dracula—arguably the best known vampire novel to date—appears in

the late 19

century. This widely-read and canonized work is still looked to as a source of

sorts for our mainstream legends regarding vampires. Once Stoker remolded the vampire, he

relegated women to powerless victimhood and created the mold for future vampires—ruling-

class monsters who use their power not only to oppress the lower classes but also to oppress

women. After he became known as the author who “introduced” the vampire to literary

fiction, some began to criticize Stoker’s capacities of imagination and innovation. In a

negative criticism by A. N. Wilson, who wrote the introduction of the 1983 reissue of

Dracula published by Oxford University Press, he claims:

Stoker was obviously well-enough versed in the better-known sensationalist
vampire literature—Varney the Vampire, Carmilla and so on. It seems that he did
some—but very little—research for his fantasy and that, like Jonathan Harker, he
‘had visited the British Museum, and made

a s

earch among the books and maps in

the Library regarding Transylvania’…[Stoker’s] imagination was not a uniquely
original one. Vampires from Varney and LeFanu; a setting and a personage
hastily ‘got up’ from a few hours in the British Museum. What is there left to say
of Bram Stoker’s originality or achievement? (43)

Wilson makes his opinion clear regarding the ineptitude of Stoker’s scholarship and

originality. Perhaps his criticism is a bit harsh as, although Stoker is clearly influenced by

former works, it would be disingenuous to say that any author is not, at some point and by

some measure, inspired by another. To what extent Stoker was “lazy” about his research is

questionable, too. This is, after all, a work of fiction—fantasy no less—which Wilson is

discussing. Nevertheless, he accurately points out that Stoker is not alone in constructing the

new image of the literary vampire.

Yet, what is worthy of even more criticism is Stoker’s omission of “Dracula’s Guest”.

This title, published as a short story two years after Stoker’s death by permission of his wife,

Florence Stoker, appears to belong to the original Dracula manuscript. Leslie S. Klinger, a

“Dracula’s Guest” is discussed at length in the next subsection.

scholar who worked directly with Stoker’s original manuscript, in his 2008 book, The New

Annotated Dracula, says the following regarding its connection to the novel:

And so what may we make of ["Dracula's Guest"]? Without the name "Dracula"
appearing in the title and [Dracula's] message [sent to the narrator], there would
be very little to connect this traveler's tale with [the novel Dracula]. The style is
completely different; the narrator shares few characteristics with Jonathan Harker;
and the action somehow fails to connect the story set forth in [Dracula]. However,
there are numerous references in the [Dracula] Manuscript to some version of the
tale eventually published as "Dracula's Guest." Most likely, a different draft —
one that identified the narrator as Harker — was included in ... an early version of
[the Dracula manuscript]. It may be that Stoker's publisher requested that the book
be shortened, or the publisher (or Stoker) may have felt that the "stylistic" aspects
of the narrative were more important than its veracity. For whatever reason, the
material was excised, and only later did Stoker return to the material and work it
into its published form. (515)

Yet this deleted ten page chapter is hardly lengthy in comparison to many others: a reader is

left pondering why this particular one was chosen for removal. While Stoker may have been

initially influenced by Carmilla, the novel is far too sexually liberated and progressive

regarding gender politics for mainstream Victorian values, and it is likely that his brief

allusion to the Countess Mircalla in “Dracula’s Guest” conflicted with his (and/or perhaps his

editor’s) overall rudimentary, dichotomous view of women and therefore becomes a very

likely reason as to why it was removed. Concurrently with the removal of this chapter came

the removal of the revolutionary character Carmilla: a female, noble vampire sexually

interested in women. Stoker, upon striking her from his novel, effectively strikes her from

history and devolves the vampire story back to its male-dominated foundation, a genre in

which men decide the fates of women and extort and exploit their sexuality for their own

pleasure.

The

women

Dracula differ from the complex and sexually liberated women of

Carmilla by demonstrating a simplistic and shallow paradoxical nature: they are either

visions of Victorian purity and chastity or sexually promiscuous beasts. After vampire

depictions move away from the sexual liberation bestowed upon them by the Romantics,

Stoker’s Victorian prudery molds his female characters into overly simplified women who

lack complexity and realism. There is, however, one female character of Stoker’s that is not

depicted as either of these shallow false dichotomies. In “Dracula's Guest”, an unnamed

wanderer, probably Jonathan, encounters a female vampire while on his way to the Count's

castle. The narrator wanders into a haunted graveyard and happens upon a white marble

sepulcher flooded in moonlight which reads:

COUNTESS DOLINGEN OF GRATZ

IN STYRIA

SOUGHT AND FOUND DEATH

1801. (LeFanu 62)

The parallel between the deceased in “Dracula’s Guest” and the vampire heroine, Carmilla, is

no coincidence. Carmilla opens with, “In Styria, we, though by no means magnificent

people...” (LeFanu 5). Styria is also echoed upon the Countesses' tombstone. This is now the

third time in literature that vampires are represented as members of the noble class, the first

two being in Polidori's “The Vampyre” and again thereafter in LeFanu's Carmilla. But

furthermore, what links Dracula and Carmilla even more intensely through this small epitaph

is the still unique character of a vampire noble, and even rarer, one who is a woman.

Although Carmilla is followed more intimately and for a longer duration throughout

the novel, and we therefore have a better understanding of her political, social, economic, and

persuasive powers than the undead Countess Dolingen, the latter's short story reveals her

own strength and power. The elusive Countess Dolingen is more or less an implicit character

as the connection between herself and the wolf, which appears at the end of the chapter, is

not overtly expressed. Yet, because of Dracula's ability to shift into animal forms, one being

a wolf, there is a connection between the undead countess and the animal.

Shortly after reading the tomb marker, Jonathan finds a warning atop of the sepulcher

which reads, “The dead travel fast” (Stoker 62), a phrase that resounds in Francis Ford

Coppola’s 1992 film, Dracula. Seeking refuge from a storm in the ominous Countess’ tomb,

two flashes of lightning briefly illuminate the darkness. The first exposes “a beautiful

woman, with rounded cheeks and red lips, seemingly sleeping on a bier” (Stoker 62), and the

second flash “seemed to strike through to the earth, blasting and crumbling the marble, as in

a burst of flame. [Thereafter] The dead woman rose for a moment of agony, while she was

lapped in the flame, and her bitter scream of pain was drowned in the thundercrash” (Stoker

63). The last thing he hears before losing consciousness is her scream mingled “with the

howling of the wolves” (Stoker 63). Although it is never stated who this woman is, it is

probable that this is the Countess Dolingen. She is depicted as both beautiful and terrifying,

both displays of power, and her cries or screams are linked with the cries of the wolves. Once

Jonathan regains consciousness he is unable to move or feel much other than what he

describes as “an icy feeling at the back of my neck and all the way down my spine […] but

there was in my breast a sense of warmth which was, by comparison, delicious. It was a

nightmare—a physical nightmare, if one may use such an expression; for some heavy weight

on my chest made it difficult for me to breathe” (Stoker 63). The weight described, in the

context of a nightmare, resembles the legend of the succubus haunting her male victims in

the middle of their slumber as she was said to perch upon their chests and subsequently cause

difficulty breathing. On the other hand, as the succubus legend goes, he experiences pleasure

from the encounter—the only pleasure throughout his entire body that is simultaneously

wracked by cold, numbness, and fear. However, Jonathan does not encounter the

aforementioned beauty in the tomb sitting atop him, but instead finds a wolf. With something

lapping at his throat, the area at which vampires now feed, Jonathan sees above him “two

great flaming eyes of a gigantic wolf […] its sharp white teeth gleamed in the gaping red

mouth” (Stoker 63). The fixation on the red mouth and gleaming teeth is seen over and again

throughout Dracula when any of the female vampires or Dracula are physically described. In

Dracula, when Jonathan first sees the Weird Sisters, he describes their beauty and lastly

focuses on their mouths: “All three had brilliant white teeth that shone like pearls against the

ruby of their full lips” (Stoker 43). Another interesting parallel between Jonathan’s encounter

with the wolf and his encounter with the Weird Sisters occurs in this same part of the novel.

He is conflicted by the opposing feelings he experiences by being in their presence. He says,

“They made me feel an uneasy mix of emotions. They were lovely, and yet I felt a kind of

deadly fear” (Stoker 43). Similar to his confused bodily sensations while the wolf is licking

his neck, Jonathan is torn between sensuality and the fear of sensuality, explicitly the

sensuality of an aggressive woman.

Before

Carmilla, fiction had not yet been introduced to the female vampire and since

Stoker was influenced by LeFanu's work, he carries on this new character-type in the omitted

chapter. Yet, regardless of Stoker's admiration of LeFanu's work, and his homage to it in

“Dracula's Guest”, that chapter which was heavily based around such a progressive vampire

was removed. In Our Vampires, Ourselves, Nina Auerbach argues that, “...Stoker's most

significant revision excised from his manuscript the shadow of Carmilla and everything she

represented” (66). While Auerbach, too, acknowledges the importance of the removal of this

chapter, she does not ask why; the answer simply enough more than likely lies within the

changing literary values from the Romantic period to Victorianism. Particularly Shelley’s

and Coleridge’s works, and their influence upon their peers, lent to more progressive

depictions of the Romantic age which were then marshaled by a more conservative Victorian

morality. LeFanu’s work, Carmilla, was not published until 1872, a time long after

Romanticism, and is a direct descendent of its Romantic predecessor, “Christabel”. However,

despite the omitted chapter and reference to Carmilla in “Dracula’s Guest”, the rest of

Dracula depicts the female vampire in a completely new way, discarding all potential of

what she might have been. Whereas Carmilla is an independent, strong female character who

bows to no man and is completely autonomous, Stoker’s Weird Sisters are submissive to the

patriarchal Count Dracula. He cares for them by giving them shelter and provides them

babies on which to feed but in return they must obey him completely. Not only does Stoker

reinforce patriarchal dominance over the Weird Sisters, he removes identity and character

complexity from his female vampire characters as well. The Weird Sisters have no names nor

do they display any real depth of character. They essentially are creatures of pure sexuality,

an unfavorable trait in Victorian women yet one that is often found in Victorian literary

depictions of women in a character type known as the “Madwoman in the Attic”. This

concept is born from “patriarchal culture that impose[s] Otherness on its women by forcing

them the twin myths of angel and monster” (Auerbach, “Review of the Madwoman” 505).

Consider Bertha of Jane Eyre, a madwoman locked away in the attic because “her excesses

had prematurely developed the germs of insanity” (Bronte 261), the “excesses” being her

numerous infidelities against her husband. Meanwhile, Jane is idealized as the perfect

woman, such as Mina. Bertha is even compared, by Jane, to a “vampyre” (Bronte 242). Like

Stoker’s focus on the vampire’s mouth, Jane too says “the lips were swelled and dark”

(Bronte 242) while also invoking demonic imagery while describing her wild red eyes—all

indications of her sexual promiscuity. Stoker introduces a number of significant changes to

the vampire in Dracula, such as ties to Christianity and xenophobia, but perhaps one of the

heaviest focuses of the novel is Victorian prudery and how it casts women in extreme binary

roles. Dracula is the novel many look upon to inform their present understanding of the

contemporary vampire, but preceding vampire fiction not only influenced Stoker and aided

him in laying the groundwork for his novel, but also reveals far more about the vampire’s

identity.

Dracula, a novel rife with social commentary regarding chaste Victorian values,

paints women in one of two ways: The Madonna or the Whore. Mina is the epitome of a

Victorian lady, so much so that Jonathan fails to write much on her during the first few

chapters of the book and instead focuses more on his lurid encounter with The Weird Sisters.

Although his first mention of Mina, his wife-to-be, occurs on the first page, it is in a note

reminding himself to get the recipe of a chicken dish he wants her to learn for him. Instead of

recalling his fiancée romantically or missing her, he thinks of her in terms of domestic

servitude. Because Mina is the archetypal figure of chastity, her own husband not even

sexually interested in her, she is later able to fight off the vampire infection and maintain

control of her body thus ridding herself of the disease. But Lucy on the other hand is wanton

and demonstrates this when she inquires, “Why can’t they let a girl marry three men, or as

many as want her, and save all this trouble?” (Stoker 77), thus condemning herself to

monstrosity. Lucy is far too free-spirited in her views regarding sexuality and speaks of the

possibilities of a woman taking multiple men to her wedding bed, an unseemly and

unforgiveable trait in a woman belonging to prudish Victorian society.

Even after she is

infected by the disease of the blood, a recurring euphemism for being unclean or tainted by

sexual perversion, the men try to save her by multiple blood transfusions; this scene sprawls

over thirty-three pages during which four men, Arthur, John, Professor Van Helsing, and

Quincy all donate their blood to try and save Lucy. The literal transmission of fluids from

several men into one woman becomes a section of transfixion for Stoker. The men, who all

share affection for her, are in competition to try and save her with their blood and say things

like, “It is a strange and wonderful feeling for a man to watch his own lifeblood fill the veins

of the woman he loves” (Stoker 159). Here John Seward, an admirer of Lucy who cannot

have her, gloats over the fusing of his body with Lucy’s. The blatant metaphor that John has

entered Lucy’s body makes him feel “proud to see a faint tinge of color steal back into the

pale cheeks and lips (Stoker 159), an allusion to the post-orgasmic flush of the face. The

Or even now.

symbolism of the scene is not lost upon Van Helsing when he quietly whispers to John as he

departs, “Tell Arthur nothing of this. It would frighten him and make him jealous as well. So

not a word!” (Stoker 159). Arthur’s fiancée’s life is slipping from her and the concern is that

he will be jealous if another man has given her his blood. The men, viewing Lucy as a sexual

object, all scramble to donate their fluids and are even competitive about being the last to

enter her. Even they are shocked at how much her body has been invaded when Seward

exclaims, “You’re telling me that in ten days, that poor pretty creature has had the blood of

four men put into her veins?” (Stoker 183). Of course, Lucy cannot be saved. She is, in the

words of Mina regarding her own disease of the blood and body, “Unclean! [With] polluted

flesh!” (Stoker 332). Whereas the human women of Dracula struggle to adhere to the strict

rules of behavior society assigns to them, the other females in the novel are vampires, a

creature which Lucy eventually becomes, and they are the representation of women gone

astray, lacking chastity and prescriptivism to their proper societal roles.

Female vampires have lost their upper hand in Dracula. They are second-class

citizens, stripped of their noble lineage, and are portrayed as women who have fallen from

grace and are subject to the rules of men. Lucy eventually must be destroyed by her own

fiancée and other male protectors for trying to find her own way in the world after

discovering her sexuality and primal self, and the Weird Sisters are held in subjugation by

their master, Dracula. He provides them with housing and food, albeit on his terms. When the

sisters try to feed upon Jonathan, Dracula throws a fit and snaps, “How dare you touch him,

any of you? How dare you look on him when I had forbidden it? Back, I tell you all! This

man belongs to me!” (Stoker 45). Dracula demonstrates ownership over Jonathan and his

female cohorts fall back in submission while whining, “You yourself never loved! You never

love!” (Stoker 45). Although Dracula responds that he has in fact loved long ago, he does not

show the Sisters love now. Love amounts to mutual respect, equality, and sharing, all of

which Dracula refuses his companions. He is far more interested in sexual conquest and

possession of others. This is apparent when he seduces Mina and tells her of his intent:

“While [the men] were out playing detective, I was taking their best beloved one and making

her flesh of my flesh, blood of my blood. Later you will become my companion and my

helper. […] You will come whenever I want you. When I say ‘Come!’ you will cross land or

sea to do whatever I say” (Stoker 326). Dracula’s conquests are not simply sexual: he also

delights in stealing away the women of other men, a trope discussed earlier in Polidori’s

“The Vampyre”. The women in this novel are mere pawns or trophies, which the men use to

boost their own egos and inflate their male power. Consequently most of the women die

because of the deadly game into which they have been forced.

One of the most widely discussed and blatant metaphors in the novel is the female

vampire as the woman devoid of virtue. Stripped of her previous nobility, she is reduced to

the wanton desires of a commoner who lacks poise and restraint. The Weird Sisters, the

antithesis of Mina, are sensual, seductive, coy, mysterious, and overtly lascivious. They are

driven by their passions and primal urges to both engage in sexual behavior and consume

flesh. In Jonathan’s encounter with them, he is “inflamed by a sense of delightful

anticipation” (Stoker 44) while he feels the breath of one of the vampires upon himself. He

describes in great detail the moving of their lips and tongue over his neck as one in particular

“sank to her knees, and bent over [him]”, a very clear image of oral sex. Jonathan describes

the experience as “both thrilling and repulsive” (Stoker 44) and compares the licking of her

lips to that of an animal. Laura, in Carmilla, experiences this same inner-conflict during her

interactions with Carmilla. She says, “I experienced a strange tumultuous excitement that

was pleasurable, ever and anon, mingled with a vague sense of fear and disgust. […] I was

conscious of a love growing into admiration, and also of abhorrence. I know this is a

paradox, but I can make no other attempt to explain the feeling” (LeFanu 32). Jonathan, like

Laura, is both repelled and attracted by the arrant sexuality of vampire women worshipping

and pleasuring him because he is both human and Victorian. Although the novel focuses on

the chaste feminine ideal, it focuses just as heavily on female sexuality. Jonathan wants both

aspects but cannot reconcile the two in the same woman, and therefore women who possess

such control over their own bodies and choose to celebrate their sexuality are compared to

animals and, essentially, monsters.

Stoker’s novel brings an entirely new dimension to vampire lore. In addition to

characterizing female vampires as lowly beasts, he also introduces several new myths that are

commonly referenced today: vampires morphing into animals such as wolves and bats, the

physiological need to sleep in dirt or coffins, dematerializing into mist, fear of the cross, and

the fear of the vampire as Other.

One other important new trope occurs in Stoker’s novel—

the vampire is no longer a solitary creature. Now a pack animal, the vampire needs not only

blood to feed upon or humans to conquer but he needs a companion, or sometimes several. It

is this change, this need for interpersonal connection which is analogous to Shelley’s

Creature, that ultimately leads to some of the most well-known works of the 20

century

which alter the face of the vampire into something more human than ever seen before.

Many of these new tropes are the result of xenophobia and orientalism at its peak in that it mystifies and

condemns the practices and beliefs of Eastern Europeans. Ultimately, this story is about the fear of the foreigner
taking British women for his own and sullying them with his uncouth and horrific ways.

CHAPTER 3

CONTEMPORARY DEPICTIONS OF THE

UNDEAD IN POPULAR CULTURE

In 1968, George Romero gave the world Night of the Living Dead, the cult classic

zombie movie that kicked off a zombie craze which would continue for decades. Popular

legend regards it as the first, or most relevant, zombie flick, as it sets the mark for others to

follow. It is therefore a pivotal work in this regard, but this discourse leads one to the

possible misconception that pop culture embraced the zombie over night. In this chapter, the

development both of zombies and their vampire brethren as permanent fixtures in pop culture

will be assessed, including how and when the two mythologies overlap. The zombie and the

vampire are forever locked in a deathly embrace, for they are one and the same; they ebb and

flow together and away from one another, borrowing from and lending to each other's stories.

The 1816 ghost story competition at Lord Byron's estate in Geneva is one of the most pivotal

nights in their respective histories; two myths of the undead were told, one that continues to

evolve into the vampire we know today, and the other that was destined to devolve into what

we now recognize in pop culture as the zombie. Although at first glance, it might be hard to

recognize Frankenstein's creature as a prototype for the modern zombie, there are a variety of

connections which link the two, their similar origin stories, overall appearances, and socio-

economic backgrounds. For now, we will begin with the reemergence of the zombie, a figure

seemingly lost over the past several hundred years.

ISTORY OF THE

OMBIE THROUGHOUT

IFFERENT

ULTURES

The concept of the animated dead or revenant is by no means new. As argued in

chapter one, the original vampires of folklore are essentially zombies, though they were not

known by that name. If our earliest ghouls that fed upon humans were known as vampires,

how did the shift (or the split, rather) from vampire to zombie occur? Just as an ancient

vampire prototype is found in ancient folklore, the same is true for zombies—to an extent.

Early Jews told stories of the “golem.” In his article “Have I Got a Monster for You,” Mikel

J. Koven explains that:

The basic outline of the story concerns a wise and righteous Jewish scholar who,
in contemplating God's creation of life, endeavors to create life himself. He
fashions a man out of mud or clay, and brings it to life by inserting the Shem-
Hamforesh (the secret name of God) written on a piece of paper (variants include
insertion into the ear, mouth, or into an amulet hanging around the golem’s
neck)…(218)

This animation of the un-living into the living resonates with similarity next to the zombie

myth but differs in the sense that zombies aren't formations of clay upon which life is

bestowed by holy source; instead, they are the undead, something distinctly apart from un-

living, which means, zombies are born out of their own human deaths. As Koven points out

in his paper by quoting Aharon Nissan Vraday, “A golem must be formed by ‘pure’ soil, by

this I mean according to the concept of purity in the Jewish tradition. According to the

traditional Jewish worldview, death is the negation of life, life being a state where goodness

can be done on earth, purity is related to an object's proximity to life. Therefore, a corpse and

a cemetery are conceptually related to impurity” (223-224). Despite its pure origins and

connection to holiness, the longer a golem lives the more likely it is to break free from its

creator’s control and run amok causing mayhem for the true living, similarly to

Frankenstein’s Creature.

Whereas the Golem indicates the ancient existence of zombie-type creatures, the

Haitian zombie is a far more direct progenitor of the Creature, and one that identifies key

features in the modern version. The very real Haitian religion Voudon has long been a

subject of American fascination with the mystical. Although the word “zombie” is Haitian in

origin, the modern American conception of the zombie has mutated so far from the Haitian

revenant that the use of the word “zombie” to describe it now seems ironically inappropriate.

While a discussion of the Voudon zombie’s complex role in Haitian belief structures is

beyond the scope of this thesis, American pop-culture’s simplified perception of “voodoo”

includes this idea of the zombie. The Jewish golem, though it is conceptually connected to

righteousness, still shares similarities with the “voodoo” zombie: a corpse raised from the

dead, also created by religion. Though both are resurrected by magical practices, the voodoo

zombie is more closely related to the contemporary zombie than its distant relative, the

golem, in that it is a corpse. Through magic, voodoo zombies are controlled and made to

fulfill their master's desires through an unconscious, hypnotic haze. They are devoid of

autonomy, will, or self-awareness and are only driven by the need to comply with the orders

given by their master, or magician. It is this type of zombie that is first introduced into

mainstream American culture by Universal's 1932 horror film, White Zombie.

EEMERGENCE OF THE

OMBIE AND THE

AMPIRE

ARLY

ENTURY

ILM

Like their twin births in 1816, the vampire and the Creature are reborn together in

1931 with the simultaneous release of Dracula and Frankenstein from Universal Pictures. As

Gregory Waller points out:

Ever since Universal Films released both Dracula and Frankenstein in 1931, then
re-released the two movies as a double feature, and brought Count Dracula,
Frankenstein's creature, and other monsters together in films like House of
Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945), the story of Frankenstein and
his creation has remained an essential comparison point for the vampire story. (9)

However, the zombie also enters the stage in Universal’s 1932 release, White Zombie. This

new story never quite reaches the popularity of Dracula and Frankenstein but because of its

proximity to them it becomes intertwined with them and influences their trajectory here on

out—one example being that it is the basis of the conflation between the Creature and the

zombie.

Released within a year of one another, Dracula and White Zombie both feature Bela

Lugosi in the role of antagonist, leading to several parallels between them. In what is often

regarded by film critics as the first full length zombie film, a young, married American

couple, Madeline and Neil, take a holiday to Haiti. While most of the residents of the town in

which they stay are Haitian natives, the master of the mansion on the plantation in which

they reside is an affluent white man. Coveting Neil’s wife, he has the local voodoo priest,

Murder Legendre, played by Bela Lugosi, turn her into a zombie so that he may have her.

The parallel between the white plantation owner possessing black slaves and exploiting them

for their labor and his desire to physically possess a woman, one who is married to another

Note that the story of the zombie is not new, per se. It is, however, at this time, new to American

mainstream audiences.

man even, primes the zombie for its future role as a powerless, mindless drone that is forced

to act by a greater power than itself. This subjugation of will is equally found in Universal’s

Dracula with the Count’s mystical powers of hypnotism over others which lead them,

ultimately, to do his bidding. Either Lugosi was not a very diverse actor, or he saw the

zombie master and the vampire as one in the same. In either case, in playing both Murder and

Dracula, Lugosi melds the vampire and the zombie in film solidifying their brotherhood once

again.

Madeline more closely resembles a living woman under the thrall of Dracula than she

does a zombie. Like Murder’s other zombies, she does not prey upon humans nor does she

look undead. Madeline maintains her ethereal beauty despite her death and rebirth as a

walking corpse, always clad in flowing white gowns, her blonde hair immaculately coiffed in

perfect ringlets. She is remarkably similar in appearance to Mina in Dracula and is treated in

the same manner. Mina, like Madeline, is an object over which the men fight for possession.

They are equally held in thrall by the domineering force of Murder and Dracula, respectively,

and they are equivalently a fantasy for the men of the films who desire her, as she represents

a completely subjugated and willing object that is incapable of denying them. Those who

create zombies are concerned with control over the body. If Dracula is capable of enforcing

control over the body through means of his own, then it stands to reason that he, too, is

capable of creating a type of zombie. Just as the plantation owner controls the physical

bodies of his Haitian slaves to propel his business in the sugarcane industry further in White

Zombie, he also wishes to control the body of the woman he sexually desires. Both situations

are terrible as each demonstrates a powerful white man oppressing either black slaves or

women but lacks the grotesque horror we have come to associate with zombies: brain-eating

monsters that will stop at nothing to feed their insatiable appetite. This familiar ghastly

zombie does not appear until nearly forty years later in Romero's Night of the Living Dead,

and its transformation happens gradually over the years through various other films.

Around the same time the film White Zombie was released, Universal Pictures was

working on and releasing the remainder of their big-hitting horror films. These include The

Mummy in 1932, Dracula in 1931, and Frankenstein in 1931.

Although all of these films

are considered cult classics by many, two of them have transcended the status of B-movie:

Dracula and Frankenstein. Both films have changed the way in which we look at each

creature. Along with casting Bella Lugosi, a man who was considered remarkably handsome

during his time, Universal introduced to its viewers for the first time a visual and overtly

seductive representation of Dracula. On the appearance of the Count, Dracula scholar,

Donald F. Glut writes:

Bela Lugosi […] established the film vampire that would endure for decades.
Although audiences knew he drank blood, they were shown neither blood nor
fangs. The true repulsiveness of the traditional vampire, including hairy palms
and a breath that reeked of decay in the grave, were eliminated in favor of a
Dracula who was immaculate, well-mannered and desirable to women. He was
more the mysterious and romantic continental rather than a reanimated corpse—a
Rudolph Valentino of sorts, with a cape and a coffin to sleep in during the day.
Most subsequent vampire films featuring undead nobleman would imitate
Lugosi's count Dracula. (120)

This classic imagery of the mysterious, elegant Count garbed in a long black flowing cape

lined with red silk and white-tie formalwear, with sleek combed-back black hair lives on in

popular culture today—every year during Halloween it is nearly impossible to go about our

holiday’s festivities without coming across this iconic costume. Dracula was well on his way

to becoming a sex symbol. His trajectory in becoming so was set in the early 19th century.

The same cannot be said for Frankenstein's Creature. Originally portrayed as an intelligent

and sensitive being whose primary reason for lashing out is society's inability to love and

accept him, Frankenstein’s creation loses many of his noble attributes in his future depictions

in film.

In Universal Pictures’ 1931 rendition of Frankenstein, the Creature is portrayed for

the first time in a mainstream full length film.

Although the film remains more faithful to

Two more of Universal’s classic monster films, The Wolf Man and The Creature from the Black

Lagoon, were released much later, in 1941 and 1954 respectively. While American popular culture places them
alongside the other Universal monsters in the ‘halloween monster’ pantheon, it is important to note that these
later additions to the Universal stable stand apart not only in time, but as monsters that are not undead, as the
first generation all were.

The first motion picture adaptation of Frankenstein was made in 1910 by the Edison film company,

directed by J. Searle Dawley. A short silent film, just under 13 minutes long, it was possibly made more to
showcase the special effects in the monster’s creation scene, than to portray an accurate or close representation

the novel than any of its future versions, it is still responsible for a distorted representation of

the creature. There are three main differences between the novel and the film in how the

creature is portrayed, the first being his creation. In the novel, the moment he is brought to

life is not filled with grand overtures and sensationalism as in the film. It occurs in a small

underwhelming paragraph, a mere fraction of the novel, as Victor narrates:

It was on a dreary night of November, that I beheld the accomplishment of my
toils. With an anxiety that almost amounted to agony, I collected the instruments
of life around me that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that
lay at my feet. It was already one in the morning; the rain pattered dismally
against the, panes, and my candle was nearly burnt out, by the glimmer of the
half-extinguished light, I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed
hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs. (Shelley 35)

The brevity of this moment is nearly as quick to pass as the spark used to infuse life. For

Victor, the moment of horror occurs after the Creature's birth. Once he sees what he has

brought into the world, his guilt continues to plague him throughout the duration of the story.

Yet, in the film, the moment of horror is crystallized in the unforgettable scene where the

mad scientist is down in his basement laboratory with his odd-looking assistant, harnessing

the power of lightning to bring the creature to life.

The focus of the creation scene in the

film Frankenstein is not as focused on the Creature but rather on the science itself, and

Frankenstein’s relationship to it. The lab is arranged with strange-looking devices pulsing

with electrical light while at the center of the room is the operating bed, fitted with

restraints.

Meanwhile, Frankenstein darts about frantically, wide-eyed and fanatic about his

experiment, garbed in an odd lab coat which resembles a straightjacket, wildly shouting, “It’s

alive!” As science and technological advancement begin to accelerate, the horror in the film

of Mary Shelley's novel.

Although electricity was a hot topic for many of the Romantic writers, it is perhaps nowhere better

illustrated than in the film versions of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. The notion that it might somehow hold the
key to life is found once again in the second half of the 19th century in one of the many versions of Sir
Varney’s resuscitations from death. In Chapter 77, “Varney in the Garden—The Communication of Dr.
Chillingworth to the Admiral and Henry”, Doctor Chillingworth uses galvanism to restore life to the dead,
hanged body of Sir Varney. Whereas most vampires then and now are created by biting one another and/or
swapping blood, in this particular case, the vampire Varney mirrors the very distinct creation tale of
Frankenstein's creature, thus continuing to demonstrate the unbreakable link between the vampire and
Frankenstein's creature.

This scene is picked up again in Kenneth Branagh’s film adaptation, Frankenstein (1994).

exists in the plausibility of the laboratory scenario being real. This scene has become so

famous, so intimately connected to the Creature’s inception, that those who have not read the

novel sometimes assume that this is the way Shelley writes the Creature into existence as

well.

The second difference between novel and film manifests in the Creature’s movement.

Although he is never regarded as the epitome of grace, his physical abilities are shown to

trump those of human beings. He is larger, stronger, and faster than the average human,

which Victor recognizes as he describes the creature’s approach: “I suddenly beheld the

figure of a man, at some distance, advancing towards me with superhuman speed. He

bounded over the crevices in the ice, among which I had walked with caution; his stature,

also, as he approached, seemed to exceed that of man” (Shelley 68).

Yet in the film,

although he retains his strength and size, he is slow, clumsy, and awkward.

The third, and most noticeable, change in his demeanor is his inability to speak.

While the creature had to teach himself how to speak and read in Shelley's novel, which

shows his strong determination in his “long[ing] to join them” (77), to become a part of

human society, the film’s Creature is incapable of learning language. Unable to

communicate, he is only able to grunt, grumble, and growl. By removing one of his most

human attributes, the film essentially makes him more monstrous, a trend which not only

continues in his future depictions but worsens as he begins to mutate from Shelley's vision

and slowly becomes less human-like and, specifically, more zombie-like.

OMBIES AND

CIENCE

Frankenstein's creation is in line with the contemporary zombie myth: Science gone

wrong. While the vampire yearns for a return to traditional aristocratic customs, zombies are

the scientifically-produced face of lower-class modernity. In contemporary American popular

culture, zombies are not supernatural; they are mishaps of manmade creations. Frankenstein's

It is arguable that one of the reasons Frankenstein fears the creature is that he potentially may have

created a being superior to humans, one which could render them obsolete. In Young Frankenstein(1974), the
scene in which Dr. Frankenstein forms a bond of friendship with the creature, he explains to him why he is so
loathed by others:“People laugh at you, people hate you, but why do they hate you? Because…they are jealous.
[…] Do you wanna talk about physical strength? Do you wanna talk about sheer muscle? You are a God”.

ambitious “eager desire to learn […] the secrets of heaven and earth […][and] the physical

secrets of the world” (Shelley 19) leads to the so-called abomination. The creature resembles

the Jewish golem in that he is fashioned and given life by a human creator. In his poem

“Golem”, David Moolten identifies their literary kinship: “At their command like the Golem

roaming / The streets of Prague, the Jewish Frankenstein / Who defended his ghetto from the

mobs” (153). While Frankenstein is narratively descended from the golem, the creature is a

corpse and therefore also related to the Haitian voodoo zombie. He is made from dead body

parts and infused with life—importantly—through scientific exploration and blunder, akin to

the contemporary zombie. Victor's hubris and insatiable hunger for knowledge and

domination over nature itself leads to the disastrous evocation of non-biological life.

Shelley's criticism of megalomania concerning scientific advancements is equally reflected in

zombie movies, comics, and television shows today. More often than not the dead rise from

their graves in a feeding frenzy due to either man-made scientific experiments going terribly

wrong or by government-made biowarfare being accidentally released into the public.

Harkening back to the quintessential zombie film, Night of the Living Dead, Romero's

zombies rise because a space probe on a mission to Venus explodes near Earth before

reaching its destination. The radiation from the man-made craft rains down into the Earth's

atmosphere and wreaks havoc down below. In the film 28 Days Later in 2002, which depicts

newly evolved superfast zombies, scientists conduct experiments upon monkeys with a man-

made disease. Animal rights activists release the infected monkeys, and before long the

infection runs rampant throughout the country, infecting nearly everyone. Likewise, today's

widely read comic series and AMC television show The Walking Dead implies the recurring

theme of science gone wrong as the remaining human characters stress the necessity to locate

and investigate the Center for Disease Control to solve the mystery of the zombie

apocalypse. Frankenstein's Creature is the gateway for all these contemporary zombies; he

opens the door to the genre of science fiction—and even more specifically, he serves as a

warning against amoral scientific exploration and demonstrates the calamitous events which

may result from hubris in the face of nature along with the inability to recognize and set

ethical boundaries while seeking human advancement.

TRUGGLE FOR

OWER BETWEEN

ONSTERS

Although some change is seen in the Creature's main film debut, the pivotal moment

of his transformation toward becoming a zombie takes place over a decade and a half later in

a subsequent Universal film, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein in 1948, specifically

under the influence of Dracula, once again played by Bela Lugosi.

In this film, not only

does the Creature begin to show his first concrete contemporary zombie-like traits but he's

also inseparable from his familiar counterpart, the vampire—in this case, specifically

Dracula—who struggles to take power and autonomy from the Creature. What is particularly

notable about this film is that it is a comedy rather than traditional horror. After

contemplating the events of WWII and those that followed, John L. Flynn writes, regarding

this shift, “America had been scared by monsters far more terrifying than Count Dracula. The

technological horrors imposed by Nazi Germany, the atom-bombings of Hiroshima and

Nagasaki, and the threat of nuclear war with the Soviets were all very real terrors, much

worse than any imaginary monster a screen could produce” (58). The world was on the verge

of ending, as far as it could tell, due to major technological advancements which all pointed

toward extinction. In wake of this, along with the second Red Scare rearing its head,

American audiences felt they had far more to fear from advancing Communists than movie

monsters, which leads to a shift in horror—from scary to silly.

Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein revolutionizes our two most famous horror

stories by not only combining the Creature's and the vampire’s lore, but by mocking them. It

takes familiar tropes and highlights them to the point of silliness. By implementing parody,

audiences are able to look upon the genre through a more critical lens as its commonly used

literary devices are placed on display. An example of this is when Costello, as Wilbur,

desperately tries to communicate to his friend Chick, played by Abbott, the behavior of both

Although the film title implies that Abbott and Costello meet Victor Frankenstein, they instead meet his

creation. Victor is not ever seen in the film, nor referenced. The spotlight is reserved for the creature. This
comes as no surprise as the Creature not only requires a name but is also entangled in the complex binary
relationship between Victor and himself; they are one and the same.

This trend of comedy-horror bleeds well into the 1950s and 1960s through film and late-night horror

television with hosts such as: Vampira, Zacherle, and Elvira, and even appears in primetime television shows
such as The Munsters; a family sitcom that boasts a Frankenstein-like father figure alongside of a vampire
father-in-law.

the Creature and Dracula by pantomiming their trademark movements as codified in their

respective earlier Universal films. This scene in which Wilbur mimics, or mocks, the

monsters comprises several minutes of physical comedy. Holding his arms out before him,

elbows locked, fingers downward, Wilbur slowly drags his feet while emitting low

incomprehensible groans, in his impersonation of the Creature, which all sounds and looks

quite zombielike. He then imitates Dracula's mannerisms, too, whisking his imaginary cloak

up to his eyes as he stares intensely at his bewildered friend while using his hand and fingers

to gesticulate what we can only assume to be mind control. Although only a few minutes

long, and mostly devoid of words, this scene speaks vastly of the nature of each monster.

One is perceived as a mindless, giant oaf and the other, a cold calculating mastermind.

Through parody of the most ridiculous aspects of the monsters are the central focus and by

way of this distillation of each into their core essences, the tropes of the vampire and the

zombie become deeply embedded in popular culture.

The film muddles and hybridizes the individual stories of both monsters. First, both

the Creature and Dracula are introduced by emerging from coffins which, prior to this, was

exclusively a vampire trait. Secondly, in Barton’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,

Chick says, “Frankenstein gave the monster eternal life with electricity…” Not only is the

idea of eternal life never discussed in Frankenstein, but once again the Creature adopts

another vampire trait.

Beyond these overt intertwining of stories, a new tale is told that

weaves our antagonists together. The central plot revolves around Dracula's desire to have

absolute control over the Creature. To accomplish this, he needs to provide the creature with

a new and simple brain so that, according to Dracula in Abbott and Costello Meet

Frankenstein, he will “have no will of his own, no fiendish intellect to oppose his master.”

Also, in all three films, Frankenstein, Son of Frankenstein, and Young Frankenstein, at some point the

action takes place within “Castle Frankenstein”—a newly conceived place that does not exist in Shelley’s novel.
Like Dracula, Frankenstein is moved into the living quarters of nobility. Even further, like Dracula,
Frankenstein’s castle is surrounded by fearful villagers who eventually rise up as an angry mob to snuff the
monsters, respectively, out of existence. And, thirdly, the most apparent connection between the interweaving
of Dracula’s and Frankenstein’s stories is when the action is moved to a spooky castle in a small fictional city in
Germany called “Transylvania”; in the film Young Frankenstein (1974) after reaching the Transylvania station
by train, Dr. Frankenstein is transported to a castle on a mountain through a forest of heavy fog while the
howling of wolves echoes around him—yet another reference to Stoker's Dracula and a way the two monsters
are conflated in the public imagination.

He desires to strip him of all autonomy and ability to think for himself to have him

completely under his command. But in order to achieve this he must acquire a new brain for

the Creature—implying that the brain he already has is intellectual. This is the only time in

film history when the Creature is depicted, albeit implicitly, as a capable, functional, and

rational being. Yet it is Dracula’s goal to destroy these individualistic traits and render the

creature useless unless under his command. Dracula seeks to remove the epicenter for

autonomy: a coherent and competent brain. As Dracula, Lugosi seeks to control both the

body and minds of his victims, just as his former character, Murder Legendre, does in White

Zombie. In Barton’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Dracula says to one of his

female victims, “I am accustomed to having my orders obeyed, especially by women...”

After using his hypnotic powers upon her, he bites her neck, which seals their bond and

forces her into subservience as she answers, “Yes, Master.” The phrase, “Yes, Master”, is

also used in the 1974 film, Young Frankenstein, by the lab assistant, Igor. Although

preceding characterizations of Igor do not popularize this catchphrase, which is now

synonymous with the transcendent Igor character, their interactions with Frankenstein

demonstrate their subjugation to him.

This type of master/slave relationship, for Dracula,

is of long standing and is illustrated in Stoker's novel as Renfield, too, refers to the count as

his “Master” and willfully does his bidding. Essentially, Igor is to Frankenstein as Renfield is

to Dracula. Dracula makes his victims into his own personal slaves, or zombies. Although he

does not kill Sandra, he has complete control over her actions just as Murder has over

Madeline in White Zombie.

The Creature is both undead and under Dracula's control, thus fitting into the

paradigm of the Haitian zombie. But Dracula's control over the Creature does not come from

the same source by which he controls humans. Although Dracula uses mind control over him

which causes him to respond with “Master”, he is unable to exercise his mental coercive

force in the same way as it applies to humans. Instead, he requires the aid of a nameless

electronic gadget to force his will upon the Creature. Because the Creature is an invention of

Also spelled Ygor.

The woman he hypnotizes in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

science it is reasonable that he only responds to scientific forms of manipulation. However,

the gadget loses potency as the film wears on, and it is therefore necessary for Dracula to

complete his domination over the creature. In Barton’s Abbott and Costello Meet

Frankenstein, Dracula wishes to literally replace his brain with one that is “so simple, so

pliable, he will obey [him] like a trained dog.” Although Dracula’s motivations for

attempting to gain complete control over the Creature are never addressed, his desire to do so

is perhaps the most predominant theme in the film. Dracula needs to be in control and is used

to having his way over others in an effortless way. The Creature, one who is not as easily

manipulated is a both a challenge and a threat to his superior self-image. It stands to reason

that if the Creature represents the masses driven by science and technology, and America

views itself as the elite capitalistic vampire, that this film is critical in determining why the

Creature is reduced to a zombie with the vampire determined to be his lord and master.

Dracula (America) is at the top of the food chain and wishes to maintain his hierarchical

position, especially during a time when the Creature (the Soviets) is gaining popularity in the

mainstream audience. By subjugating him and claiming ownership of him, he regains his

prestigious monster king title while making a mockery out of the once larger-than-life

Creature.

OMBIES AND

RAINS

The brain, or more specifically, the educated brain, is the key to autonomy and

individuality. To control the brain of another is to render them ignorant and faceless among

the masses. As noted, the key to controlling the Creature lies within the brain. Whereas the

Creature as conceived by Shelley was an intelligent, cultured, and sensitive being, he is now

reduced to a mere shell of his former self. Dracula's desire to transplant a barely functional

brain into the monster to dumb him down and enslave him is stressed throughout the film.

Although the brain is for the creature, Dracula is a surrogate for the organ as he repeatedly

echoes his need for brains. At one point in Barton’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein,

he remarks, “What we need today is young blood and brains”, with a long extension and

emphasis on the last word: “braaaains.” The drawing out of this word in a monotone is

easily recognizable as one of the most stereotypical zombie tropes—their monosyllabic drone

for brains. Yet, it is uncertain where this trope started. An article by Eric Spitznagel in Vanity

Fair contains an interview with George Romero, where the following conversation regarding

the mysterious lore of zombies eating brains unfolds:

Spitznagel: Zombies have the weird fixation with eating human flesh and brains.
What is it about being undead that makes somebody so ravenous?

Romero: First of all, why does everybody say that zombies eat brains?

Spitznagel: Because… it's true?

Romero: I've never had a zombie eat a brain! I don't know where that comes
from. Who says zombies eat brains?

Spitznagel: I remember brains being a big zombie menu item in Return of the
Living Dead back in the mid-80s, but I'm not sure if that's where it started.

Romero: Whenever I sign autographs, they always ask me, “Write ‘Eat Brains’!”
I don't understand what that means. I've never had a zombie eat a brain. But it's
become this landmark thing.

Spitznagel: Well, what about gorging on human flesh? Your zombies do that,
right?

Romero: Definitely. (Laughs.)

Although Romero's “seminal zombie masterpiece from 1968” (Spitznagel), along with his

subsequent zombie films, features zombies solely dining upon human flesh, even he finds it

undeniable that their successors are ravenous for brains. While it is true that comedy-horror

the 1985 film, Return of the Living Dead, emphasizes the need for zombies to consume

brains, to further answer Romero's question regarding the origin of this trope, both he and his

interviewer need only look back some 40-odd years at the other comedy-horror film in

discussion, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

The zombie mantra for brains is

echoed not only by Dracula but by Wilbur, too. In Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein

Wilbur declares, “Sandra’s gonna use my brain to make a bigger dummy out of the other

dummy. […] I've got too much of what they want—brains.”

Again, the phrasing of this

word left dangling alone at the end of his sentence is unmistakably reminiscent of the future

zombie call. If the Creature, as depicted in this film, is a prototype of the contemporary

American zombie, then the reason zombies are insatiable for brains is because a brain is the

only way to reclaim their autonomy and individuality. The zombie is pure id and only knows,

Return of the Living Dead is directed by Dan O’Bannon.

Wilbur, a buffoon, is who Dracula chooses as a brain donor for the Creature.

perhaps on some instinctive level, that it requires a brain to function properly again.

This

leads it to the primitive behavior of cannibalism and the idea that ingesting something allows

one to take in the power of the object consumed. Zombies may be propelled on some visceral

level to eat brains to reclaim their former selves, which is why no matter how much they eat,

they are always hungry for more. This point also speaks to the spread of the zombie infection

from zombie to zombie. After the initial disease or scientific malfunction is released upon the

general public, the most common way to become a zombie is to be bitten by one. Because

they are taking in the body of another, they steal autonomy from their victim, thus rendering

their victim helpless, incapable, and ultimately just like them, yearning to return to their

former complete selves. This endless cycle of taking from others to fulfill the emptiness

within the attacking zombie leads them to be perpetually unfulfilled and plagued with

constant hunger.

ROM

HELLEY

’

REATURE TO

OMERO

’

OMBIE

Although Romero is not directly responsible for the trope of zombies eating brains, he

further solidifies the link between Frankenstein's creature and contemporary zombies in his

1985 film, Day of the Dead. In the aforementioned article, Romero says, “I […] have a soft

spot for Bub from Day of the Dead, which was a brilliant performance, worthy of Boris

Karloff” (Spitznagel). In Day of the Dead, a team of scientists and military personnel are

working in an underground bunker while the world above is overrun by zombies. Bub, as he's

affectionately called, is the subject of their study. Although Bub is originally seen as a key

opportunity to better understand the world's most threatening enemy, he becomes more than

a mere subject of scientific inquiry. To the head scientist, Logan, he is a newborn child

awaiting patience, discipline, education, and reward. Logan explains his motives for taking

Bub under his wing by succinctly explaining to his companions in Day of the Dead, “it

means controlling them.” Just as the many zombies discussed prior, the issue of control over

In Romero's Day of the Dead, the “mad scientist” Logan, also frequently referred to as “Frankenstein”,

explains the significance of the brain within the zombie: “the brain is the engine, the motor that drives them”.
Although they don't physically need to eat, Logan explains that what drives them is a “deep dark primordial
instinct”. This is why, in contemporary American zombie myth, a surefire way to permanently destroy a zombie
is to destroy its brain, the remnants of who it once was.

the body is at hand once again. In the aforementioned interview, Romero makes evident the

connection between his amiable character Bub and Frankenstein's Creature. By comparing

his performance to Boris Karloff's in Frankenstein, Romero himself, father of the

contemporary zombie, draws his inspiration for the amiable zombie Bub from the Creature.

Aside from the parallel drawn by Romero in the interview, his film, Day of the Dead, itself is

basically a remake of the sprawling Frankenstein myth, ranging from Shelley’s novel, up

through the Universal film adaptations, and finally into Mel Brook’s parody, Young

Frankenstein. In fact, he echoes Shelley’s warning and the philosophy of the Romantics

regarding scientific reductionism in the speech given by John, one of the heroes of the film,

regarding Sarah’s obsession with trying to figure out what might be causing the zombie

apocalypse. In Day of the Dead, John says

We don't believe in what you're doing here, Sarah. Hey, you know what they keep
down here in this cave? Man, they got the books and the records of the top 100
companies. They got the Defense Department budget down here. And they got the
negatives for all your favorite movies. They got microfilm with tax return and
newspaper stories. They got immigration records, census reports, and they got the
accounts of all the wars and plane crashes and volcano eruptions and earthquakes
and fires and floods and all the other disasters that interrupted the flow of things
in the good ol’ U.S. of A. Now what does it matter, Sarah darling? All this filing
and record keeping? We ever gonna give a shit? We even gonna get a chance to
see it all? With an epitaph on it that nobody gonna bother to read. Now, here you
come. Here you come with a whole new set of charts and graphs and records.
What you gonna do? Bury them down here with all the other relics of what...
once... was? Let me tell you what else. Yeah, I'm gonna tell you what else. You
ain't never gonna figure it out, just like they never figured out why the stars are
where they're at. It ain't mankind's job to figure that stuff out. So what you're
doing is a waste of time, Sarah. And time is all we got left, you know.

This speech is the central thesis of the movie. John wishes to move on, to repopulate the

earth, and be done with the horrific past, which he claims they’ll never understand. Like

Shelley’s criticism of hubris and obsession in seeking unknowable or unreachable answers,

or to attempt to “unlock the physical secrets of the world” (Shelley 19), John tries to speak

sense into Sarah (also a scientist) persuading her to let go of her obsession with providing

answers to why the catastrophe happened. John believes that living in the present is what

matters, not chasing unattainable, potentially harmful, or even potentially useless knowledge.

Romero, the man responsible for formalizing the contemporary zombie, therefore both

implicitly (in his film) and explicitly (in his own words) states his influence in linking the

Creature born from Shelley’s imagination nearly 200 years ago to the zombie we know

today.

There are similarities in both appearance and behavior that link the pop culture

Creature to Romero’s zombies: First, they both have green skin. In Shelley's novel the

Creature is described as having yellow skin, but in his future film, and contemporary pop

culture appearances, his skin is green.

Zombies, in Romero’s films and in the pop culture

eye, are also green.

Secondly, they share similar facial expressions. Both, for the most part,

lack a wide range of expression; their faces are mostly set in a slack-jawed, glassy-eyed gaze.

Thirdly, they exhibit similar behavior: Both walk the same, as if under a hypnotic spell, and

they also use the same sorts of vocalizations such as long, low groans. And fourth, the well-

known Romero trope of zombie hands and arms plunging through walls, doors, or bursting

up from their graves is also seen from the Creature in Abbott and Costello Meet

Frankenstein.

However, the most stunning connection between the Creature and the contemporary

zombie is found in Bub of Day of the Dead. Bub is a sympathetic zombie who we wish to

succeed. He starts out much like Frankenstein's creature, a blank slate without any concept of

civility, knowledge, or humanity, but far worse because he is still a zombie and therefore

contains the grotesque characteristic of being ravenous for human flesh. However, through

time, diligence, and patience of the scientist who studies him, and eventually comes to care

for him, Bub echoes Shelley's Creature by learning how to become more human. The main

difference between Bub and Shelley's Creature is that Bub has the fortunate opportunity of

being guided and cared for, setting him on the path toward humanity.

His appearance, grotesquely ugly, demonstrates some of the remaining characteristics of the pre-

vampire being adopted by the Creature. Also, the early Universal movies were released before the arrival of
color film, but detecting the color of the makeup used on Karloff is easy enough by simply looking at theatrical
release posters. Also, it’s popular knowledge that Karloff’s makeup was green. Although color film was readily
available during this time, Romero deliberately chose to shoot his first film in black and white, perhaps as
homage to the earlier horror films which undoubtedly influenced him.

Zombies, too, were originally presented to mainstream viewers in black and white film, as sallow and

ashy, but as the zombie genre exploded, future zombie films soon adapted to color and zombies became
increasingly green.

Another film in which zombies are trained to coexist with humans is the zombie spoof film Shaun of the

Dead (2004). This concept, that zombies can become better and assimilate, is also seen in 21

century vampire

Although Shelley's Creature is not as fortunate as Bub, despite his tenacity in learning

and his admirable drive to become a part of something larger than himself, he ultimately

lacks a liaison that might introduce him, and help ease his transition, to the human world.

However, in Mel Brook’s Young Frankenstein, the happy ending does occur. In this comedy

classic, a parody of Son of Frankenstein, the grandson of Victor Von Frankenstein, known as

Dr. Frankenstein ultimately rights the wrong his grandfather made decades ago.

In Mel

Brooks’ Young Frankenstein, he delivers the following heartfelt speech to the creature:

Listen to me, you are not evil. You… are… good! (The Creature weeps) This is a
nice boy. This is a good boy. This is a mother’s angel. And I want all the world to
know once and for all, and without any shame, that we love him. I'm going to
teach you. I'm going to show you how to walk, how to speak, how to move, how
to think. Together, you and I are going to make the greatest single contribution to
science since the creation of fire!

As Dr. Frankenstein and the creature embrace one another, the Creature weeps with joy and

relief over the acceptance and love from his creator, and a cathartic feeling sweeps over the

viewer as this is the outcome one may have hoped for Shelley's Creature. In a small scene

filled with simple kind gestures, Dr. Frankenstein gives his Creature all he ever wanted:

compassion, love, and someone willing to help guide him through the world—essentially, a

father. And because of the love bestowed, the Creature is able to live out a long, happy life

filled surrounded by those who care about him.

A similar father/son relationship occurs between Day of the Dead’s mad scientist

Logan, aka “Dr. Frankenstein,” and Bub. Although Bub begins as a mere test subject for

Logan's experiments, a bond steadily increases between them. The nickname “Bub” is

Logan's deceased father's nickname, thus indicating a desire to create a familial relationship

with his test subject. During his domestication of Bub, he provides him with several human

stories such as Laurel K. Hamilton’s Anita Blake series and Charlene Harris’ True Blood. Yet, vampires aren’t
trained to coexist as the zombies are—instead they fight for their civil rights to be accepted among humans.

The nobiliary particle, “von”, first appears in Son of Frankenstein, in which it is part of an even larger

title, “Baron Wolf von Frankenstein”, which is interesting for three reasons. (1) Since Universal Pictures was so
fond of interweaving the storylines of their monsters, the incorporation of the name “Wolf” raises the possibility
of connection to Bram Stoker's Dracula, as one of his powers was the ability to turn into a wolf. (2) The
newfound nobility, which was not present in Shelley's novel, of the Frankenstein family is possibly a conflation
of the nobility of Universal's other popular horror figure, Count Dracula, and (3) it is possible, and worthy of
further research, that Universal may have been working on the concept of The Wolf Man, if not already filming
it, which potentially provides further connections between the slew of monsters in the Universal family.

things with which to interact, one of which being the 1975 book, Salem’s Lot, by Stephen

King. Salem’s Lot tells the story of a man who returns to the town in which he grew up only

to discover that its residents are all becoming vampires. The allusion to this work shows the

clear parallel between zombies and vampires; Logan wishes for Bub to learn how to read

from subject material that is both relevant and familiar to him. This scene in which Bub

interacts with the more mundane objects is touching. The music is whimsical, the curiosity

behind Bub’s eyes is inspiring, and the moments in which he makes connections regarding

the significance, or purposes, of these items is overwhelmingly emotional. Bub, with the help

of Logan, just like the Creature with the aid of Dr. Frankenstein, slowly learns to make

meaning and by doing so grows increasingly more human before our eyes. Although both Dr.

Frankenstein and Logan provide the same affection and education to each of their respective

creatures, Dr. Frankenstein's creature has a happy comical ending, which ends in a marriage;

the same cannot be said for Bub. Upon finding his murdered “creator”, he openly grieves

over the loss of a loved one and seeks revenge upon his executioner, indicating another

aspect of his humanity, albeit a dark one. As Romero says, Bub’s performance is worthy of

Boris Karloff because he is a unique zombie, one who transcends their grotesque stereotypes

and their horrible fates, but more so he reminds audiences of who the Creature in Mary

Shelley's novel once was. After years of being misrepresented in film, Shelley's Creature was

ultimately led to his tragic and inevitable devolution into the zombie, a mere sliver of his

former self. But Bub gives hope for the restoration of Mary Shelley's vision and reminds us

that his heroic ancestor is nobler than any of his vampire contemporaries.

OMBIE

ODAY

Today the zombie is more or less formalized, leaving little to the imagination

regarding how it may behave or what its motives are. The trajectory of the zombie myth

neatly follows the trajectory of the masses—serf, slave, and proletariat—enslaved by

superstition and religion, enslaved by the aristocracy, enslaved by science and the relentless

gears of progress, and finally, enslaved by raw consumption in a ‘social’ framework that is

the legacy of that rational progress. Besides Bub, few zombies have challenged the

established narrative structure, leaving them predictable, although widely popular, in the

public imagination. Although popular critical analysis has categorized them as metaphors for

consumer culture and left-wing class warfare raging against advanced capitalism, Romero, in

response to these critiques says, “it got analyzed and overanalyzed way out of proportion”

(Sptitznagel) and has always maintained that his films are not about zombies necessarily, but

“about humans and how they react, or fail to react, or react stupidly. I’m pointing the finger

at us, not at the zombies” (Spitznagel). Regardless of Romero's intention, the reader’s

response to zombies today dictates otherwise, as the genre has exploded into mainstream

culture with events such as the yearly Zombie Walk, an event in October when people dress

up like zombies and trudge through city streets across the country merely for the fun of it,

and the constant (now verging on annoying) pop cultural references on TV, the Internet,

books, high school lesson plans, and in the general public discourse regarding the allegedly

impending zombie apocalypse.

33,34

Zombie-mania is now a contender with the vampire craze

that continues to captivate America, perhaps because zombies speak to a part of our

American culture: The zombie is a drowning face in the sea of the masses. It is dirty, wears

tattered clothing, cannot speak, cannot think, and lives merely to consume. It is devoid of

identity, autonomy, intelligence, social mobility, and remains perpetually famished. The

zombie, a creature with an indistinguishable fraction of the vampire’s resources, is destined

to remain a metaphor for the poor, the disenfranchised, and the hungry unless given a unique

opportunity by others to rise up and out of its horrific social conditions.

AMPIRE

’

RIEF

ECLINE INTO THE

ROLETARIAT

The vampire’s journey through popular culture is long, but not nearly as arduous as

the zombie’s. Although countless films have told and retold the story of Dracula throughout

the 20

century, the vampire has more or less stayed true to its original depiction and the

man upon whom it is based: Lord Byron. There are two main exceptions: the 1922 German

See parodies of classic literature such as Pride and Prejudice and Zombies(2009) by Seth Grahame-

Smith, as well as works by Max Brooks like World War Z (a fictional work about the zombie apocalypse) and
The Zombie Survival Guide (a tactical guide on how to survive the zombie apocalypse).

See Chris J. Park and Heather K. Lye’s work entitled, “How Many People Can Fit on [sic] the National

Mall//Zombie Attack”, whose abstract reads, “Students analyze items from the media to answer mathematical
questions related to the article. Estimating the size of the crowd at the Obama inauguration leads to estimating
skills and finding areas, whereas the Zombie epidemic leads to modeling infectious disease.”

Expressionist film Nosferatu

, and the 1954 novel I Am Legend, a far more pivotal work

responsible for the interwoven tapestry of the zombie and the vampire, a book that turns

vampires on their heads and reminds them of their humble zombielike beginnings, a book

that “is the direct antecedent and the ‘inspiration’ for George A. Romero's 1968 apocalyptic

horror film, Night of the Living Dead, which depicts undead flesh-eating zombies rather than

bloodthirsty vampires” (Waller 6).

Although Richard Matheson's novel I Am Legend is technically a story about

vampires overrunning the Earth and wiping out humanity, save one human man, these

creatures resemble popular zombies far more than they resemble their Byronic predecessors:

the novel is another zero point during which vampires and zombies flagrantly converge once

again in their dance macabre, this time, into a nearly indistinguishable hybridization.

Matheson’s story removes the vampire from the realm of the supernatural and places him

into the lower class realm of science fiction, the birthplace of the zombie. Removing many of

the vampire’s traits audiences have come to expect—such as its fancy titles, frilly clothing,

and dashing looks—he is robbed of his social privileges. This reduces the vampire very much

to its formative self, or much of the way it was once perceived in folklore of old. Although

they look and behave very much like contemporary zombies, they still maintain components

of now traditional vampire myths: sexuality, being staked through the heart to be killed,

being unable to venture out into the sunlight without being destroyed, and being fearful of

crosses.

Written in an age when America continued to feel the threat of Communism looming

over it, the book demonstrates what could potentially happen to the individualistic wealthy

vampire after being reduced to the lower class collectivist zombie. However, the central

focus of the novel rests on the lone human whose world is overtaken by the Other and his

futile desperation for the restoration of humanity. As Mathias Classen points out:

This is a film that remains an outlier in the development of the vampire genre. Although it demonstrates

the backsliding of the vampire into a more monstrous version of itself, its filmmaker, F. W. Murnau, was far
more interested in creating an offensive racial stereotype of the Jew rather than focusing on a tale of the
vampire.

Not sensuality. Unlike their Byronic predecessors, their sexuality is raw and bestial.

The horror critic Mark Jankcovich identifies a group of 1950s horror texts, I Am
Legend included, that are characterized by a 'preoccupation with the figure of the
outsider, and their experience of alienation, estrangement and powerlessness.' As
he notes, the concept of conformity in 1950s USA was not just highly prevalent in
social discourse, but highly ambivalent. The paradoxical motif of being alone
among others is one that finds currency in a paranoid Cold War cultural climate.
(321)

The merits of individuality is questioned when the sole human character is left isolated in a

new world overrun by a different species of being. The irony of the story is that the last

human is, in fact, the monster in this brand new world.

EEMERGENCE OF THE

YRONIC

AMPIRE

Two decades after Romero's rearticulation of I Am Legend, novelist Anne Rice

arrives on the scene and pulls the vampire out of the muck, by not only reclaiming his noble

heritage but also by catapulting him to new heights. In her first novel, Interview with the

Vampire (published in 1976), the familiar face of the Byronic vampire reincarnates in Lestat.

As an aristocrat with indispensable income which permits him every luxury while enjoying

complete social mobility, he is the epitome of the 19th century vampire. In addition, he and

his vampire companion Louis are plantation owners in New Orleans and own hundreds of

black slaves. Just as Dracula, in Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, needs to control

others by turning them into his slaves, or metaphorical zombies, Lestat does the same.

Regarding his view of humanity and his superiority over it he explains:

Evil is a point of view. We are immortal. And what we have before us are the rich
feasts that conscience cannot appreciate and mortal men cannot know without
regret. God kills, and so shall we; indiscriminately. He takes the richest and the
poorest, and so shall we; for no creatures under God are as we are, none so like
Him as ourselves, dark angels not confined to the limits of hell but wandering His
earth and all its kingdoms. (Rice 87)

By rationalizing the subjectivity of evil, Lestat justifies his behavior of feasting upon

humans, whom he perceives as inferior to his own kind. Like his noble predecessors, he

reckons himself above those he preys upon and likens himself to God, his permissive

aristocratic doctrine giving him free reign to do precisely what he wants when he wants,

without accountability to others. Yet as the Vampire Chronicles series progresses Lestat,

under the influence of the compassionate and humanistic Louis, evolves into a humane being

with a conscience. Similarly to “Varney the Vampire, serialized in the middle of the 19th

century, the undead creature exhibits remorse for his crimes—ultimately killing himself

rather than continuing as he is—it is not until Anne Rice's works that we have our first truly

sympathetic view of the vampire as a self-aware creature capable of choosing not to murder

innocents” (Wilcox and Lavery 149). Although Varney displays conscience, he does not

display restraint. Rice’s vampires are more human than ever before in that they not only

wrestle with the guilt of their vampire identities but behave contrary to their innate predatory

nature.

Concurrently, Rice adds another dimension to the vampire which is the need for

human companionship. Armand explains to Louis that many vampires do not have the

stamina for immortality because they are unable to cope as permanent fixtures within an

ever-changing world. The novel, which at times takes place in the late 20

century, is worlds

away from the 18

century, or the time in which Louis and Lestat were born. In order to

survive, they are forced to evolve, accepting a modern world lest they perish in their

nostalgia for the past. Lestat has a hard time accepting the evolution of the world as it

progresses through time. He, like Byron, is nostalgic for the 18

century, a time in which

aristocratic privilege and dangerous liaisons trumped all.

As Lestat moves into the 20

century, nobility and the privileges that accompany it is an idea of the past which is

especially evident in America, the eventual country in which Louis and Lestat reside. The

world as they knew it hundreds of years ago is replaced by modernity, so-called social

justice, and the exponential acceleration of science and technology—the world of the

Creature/zombie. Humans change and adapt and are therefore the vampire's gateway into the

modern world. Mortals become an integral part of the vampire's life who wishes to

assimilate. Yet outside of their necessity for humans, vampires also find mortality beautiful

because of its brevity. They live vicariously through human lives by following them,

watching them, befriending them, protecting them, and sometimes taking them as lovers;

humans remind them of their former selves.

Louis, in defense of human life and refutation

Although Byron is of the 19

century, he seems far more suited to the 18

century world of aristocracy

and lived in ways which emulated that life.

Anne Rice also brings back the homosexuality of the vampire. Instead of lesbian vampires, like

LeFanu’s, her male vampires are implicitly written as either bisexual or gay. Yet, Rice also brings back the
progressiveness of the female vampire outside of her sexuality. Rice’s female vampires are strong, independent

of Lestat’s subjective philosophy on evil, explains after emerging from an existential crisis,

“And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a single human life. Whether a man

would die tomorrow or the day after or eventually... it doesn't matter. Because if God does

not exist, then life...every second of it...is all we have” (Rice 235). Rice's vampires are the

first to hold humans in such high regard because they come to the realization that fleeting life

is far more precious than the monotony and meaninglessness of immortality, which

ultimately is akin to the monotony and meaninglessness of the aristocracy. Echoing the

dilemma of Childe Harold, although infinitely wealthy, able to travel the world and a

moment’s notice, take the lover of their choosing, and wield supreme power over the masses,

what is left to be desired? Rice's vampires take a step away from the aristocracy and into the

life of the everyman which causes the reemergence of the vampire genre. Rice breathes life

anew into a tired and dated archetype, giving it relevance to the New World and this slowly

begins to bridge the gap between vampires and ourselves.

GE OF

ROGRESS IN

AMPIRE

ICTION

As a result of the born again vampire, the critically-acclaimed, television series Buffy

the Vampire Slayer (produced from 1997 to 2003) and its spinoff series, Angel (produced

from 1999 to 2004) emerge. Creative mastermind behind the project, Joss Whedon, broke

ground after giving the world Angel and Buffy, unprecedented progressive characters who

tear through the constraints of traditional vampire fiction: Angel, a formerly evil vampire

turned good fights alongside Buffy, the strong, independent heroine, to save the world from

the vampire apocalypse. Whedon’s vampires express the full range of vampire types, from

the zombie-esque who claw out of their graves with glazed eyes and insatiable appetites, to

the sympathetic and transcendent vampire Angel, who abstains from drinking human blood,

and sleeps in a bed rather than a coffin. Angel, an outgrowth of Rice's vampires, struggles

with his vampirism. Once hailed as the most heinous vampire of all time, he now loathes and

resents his vampire nature after being cursed with a soul by a band of “gypsies.”

Along

with his soul comes the torture of conscience and loneliness. He yearns for mortality, which

types who live outside the rules of vampire society.

Vampires in “Buffyverse” have no souls, which makes them inherently evil.

he reclaims to a certain extent through his mortal companions and human lover Buffy. Tim

Kane draws the same parallel as he writes, “Creator Joss Whedon wanted to exemplify the

loneliness of the vampire… Whedon calls the vampire a creature that's ‘in the world but not

part of it.’ In this aspect, Angel is syntactically similar to Louis from Interview with the

Vampire” (113). Whedon’s brief description of the vampire is remarkably similar to Louis’

formerly quoted speech regarding their fixed nature in an ever-changing world and is just as

relevant to Shelley’s Creature—both are plagued by alienation. However, Angel transcends

both the Creature and Rice’s vampires in that he actively seeks redemption for the sins he has

committed against humankind in his formative evil years. This extra step beyond merely

feeling mournful over losing his humanity, like the Creature and Rice’s vampires, to taking

the time to right his wrongs by actively seeking out and assisting humans in distress, presents

an unexpected growth in the vampire; Angel is in fact a guardian angel of sorts and the

implication behind his name implies a transcendence to the heavenly. But Angel, too, is a

product of his time. Grounded in his desire for humanity he leaves his nobility behind and

lives among the ordinary. He surrounds himself with people, works a full-time job, and wears

casual clothing. Outside of his supernatural powers, Angel is an everyman, a middle-class

guy who is a happy medium between the Byronic noble elite vampire and the destitute

poverty-stricken zombie. If zombies and vampires sit on the same scale representing

socioeconomic status, Angel resides somewhere in the middle. While he still has monetary

resources, social privilege, and supernatural powers, he is humble, hard-working, and gives

back to his community.

Like Angel, Buffy subverts her stereotypical role. A review of Buffy entitled “Power

Girl/Girl Power”, states, “Buffy as [a] heroine is most unusual. Since the first Gothic novels

appeared in the mid-18th century, Gothic heroines have tended to be extremely sensitive,

intelligent, and curious, but overly imaginative and passive. By granting Buffy fighting

power against evil and the ability to foresee the future in her dreams, Whedon creates a

heroine opposed to a long tradition” (Walsh and Walsh 503). She is a unique human female

character in the vampire genre in that she is anything but weak or impressionable. She is

“The Slayer”, or “The Chosen One”, who is ordained to save the world from impending

apocalyptic evil. She is a superhero in her own right: a fierce, strong, smart, independent, and

quick-witted girl who, despite falling in love with the vampire Angel, does so on her own

terms. Their courtship is devoid of any supernatural influence; it is a relationship of

unconditional love and mutual respect. Buffy is arguably stronger than Angel, both mentally

and physically, a paradigm never seen before in the vampire genre.

Buffy, like Angel,

transcends her formative restrictive stereotypical role in that she is a positive female role

model who teaches women their strength and self-worth. In a time when “girl power”

became a catch phrase and shortly after Third Wave feminism was born, Buffy is reflective

of her era. Both she and Angel are the most positive role models of their respective

archetypes in the history of the vampire genre.

ACKSLIDING OF

ROGRESS IN

ARLY

ENTURY

AMPIRE

ICTION

After Buffy and Angel’s departure from television came the regression of the

vampire. He begins once again to resemble the controlling 19

/early 20

century vampire

who controls his victims as though they are his zombies. Although two contemporary best-

selling texts—Stephanie Meyer's Twilight series and, Charlene Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse

series (which was adapted into the popular HBO series True Blood—are responsible for the

explosion of the vampire genre in contemporary popular culture, they are equally responsible

for stripping it of the newfound progressivism instilled in it by Joss Whedon. It is arguable

that True Blood deals with social issues in a progressive manner, but if it does, it does so

disingenuously. The story is set in the Deep South, making vampires easily identifiable as a

metaphor for minority groups who suffer from racial injustice and bigotry. Some struggle for

acceptance as equals in society and openly defy those who would force them to live in

segregation, or even worse, seek to destroy them. However, there are many vampires who

remain uninterested in coexisting with humans and view them as nothing more than food.

Their closed-door exclusive society harkens back to the aristocratic elite: they even appoint

kings and queens. Yet the disingenuous approach to race and class is visible in the way

Harris portrays vampires in comparison to the real destitute characters who suffer from class

and race warfare. To paint vampires as synonymous with poor black people trying to gain

And one rarely found in the horror genre where women are more often depicted as victims rather than

warriors.

equality in a white, rich world is laughable. Firstly, most of the show’s vampires are white

and more importantly, they retain their socio-economic privilege from centuries past. Harris’

vampires remain the wealthy elite, not the downtrodden disenfranchised: they own successful

nightclubs and live in mansions. The true horror of True Blood is the rampant poverty that

plagues the majority of other supernatural characters as well as humans. While privileging

the aristocratic vampire elite by trying to help earn them a place in society, Harris demonizes

the poor. Some of the show’s worst characters are defined by their poverty: Tara’s mother,

Lettie Mae is a poor, single black woman who drinks excessively and abuses her daughter;

Crystal (named after the slang word for methamphetamines) and her family are mere

rearticulations of the socially constructed stereotype of the “white trash redneck”: dirty, poor,

uneducated, inbred and incestuous, living in a shantytown and supporting themselves by

manufacturing and selling methamphetamines; Sam’s trailer-dwelling parents are

opportunists who turn their other shapeshifter son out by forcing him to participate in deadly

dogfights so they can make a buck. Generally, those who fit the stereotype surrounding poor

southern culture are those who are depicted as the worst types of people. Harris doesn’t even

use zombies as a metaphor to make a class distinction in her show—in her world, literal poor

people are the monsters.

True

Blood and Twilight are both culpable for the backsliding of the main female

character: she is once again weak, sexually objectified, and now more eager than ever to be

submissive to, while reveling in mistreatment by her vampire lover. While True Blood

contains Nan Flanagan and Pam Swynford De Beaufort, two strong female vampires who

parody anti-feminist sentiments, the central focus of the 21

century vampire story tends to

revolve around a frail and emotionally dependent human girl and her romantic relationship

with the possessive and domineering vampire, which reinforces the twisted myth of this

particular idealized love story.

In addition to the vampire genre’s heroine receiving a

demotion, the contemporary vampire devolves into a lascivious, manipulative, and

domineering male who preys upon the weaknesses of women under the guise of good nature.

Although Sookie is half-human, half-faerie, she tends to get most of her physical/supernatural strength

from her faerie side. As a human, Sookie perpetually places herself in danger because of her differing vampire
love interests.

Yet J.M. Tyree defends the modern vampire because he believes that it might have an

influence on the way we think about contemporary romantic relationships. He writes:

Edward is the perfect gentleman. He struggles successfully to resist smoldering
jailbait come-ons, and he can move at lightning speed from driving a car to
opening its passenger door for his date. Bill is literally an old-school Southern
gent—his good manners derive from his upbringing in Antebellum Louisiana.
[…] a metaphor for our age’s fantasies of non-exploitative tolerance and
relatively equitable love relationships. (Tyree 32)

Firstly, “old-school Southern” door-opening gender relationships are perhaps the pinnacle of

patriarchal condescension and disempowerment. Secondly, to assume society at large is

pining for said ideals while domestic violence, rape, homophobia, racism, and sexism run

rampant, is charitable at best. And thirdly, are we really going to give Edward our approval

for being “strong enough” to resist pedophilic urges? We have reached the point at which we

are more concerned with defending the vampire rather than the victim. Although they might

sometimes appear wholesome and gentlemanly because of their good looks and silver

tongues, their underlying motivations are not driven by neither love nor respect for the

women to whom they are attracted, but by selfish desire, and contemporary readers do mental

gymnastics to convince themselves that this is somehow acceptable and even desirable.

By mainstream standards today's vampire is something to aspire to. The shift into the

contemporary depiction of zombies—to an ever-more undirected consumerism—is paralleled

in vampire stories in the 21

century. Deviating from the progressive representation of Buffy

to a more strictly controlled vision of female sexuality that is reliant on a strong male figure

for validation, with a heavy focus on aesthetic and status, 21

century vampires (and their

groupies) feed into patriarchal, exploitative fairytales. As Natalie Wilson puts it, “On a

mythic level, Twilight validates patriarchal capitalism and suggests that married monogamy

creates a stable society while at the same time bolstering readers’ worth by feeding long-

standing beliefs such as ‘true love conquers all’” (18). The vampire represents the height of

societal expectations: he is the epitome of coolness, sexiness, mystery, and power. He's

white, privileged, heterosexual, well-dressed, extraordinarily beautiful, and widely desired:

some even sparkle in the sun like diamonds.

He is a bona fide celebrity (the nobility of our

This is an attempt by the Mormon Meyers to depict her vampires as “good” or angelic. In reaction to the

age) and is adored by both in-text characters and real-life audiences. And just as celebrities

frequently do wrong in the public eye, so do vampires, and we are quick to forgive them and

once again worship at their feet. Both Edward and Bill repeatedly mistreat their leading

ladies: Bella and Sookie are treated as prizes in male competitions, disingenuously seduced

for gain (each have a quality that is inaccessible to the vampire unless he claims the girl to

whom it belongs), and perpetually placed in life-threatening situations. Yet they are still

mesmerized by the vampires’ multi-faceted representation of power and, displaying a

horrifying lack of self-worth, Bella and Sookie continuously look into the face of danger

while desperately vying for male attention and validation. Whereas in the episode “Him”,

Buffy says, “No guy is worth your life, not ever”, Bella is willing to make the ultimate

sacrifice and die for her beau, and eventually does. Yet some regard Twilight as “a sweet and

innocent love story” (Blasingame 629); it has, after all, sold over 100 million copies

worldwide. But by praising Bella's willingness to die for love and become a vampire herself,

is to make her subordinate to Edward and reinforces gender roles rooted in inequality. She

casts aside all components of her identity to be with him and, essentially, to be like him.

Bella's willingness to reinvent herself for Edward is praised as romantic despite its regressive

patriarchal implications. The overall behavior of the contemporary vampire is reminiscent of

the loathsome behavior of some of the original literary 19

century vampires. They are

equally patriarchal, domineering, selfish elites who serve their own interests. However, the

one distinguishing characteristic the new vampire claims from contemporary lore is

sympathy, consequently making him more heinous than we have formerly imagined, because

not only is he once again monstrous, but now we like him for it. When Whedon introduced

the progressive vampire, he concurrently introduced the amiable vampire. Yet once his

progressive voice left the arena, all that remains is a love affair with a monster.

Zombies and vampires are equally popular today. Both are contenders for the

competitive title “coolest monster,” but at their essence they are not all that different. As we

have discussed, they originate from the same humble place: the graveyard of peasants. The

new vampire trait there was a huge backlash in pop culture, mainly by anti fans of the series. Although most of
the gory horror of the vampire is gone, this negative popular reaction shows that audiences have certain
standards regarding the depiction of vampires.

revenant reflected their humble lives and it was only after the upper-class Romantics

produced their innovative tales of the undead, that the story becomes muddled. Essentially,

rich, upper-class elites took the story back to England, retold it as it applied to their own

lives, and thus the split between the zombie and the vampire occurred. The English noble

vampire was born and has since made his way to America, while his original grassroots

identity remains left behind with the Eastern European peasants who brought him into

existence. The undead is the undead and, in the case of the zombie and vampire, what merely

appears to separate one revenant from another ultimately boils down to distinctions in

culture, class, and time. If then vampires and zombies are reflections of ourselves rooted in

our respective times, what is the future of our monsters? Seeing how each is popular in its

own right and the vampire arguably has already had its heyday, perhaps we should turn our

eyes to the zombies and listen more closely to what they're trying to tell us about ourselves.

The reality is most of us are not similar to vampires and will never be similar to vampires;

the reality is most of us are far more similar to the zombie than we like to think. In an age

driven by science and technology which propels our consumer culture, we desperately try to

claw our way out from our proletariat graves and grab onto anything which permits us better

material conditions. How long can the zombie and the vampire sustain their current

respective un-lives? Their social classes are so far divided that a revolution is bound to occur

and when it does, it will be a fascinating time: one that allows us to examine the continuing

changes in our most beloved monsters and, more importantly, within ourselves.

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