Conclusion: The Vampire in the Americas and Beyond

Summary

The vampire as we know it, its frequent allure of great antiquity and exotic provenance notwithstanding, is fundamentally a modern, European monster. Each of the vampire's many incarnations draws on the anxiety and desire loosed by accelerating social transformations since the 1700s. The first half of this study examined the monster in light of economic changes, political conflicts, and encounters between different ethnicities in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The last three chapters have explored how the vampire subsequently mutated and thrived in the imaginary space shaped, at the turn of the twentieth century, by modern technologies — all the while retaining its connection to the open-ended categories of religion, race, and class inherited from earlier times. It would be remiss to close the book on the vampire without a few words on the forms the monster has assumed in the latter half of the twentieth and at the beginning of the twenty-first centuries. Equally, the task remains of exploring how the vampire left the Old World for the New and, in the process, rejuvenated itself.

The ministers, clerics, and men of finance referred to as “vampires” in rationalist polemics from the London Craftsman to Marx's Capital (see chapter 2) represent the barbarism that modern societies can displace and change in appearance, but which always remains one step ahead of projects of improvement — as if new agents of power enjoyed an inherited right.