Introduction: Migrations and Mutations

Summary

A defining feature of vampires is their ability to mutate and migrate. Evoking the black-and-white mise-en-scène of classical Hollywood, Ana Lily Amirpour's A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014) introduced a female vampire who rides a skateboard in hijab. The vampire's chador rejects typical post-9/11 suspicions about Muslims, racialized by their clothing. Instead, it shields her from unwanted attention of predatory human men. The film self-consciously references the visual ambiance of Hollywood's first vampire films, Universal Pictures’ Dracula (1931) and Drácula (1931), but marks a different historical moment and cultural politics. Count Dracula and Conde Drácula's flowing black capes may have seemed foreign to audiences during the 1930s, but the open black chador of Amirpour's vampire is relatively familiar today, if sometimes reductively as a sign of patriarchal oppression or foreign menace. Amirpour reworks Hollywood conventions of male vampires, attacking female victims, into a feminist vampire, protecting women. Marshaling the chador's power against male terrors of the night—and a skateboard for enhanced female mobility, Amirpour's vampire also subverts conventional thinking about difference and belonging, guiding us through worlds that have always folded into one another.

Vampires may be historically rooted in eastern European folklore, but their progeny proliferates unbound. They mutate and migrate between melodrama, romance, horror, comedy, soap opera, and science fiction. They adapt freely to codes and conventions as diverse as Latin American lucha libre and tel¬enovela, South Asian masala, East Asian wuxia and anime, and industrial contexts as different as Hollywood, Lollywood, Bollywood, Nollywood, and Hallyuwood. Our fascination with vampires is undying; their popu¬larity, inexhaustible. Since vampires are diverse and unruly as a category, vampire media is sometimes dismissed as having little to say. Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods argues that vampires have something to say precisely because they are so diverse and unruly as a category. The book proposes that vampire films and series constitute a different way of understanding Hollywood by investigating two twinned trajectories in the context of production, distribution, and exhibition: what vampire films and series depict on the screen, and how they produce affect in audiences that ranges from affiliation and empathy to repulsion and suspicion. Vampires allow us to refocus on Hollywood as plural, US history as transnational, and race as having afterlives. The vampire's figurative and discursive significance addresses ongoing debates that are not always addressed in more realist modes.