Vampires:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Thursday 22nd May - Saturday 24th May 2003
Budapest, Hungary

Session 1: Vampires in Film
Tomasz Warchol - How Coppola killed Dracula
Department of Literature and Philosophy, Georgia Southern University, USA
Tomasz Warchol Home Page

In 1897 minor writer Bram Stoker turned an obscure 15th-century Prince of Wallachia known as Dracula into the first and only historically grounded literary vampire and released his species from the eastern frontiers of Europe onto the western culture. Through Stoker's scrupulous conception, influenced by Transylvanian folklore and Victorian imagination, Dracula became the codified vampire, a standard for all vampires, King Vampire himself. In my presentation, I will argue that Dracula's almost century-long cultural life came to an end with the release of Francis Ford Coppola's 1992 film adaptation of Stoker's novel. Ironically, it was the invention of cinema (curiously not mentioned in Stoker's novel but praised by Coppola's Dracula as "the wonder of the civilized world") that first freed Dracula from his creator and the constraints of his novel to make him the most pervasive icon in western popular culture. But that same cinema, which let him reconfigure himself with each new decade, setting, and scenario, eventually brought his explicit and irrevocable death when, in the climax of Coppola's film, Mina ritually stakes and beheads Dracula, thus correcting his improper destruction in Stoker's novel, so he can return to his world and time, redeemed through her love as his reincarnated Elizabeth. Before Dracula can rest in peace, however, Coppola will elevate him to a tragic romantic figure, historicized and mythologized, a justified blasphemer inviting and embracing his curse. I will demonstrate how Coppola's portrayal and interpretation of Dracula derives from a thoughtful assimilation of Stoker's text, Florescu and McNally's research, and some of Dracula's most notable cinematic incarnations (Max Schreck, Bela Lugosi, Christopher Lee, Jack Palance, Frank Langella, to name a few). I will then claim that just as Coppola's Dracula, like a true revenant meta-vampire, draws his power and force from his own earlier kind, Coppola's film emerges as the ultimate, definitive, canonized adaptation of Dracula story by effectively vampirizing, sucking out life from all previous renditions of Dracula. While the vampires he helped father are alive and well, Dracula himself, following his death in 1992 has taken its well-earned place in our cultural past.

James Tobias- The Vampire and the Cyborg Embrace: Affect Beyond Fantasy in Virtual Materialism
Assistant Professor of Digital Media Studies, University of California at Riverside, California, USA

Latham recently has read the relationship between the vampire nd the cyborg in terms of opposing tendencies, evidence of the ongoing dialectic of capital and labour refigured in the transition to a post-Fordist consumption society. This talk will complicate Latham’s account by emphasizing the observation that the neither vampire nor cyborg is as much a figure of disavowed alterity as of avowed identification (Dyer, 1988). More generally, neither the fact of mediatisation nor the suggestion of eroticism are, today, outside the frame of the computer screen. And the fact that the point of agency in networked digital media is effectively a virtual one points to the specific engagement of the body of the interactive user-audience at the same time as it challenges and problematizes -- or at least defers specification of -- the status, form, and identity of that body. Thus, the vampire and the cyborg can also be read in terms of a problematic of phantasmatic agency at the interface itself: where the vampire “cuts,” the cyborg “pastes.”
Indeed, several critical accounts of identity and interaction in the digital media have specifically invoked the dark gift of the vampire while interrogating the prosthetic body of the cyborg. In each case, the embrace of the vampire and the cyborg re-double the figure of hybrid identity operating across systems of technology and of gender. Against the background of contemporary accounts of subjectivity and technologies of mediation (Latham, 2002, Haraway,1985, Case,1995, and Kittler,1982, Dyer, 1988) this paper will examine several contemporary works, critical and narrative, of the vampire’s embrace of the cyborg. First, I’ll explore Stone’s now-classic suggestion (1995) that subjectivity at the interface implies a vampiric gaze founded in a prosthetic corporeality. Another passional embrace between the vampire and the cyborg occurs in Guillermo Gomez-Pena’s Friendly Cannibals (1997), specifically, a fictional email exchange between an ethno-cyborg and his Latina vampire lover wandering remotely in the ‘net. Finally, Oshii’s Kikaku Kidotai (Ghost in the Shell, Oshii,1995) provides a third example of the ways in which globalizing identities open up on to differential corporealities through erotic displacements in cybernetic media systems. Here, a virtual puppet-master, an emergent, rather than artificial, cybernetic intelligence, anchors himself in the female body of a cyborg in order to claim diplomatic immunity from informatic persecution – the final inversion of Dracula’s legacy in terms precisely of mechanofemiminization, as the master’s disembodied voice seeks a female cyborg’s body in which to take refuge in the world of humans. Transgender, transethnic, transcorporeal (human-machine) – these are the figures projected in, or put to work at, the feast of transnational global technoculture in its deployment in digital form.

Sue Rinker- Vampire as metaphor for New Media?
Department of Information and Design Technology, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, USA

As a graduate student in Information Design and Technology at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, my thesis consisted of a thirty minute documentary on the history,remediation and role playing surrounding the St. Louis I Cemetery in New Orleans, Louisiana along with an interactive virtual reality tour of the site.
In my thesis, I use the vampire as a metaphor for New Media: an entity which is dependent on its former incarnation, but at the same time, is capable of destroying the very thing which sustains it. For example, many New Media theorists believe the internet will eliminate books and movies, both of which are dependent on the ancient art of spoken word storytelling. With this in mind, I explored the various ways the cemetery has been recreated in regard to the vampire, specifically through “Interview with the Vampire” by Anne Rice, her now defunct annual Coven Ball, and the Atlanta Interactive Theatre live action role playing game which is based on her writings. Also, Poppy Z Brite’s “Lost Souls” contain references to the St. Louis I Cemetery which undoubtedly influences the gothic atmosphere of the grounds.
Here is a brief synopsis of my research: First of all, the history of an artifact directly affects its future recreations. Because much of New Orleans is below sea level, the bodies are buried above ground in elaborate tombs which lend themselves perfectly to vampiric lore. The Cemetery’s religious background is pivotal in creating an atmosphere for the undead: voodoo is accepted as a religion, rites are practiced within the grounds, and a voodoo temple is across the street. The United States most famous voodoo priestess is buried in the St. Louis I, and despite the fact that Marie Laveaux has been dead for generations, people bring her offerings of coins, beads, flowers, and bottles of wine.
Secondly, a fine line exists between history and folklore. A tradition within the St. Louis I is the ritual of using a penny to scratch xxx on the tomb of Marie Laveaux, the idea being she will grant your wish in return. One tour guide claims that this is not a voodoo ritual or even a Louisiana ritual, but a fable which was started by a theatrical tour group who offer vampire tours through St. Louis I, as well as the French Quarter, while dressed a la Lestat.
Thirdly, once an artifact is remediated, that recreation may influence and/or inspire future recreations. The lineage I traced from St. Louis I is an intricate spider web of references along the lines of the game Seven Degrees of Kevin Bacon. Anne Rice writes “The Vampire Chronicles” which spawns the Coven Ball and various Live Action Role Playing Games (LARPS), which encourage some New Orleans tour guides to costume themselves as characters from her book. The concepts in Rice’s work, that vampires live among humans and have societies and rules of their own, are displayed in the movie “The Hunger”, which stars David Bowie and features the music of Bau Haus, a former Bowie tribute band gone goth. Poppy Z. Brite’s “Lost Souls” also repeatedly mentions Bau Haus, specifically the song “Bela Lugois Dead” which is used in the opening titles of “The Hunger” and is considered to be the ultimate gothic anthem. Brite also explores the homoeroticism found in “Interview with the Vampire” and “The Hunger”. Indeed, an entire genre of vampyric erotica from a variety of authors and sources is available, from the collected short stories in “A Taste of Midnight”, to the stylish x-rated film “Pornogothic”. Throughout the documentary, I interview a tour guide while on the cemetery grounds, a literature professor, a publisher, and members of the AIT, the Atlanta Interactive Theatre, in a discussion of the allure of the vampire and its effect on the St. Louis I.

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