Citation: Olney, Ian Zombie Cinema. New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press
[Book] Ian Olney’s Zombie Cinema gives an overview to the recent boom in the use of Zombies in popular culture. It acknowledges how it’s ingrained itself into almost every form of media, and how zombies often involve a zombie apocalypse. Olney believes the cause of this popularity in the twenty-first century rather than in its first appearances is that instead of the more mixed representations of the early to mid nineteen-hundreds, they began to represent a cultural anxiety in ourselves, a fear of our own collapse. Olney addresses earlier uses of zombies as representations of the “other,” such as the Essay “An Introduction to American Horror Film” by Robin Wood, which claims that zombies may represent the counterculture movement of younger generations. Olney also references how this insatiable hunger the zombies show represents our Western culture of constant consumption, along with Stephen Shapiro’s essay “Urban Zombies, the Monstrous Turn”; stating that our relating or wanting to be zombies relates to our own wish to induce social collapse. This source will allow me to illustrate how zombies have had a boom in culture as a reflection of our own potential downfalls.
Citation: Arata, Stephen D. “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization”. Victorian studies, 1990-07-01, Vol.33 (4), p.621-645
[Article] Stephen Arata brings to light the movement in Gothic literature Dracula, by Bram Stoker was a part of, which grounds their stories in their modern world to use what their society already feared. Around the time of Dracula’s writing there was a fear of “Reverse Colonization,” represented by the foreign(Austro-Hungarian) Count Dracula with animalistic features coming to civilized England to infect or seduce the masses with his hedonistic ways. Arata also acknowledges how other pieces of literature(such as The Time Machine by H.G. Wells and Jekyll and Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson) in this movement typically differed from Dracula due to the antagonist being more of a savage character rather than the apparent high class of the Count, who’s supernatural power is more occult. This source will let me illustrate the original representation of the Vampire and how it reflects the time and place it came from, and contrast it to modern representations of vampires.
Citation: Vučković, Dijana & PajovićDujović, Ljiljana. “The Evolution of the Evolution of the Vampire from Stoker’s Dracula to Meyer’s Twilight Saga”. CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture, 2016-09-01, Vol.18 (3), p.1
[Online Article] Dijana Vučković and Ljiljana Dujović take a more rounded look at Vampires, comparing modern takes such as the Twilight Saga with the original Dracula, Showing how the original fears that built up Vampires has shifted to become less fearful, while still playing into the idea of reverse colonization, even referencing Stephen Arata’s “The Occidental Tourist: Dracula and the Anxiety of Reverse Colonization”. We see this by having Edward Cullen, a Vampire shown to very clearly be inhuman to fall in love and run away with the human Bella Swan. But rather than this being a horror story it’s seen as a controversial love for a Romantic movie, with both well meaning or “civilized” vampires and the classic monstrous vampires as antagonists. I will use this source to show how the main fear that inspired the original vampires still plays a key role into modern representation of vampires, while still changing in tone.
Citation: Erickson, Daniel. Ghosts, metaphor, and history in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Gabriel García Márquez’s One hundred years of solitude New York : Palgrave Macmillan [Book]
Citation: Gonzalez-Crussi, Frank. The Beast Within: A History of the Werewolf. Nature Publishing Group [Article]
Citation: Crossen, Carys The Nature of the Beast: Transformations of the Werewolf from the 1970s to the Twenty First Century. University of Wales Press [Book]