Bela Lugosi may -- as the eighties gothic rock band Bauhaus sang --
be dead, but the vampire lives on. A nightmarish figure dwelling
somewhere between genuine terror and high camp, a morbid repository
for the psychic projections of diverse cultures, an endlessly
recyclable mass-media icon, the vampire is an enduring object of
fascination, fear, ridicule, and reverence. In The Vampire
Lectures, Laurence A. Rickels sifts through the rich mythology of
vampirism, from medieval folklore to Marilyn Manson, to explore the
profound and unconscious appeal of the undead.
Based on the course Rickels has taught at the University of
California, Santa Barbara, for several years (a course that is
itself a cult phenomenon on campus), The Vampire Lectures reflects
Rickels's unique lecture style and provides a lively history of
vampirism in legend, literature, and film. Rickels unearths a trove
that includes eyewitness accounts of vampire attacks; burial
rituals and sexual taboos devised to keep vampirism at bay;
Hungarian countess Elisabeth Bathory's use of girls' blood in her
sadistic beauty regimen; Bram Stoker's Dracula, with its
turn-of-the-century media technologies; F. W. Murnau's haunting
Nosferatu; and crude, though intense, straight-to-video horror
films such as Subspecies. He makes intuitive, often unexpected
connections among these sometimes wildly disparate sources.
More than simply a compilation of vampire lore, however, The
Vampire Lectures makes an original and intellectually rigorous
contribution to literary and psychoanalytic theory, identifying the
subconscious meanings, complex symbolism, and philosophical
arguments -- particularly those of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche --
embeddedin vampirism and gothic literature.
General
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