Vampires from folklore to the cash nexus

Horror: A Very Short Introduction (2021) by Darryl Jones

Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror by Darryl Jones (OUP, 2018) is a brief but meaty overview of Horror fiction and film since about 1800. Jones is erudite and clever, insightful without being glib. He takes a global comparative view of his materials, stressing themes and motifs. Happily for the reader, he does not recapitulate the already chewed-over work of earlier scholars like Praz, Punter, and Bloom. Sleeping with the Lights On is also an excellent survey of academic thinking on issues raised by works of horror.

I first read Sleeping with the Lights On two years ago. At that time I wrote:

....For most of the very brief book, Jones addresses the market-driven historical vicissitudes of horror film and TV work. As a teacher he's probably learned that students are willing to discuss "True Detective" or "Buffy," but  not Melmoth the Wanderer or "Laura Silver Bell." (Sorry to be wearing my Sneering S. T. Joshi hat today.)

I was surprised that the most recognized and influential contemporary stylists of horror prose today get little mention.  Stephen King is discussed, as are Victor LaValle and Michelle Paver, but not Dennis Etchison, Ramsey Campbell, or Reggie Oliver. Perhaps that's just me, though. Jones is clearly aiming at a short, popular outline, employing sexy tops like "body horror" and "torture porn." His discussions of these topics are sober and thoughtful, and do point readers at the best examples.

This past week I read the latest, expanded edition of Sleeping with the Lights On, which OUP has recruited to its long-running series A Very Short Introduction.

Jones has added an updated final chapter survey of the field circa 2020, which begins:

Where is horror today? Throughout this book, I have tried to stress the cultural proliferation of horror, and its plurality. Horror is tentacular, spreading everywhere. It is Protean, taking many forms. It manifests multiple personalities and has been put to many uses, made to suggest or articulate a variety of positions, ideologies, arguments, and worldviews, not all of them consistent and some of them downright contradictory. While some, including myself, would argue that horror is at its most powerful when it is at its most confrontational—violating taboos, flowing over boundaries, antagonizing respectability—there is no doubt that some of the finest horror shores up traditional worldviews.

Horror: A Very Short Introduction (2021) is a book worthy of your time and attention. I will be posting some excerpts in the coming days.

Jay

     ....who actually believes in vampires?’

     Though unquestionably revenants, ‘folkloric’ vampires such as Arnold Paole and his ilk tend to be peasants or rural villagers, intensely localized in their effects. In appearance, they are often described as ruddy faced, as though bloated with blood. How did we get from these frankly unsexy undead yokels to the characteristic vampire of modern popular culture—suave, aristocratic, cultivated, pale, and desirable?

     This vampire is a distinctive product of the literary culture of Romanticism. As the critic Mario Praz identified as long ago as 1933, there is a recurring strain of ‘Dark Romanticism’ which is fascinated by the allure of supernatural and demonic creatures (Lamia, Geraldine, and other serpent-women, Life-in-Death, La Belle Dame Sans Merci) and by human transgressors and overreachers standing apart from the common concerns of humanity (Faust, Frankenstein, Napoleon). In April 1819, the New Monthly Magazine published a tale entitled The Vampyre, whose protagonist, the charismatic and seductive Lord Ruthven, returns to London from his European Grand Tour, having died in Greece and arisen as a vampire. Published anonymously, the work was assumed to be by Lord Byron (Goethe thought it among his best work), though it was in fact written by the Edinburgh physician Dr John Polidori. Polidori was present at the evening of supernatural tales told at the Villa Diodati on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816 which was the genesis of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Told as they have been from a variety of different and differing sources, the events of this evening are difficult to reconstruct with certainty, but it seems likely that Polidori based The Vampyre on the supernatural tale which Byron himself told that night (a fragment of which was subsequently published), and drew heavily on the scandalous public persona of Byron himself for Lord Ruthven.

     With Romantic writers such as Byron and Polidori, the vampire became, importantly, both sexualized and aristocratic, a demon lover, running riot across the poetry, fiction, and theatre of the nineteenth century right up to the publication of the single most important text in the history of horror, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, in 1897. At the same time, Karl Marx habitually deployed the vampire as a metaphor for the ‘bloodsucking’ economic exploitation of capitalism (one wonders what he would have made of the Twilight phenomenon, capitalism red in fang and claw?). Marx was much given to Gothic metaphors, and when casting around in Capital (1867) for an exemplar of ‘The Voracious Appetite for Surplus Labour’, settles on ‘a Wallachian Boyar…in the Danubian Principalities’ (was he thinking of Vlad the Impaler?). A couple of pages earlier, Marx offers his celebrated account of bloodsucking capitalism:

     [The] capitalist…is only capital personified. His soul is the soul of capital. But capital has one sole driving force, the drive to valorize itself, to create surplus-value, to make its constant part, the means of production, absorb the greatest possible amount of surplus labour. Capital is dead labour which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.

     The class polarities of vampirism have been reversed. Marx’s vampiric ‘Wallachian Boyar’ exploits the labour of the very people (the Eastern European poor) who were traditionally prone to vampirism.

Sleeping with the Lights On: The Unsettling Story of Horror by Darryl Jones (OUP, 2018)