The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema by Jeffrey Weinstock (review)

Jeffrey Weinstock’s The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema is a recent edition of Wallflower’s Short Cuts series, described on the publisher’s website as “a comprehensive list of introductory texts covering the full spectrum of Film Studies, including genres, critical concepts, film histories/movements and film technologies.” Such a description might prepare readers for the general approach the author takes to discussing the vampire film and its tropes. Throughout the text, Weinstock reviews some of the relevant scholarship on vampire cinema (that is, if the term can be used to describe vampire films, an issue Weinstock addresses), mainly offering subtle tweaks to existing ideas plus new readings of a variety of films, as opposed to radically new analyses. Newer readers on the subject will likely see The Vampire Film as a solid introduction to this discourse.

Weinstock opens the text with a marshaling of “a handful of governing principles that … hold true for the vast majority of films and underlie the hypnotic hold the vampire has exerted over the Western imagination for over a century” (6). These ideas speak to the lasting popularity of the vampire as cinematic subject matter, and include notions such as the cinematic vampire defying genre, consistently being related to sex, engaging understandings of technology, and acting as a representation of cultural “others” (7–19). He chooses the latter three concepts in particular as lenses for exploring the vampire’s enduring appeal, doing in-depth readings of numerous films across cinema history to illustrate the importance of these ideas to vampire cinema. Readers new to this discussion should find his consideration of classic vampire texts such as Dracula, as well as his references to earlier academic writing on vampire films, important to tracing the topic back to its roots; those already versed in this scholarship will find interesting readings of a variety of films, a number of which have rarely been discussed in theoretical considerations of the genre.

Among the most interesting elements of Weinstock’s approach is his work on rarely addressed films, be it because of their obscurity (1915’s A Fool There Was; 1971’s lesbian vampire films Vampyros Lesbos, Requiem for a Vampire, and Daughters of Darkness; 1973’s Ganja and Hess) or their status as diluted Hollywood fare (the Blade, Underworld, and Twilight franchises; 2004’s Hugh Jackman–starring Van Helsing; 2007’s Will Smith–starring I Am Legend). While the introductory nature of the text leads to some more traditional readings of films such as Interview with the Vampire, the Blacula films, or David Cronenberg’s Rabid, his approach to the previously mentioned texts yields newer insights and more nuanced readings. In regard to the films of the 1970s, Weinstock uses them to discuss shifting sexual norms in his opening chapter on vampires and sexuality. He points to lesbian vampire films in particular as a “titillating engagement with transgressive sexual desires and taboos” that “implicitly code specific behaviors as acceptable and unacceptable, thus reifying and reproducing sexual stereotypes and cultural understandings of what constitutes acceptable and unacceptable sexual behavior, even as they trouble those same social expectations by raising questions … about their naturalness” (22). While many readers may be aware of this notion of the hyper-sexualized vampire, Weinstock argues that previous scholars such as Richard Dyer, Ken Gelder, and David Pirie see eroticism in vampire films as “latent,” whereas he is more interested in considering the explicitness of sexuality around cinematic vampires (21). In the process, the chapter provides an intriguing insight into the complicated ways that the eroticism of the vampire myth becomes visualized in a film era with loosening constraints around depictions of sexuality.

Another valuable element of Weinstock’s text is the discussion of popular vampire films that are often pushed to the liminal spaces of the genre. While films such as those in the Twilight, Blade, and Underworld franchises are often considered with varying levels of disdain, often critiqued for the changes they make to vampire lore...