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CHAPTER TEN Los Angeles: Fangs, Gangs, andVampireland When Angel, the vampire with a soul, leaves Sunnydale and the television series of Buffy the Vampire Slayer to pursue his own destiny and television program, he is drawn to the city of Los Angeles and its diversity of victims and villains, humans and demons.1 While Sunnydale was contained and unified, Los Angeles is sprawling and fragmented. Violence erupts onto the streets every night unnoticed, not because it is hidden but because the inhabitants of Los Angeles retreat behind closed doors and choose not to see it. “War Zone” (Angel 1:20) encapsulates one of the many themes of the Los Angeles vampire film, presenting this violence as a conflict of race, enacted upon the backstreets of the city through gang warfare. In this episode, Angel comes across two youth gangs segregated into distinct groups, vampire and human, fighting to maintain their turf and identity. Racially, the humans embody a diverse ethnic range of African, Asian, and Hispanic origins, while the vampires are presented as fascist skinheads looking to maintain the purity of the blood supply in the neighborhood . The battles they wage are in the open yet remain unseen. The fragmented nature of the city is summarized by Angel’s assistant Cordelia when she laments, “Twenty minutes ride from billionaires and crab puffs, kids going to war.” As Angel proceeds on his mission, confronting different types of demons, vampires, victims, or villains, the serial nature of the program emphasizes the fragmentation of the city into distinct and often warring communities. Prior to Angel’s arrival in Los Angeles, however, a diverse range of vampires already populated the city. Blacula and Count Yorga, two old-world vampires, from Africa and Europe respectively, relocated to Los Angeles in the 1970s. John Llewellyn Moxey followed up the success of The Night Stalker with I, Desire (1982), a made-for-television film 178 CelluloidVampires about a young law student who becomes obsessed with hunting a vampire that is stalking contemporary Los Angeles. The city, however, became the locus for a subgenre of vampire films in the mid 1980s with the release of a group of teen-vampire films: Fright Night (1985), Fright Night Part II (1988), The Lost Boys (1987), Beverly Hills Vamp (1988), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992), followed by the less specifically teen-oriented vampire films Blood Ties (1992), Blade (1998), and Revenant (1999). The vampires in these films are a fragmented group, represented by a diversity of race, age, gender, and social makeup, and like the city itself, they are unified by their disunity. The movement from the New York vampire to the Los Angeles vampire along the highway of the vampire road movie, therefore, charts a shift from the specificity and locality embodied by New York to the absence of locale, the fragmentation of space and identity, and the prevalence of postmodern alienation that defines Los Angeles. Greg Hise, Michael J. Dear, and H. Eric Schockman describe the disunity of the Los Angeles landscape as a form of “postmodern urbanism,” arguing that the logic that previously “guided the urban process” has been altered and replaced by “multiple rationalities that do not cohere into a single logic of urbanization. In this sense, postmodern urbanism is about complexity and difference.”2 Edward Soja, a leading urban theorist, has suggested that the structure of Los Angeles is, by definition, a contradiction , as the freeways, which seemingly act as a linchpin to pull the city together, also act as barriers keeping it apart.3 This fragmentation has led to the problem of identifying and reading the contemporary city. The indecipherability of the real city of Los Angeles is reinforced by its primary window to the world: the film industry. As the home to Hollywood , Los Angeles is one of the most represented cities in the world. Los Angeles’ city streets and buildings have been the backdrop of countless films, from the early days of silent cinema to the present, yet rarely are they presented in their own right. One of the reasons that the early filmmakers moved to Hollywood was because of the city’s climate and malleability as a location.4 From the beaches to the foothills, from the desert to the mountains, Los Angeles can pass for everywhere and nowhere , anytime and no time. As Jonathan Bell has argued, “the countless celluloid lies that have been born beneath the picture-perfect skies reflect a city of imitation, duplicity, simulation, and duplication.”5 Although...

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