The Undead Among Us - The Figure of the Vampire as the "Unknown Other" and Its Representation in "True Blood"

Felicitas Schott

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Initial point and working hypothesis Drakul. Nosferatu. Upyr. Vampyre. There have been many names for what we know today as the v...

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Initial point and working hypothesis Drakul. Nosferatu. Upyr. Vampyre. There have been many names for what we know today as the vampire. It is believed that the existence of the vampires goes back in time for almost one thousand years. At least since Bram Stoker's successful novel Dracula from 1897, almost everyone is familiar with the image of the walking undead that creeps out of its coffin at night and sucks the blood out of humans. Today's American popular culture makes it even inevitable to not be faced with vampires on television, in advertisement, on cereal boxes, or even in educational programs for children. The undead has always been appealing to viewers especially of the horror and fantasy genre. Zombies, ghosts, demons, mummies, and vampires have been present in movies and on television ever since the invention of the motion picture at the turn of the twentieth century. It is the "otherness" of such monsters, their frightful darkness and exoticism that makes them so interesting. Since the turn of the twenty-first century, a striking popularity of the undead figure of the vampire in American popular culture is particularly notable. Since F.W. Murnau's masterpiece Nosferatu in 1922, it is not possible anymore to imagine cinema and television without these nocturnal creatures. The vampire has always been serving as a metaphor for something strange, for anxieties and hidden desires in society. What it has in common with other undead figures in American popular culture is its representation as a monster. The vampires' "otherness", their mystical darkness, hypnotizing men, seducing women, longing for life and its taste in human blood - that is what makes the figure of the vampire so extraordinary fascinating and engaging to today's movie and television audience. This thesis deals with the figure of the vampire regarded as the "unknown other" and how it is fictionally represented in the American TV series True Blood (2008 - ). The thesis argues that the figure of the vampire in postmodern American popular culture lost some of its "otherness" to a certain extent and cannot be regarded as a "monster" per se anymore.