Abstract
This chapter, looks at the body and it’s various parts that carry contagion, and affect the environments and people around them in very particular ways. Here the body is an undead source of infection that, even though seemingly dead, can be revived and begin to infect the world around it again, and again.
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Notes
- 1.
There are versions of the vampire narrative that see them as a separate evolutionary species, like The Hunger (Streiber: 1981) and Priest (Stewart: 2011), sometimes from outer space, as seen in Lifeforce (Hooper: 1985), or angelic or demonic, the brother of Lucifer in Penny Dreadful (Logan: 2014–2016), the throat of the Angel of Death in The Strain (del Toro and Hogan: 2014–2017—though more obvious in the original novels), and angels in Wings of Desire (Wenders: 1987).
- 2.
In the novel, this largely takes the form of the Count appearing younger which is often attributed to his drinking of Harker’s blood, yet Dracula does not lack for that as he obviously has access to a ready food supply as seen in his “gift” of babies for his Brides.
- 3.
More importantly, for the vampire, if not for the argument at hand, this is also a temporal return and describes its nature as beyond or outside of time as we know/experience it: it is why vampires are often described as immortal.
- 4.
Spectacle and punishment are not uncommon bedfellows in regard to disease where the outward signs of contracting certain ailments are seen as the just rewards of transgressive behaviours—the early days of COVID being a case in point where those contracting it must have not followed the proscribed rules of mask-wearing, hand washing, and social distancing.
- 5.
It would seem that the evening dress that the Count wears is an essential part of his identity and so disintegrates and regenerates with him each time he is killed and revived.
- 6.
This idea can be traced at least back to Tinker Bell in Peter Pan (1904)—the Tinker Bell effect—but in horror related texts is most obviously seen in examples where the entities name is repeated, often in front of a mirror, such as the urban legend around Bloody Mary, or in the film Candyman (Rose: 1992, and DaCosta: 2021), or even just by thinking about them as seen in the Boogeyman series (Various: 2005–2008).
- 7.
It should be noted that this does not mean the return of the exact same disease, though even if it is the resistance to further lockdowns, vaccinations, and other restrictions in relation to COVID-19 highlight how susceptible society would be if it came back in a new, more dangerous form.
- 8.
These films were not meant as a series in any way.
- 9.
Although Dracula’s Daughter was set in London it shares the same conceptual framing as Browning’s Dracula where its American audience would relate to the story and its characters as being more New England than Merrie Old England and the vampire symbolizing a threat from Europe.
- 10.
Mysteriously Dracula’s castle is now near the edge of a shear drop which is how he gets impaled as he falls from the edge onto a cross at the bottom of the cliff.
- 11.
Maybe as importantly in the popular imagination bats featured as the cause of the deadly outbreak in the film Contagion (Soderbergh: 2011).
- 12.
Dracula was of course resurrected again in The Legend of 7 Golden Vampires (Baker: 1974) but not the Christopher Lee version as he was replaced by John Forbes-Robertson.
- 13.
See Sperling (2020).
- 14.
Both films can be seen to be influenced by Cold War anxieties, yet Carpenter’s version also leans into the popularity of alien films in the late 1970s and early 1980s (the remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers [Kaufman: 1978], Alien [Scott: 1979], Aliens [1986], and even E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial [Spielberg: 198]).
- 15.
The Austrian film The Station, or Blood Glacier (Kren: 2013) works on a similar idea where a melting glacier produces a red liquid that causes all life forms that encounter it to mutate. The novels of V Wars by Jonathan Maberry (2012–2016) also see the release of a “vampire” virus due to glacial melting.
- 16.
Something very similar is seen in Splinter (Wilkins: 2008) where a spiky fungal growth infects bodies making it part of itself, so it slowly gets larger and larger.
- 17.
Here though the alien merely wishes to find a way to return to its home-world.
- 18.
Of interest in relation to this is the book Pathogenisis (Kennedy: 2023) which argues that the biggest influence on human history has been disease.
References
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Lewison, Sarah. “Nonconsensual Eco-Sex: A Guided Meditation to the Permeable Membrane.” In The Anthropocene and the Undead: Cultural Anxieties in Contemporary Popular Imaginiation, edited by Simon Bacon (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2022), 183–96.
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Bacon, S. (2023). Bodies. In: Contagion and the Vampire. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-39202-3_2
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