South African Vampires

Abstract

South Africa is not a country renowned for its vampire films. Indeed, as with many nations that were colonized by European invaders, vampires were something that came with the foreigners rather than being part of the Indigenous culture(s). In fact, it was the settlers themselves that were often thought of as vampires as they imposed their own medical regimes on the Indigenous populations where enforced injections and taking of blood samples were interpreted as something akin to witchcraft and/or a form of slavery or enchantment. This begins to lay out a pattern of mistrust and misrecognition between the white and black communities that can often be seen to continue up until the present day. The end of apartheid in 1994 did not dispel white anxieties associated with this separation as the process of ridding the country of the kinds of segregation that previously existed increased the fears of miscegenation and a loss of identity.

This chapter looks at five vampire films: Pure Blood by Kenneth Kaplan (2001), Eternity by Christopher Lee dos Santos (2010) – which feature recognizably Western vampires – Dust Devil by Richard Stanley (1992), Blood Tokoloshe by Jordan Harland (2013), and The Soul Collector by Harold Hölscher (2019) – that involve vampiric entities – and examines how the figure of the vampire has been used to represent these fears and also explores ways of bridging the divide between the two communities to create a new South African imaginary.