Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Migrations and Mutations
- 1 Blood, Bodies, and Borders
- 2 “Making” Americans from Foreigners
- 3 Classical Hollywood Vampires: The Unnatural Whiteness of America
- 4 International Hollywood Vampires: Cosmopolitanisms of “Foreign Movies”
- 5 Vampires of Color: A Critique of Multicultural Whiteness
- 6 Terrorist Vampires: Religious Heritage or Planetary Advocacy
- 7 Other Vampires, Other Hollywoods: Serialized Citizenship and Narrowcast Difference
- Conclusion: History and Hollywood, Mashed-up
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
6 - Terrorist Vampires: Religious Heritage or Planetary Advocacy
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 January 2018
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Migrations and Mutations
- 1 Blood, Bodies, and Borders
- 2 “Making” Americans from Foreigners
- 3 Classical Hollywood Vampires: The Unnatural Whiteness of America
- 4 International Hollywood Vampires: Cosmopolitanisms of “Foreign Movies”
- 5 Vampires of Color: A Critique of Multicultural Whiteness
- 6 Terrorist Vampires: Religious Heritage or Planetary Advocacy
- 7 Other Vampires, Other Hollywoods: Serialized Citizenship and Narrowcast Difference
- Conclusion: History and Hollywood, Mashed-up
- Filmography
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
If multiculturalism opened understanding to historical consciousness that included slavery, genocide, and dispossession—“everything we are is eternally with us,” as Kathleen observes in The Addiction, then neoliberalism obscures connections between past and present. Formalized through institutions like NAFTA (1994–present) and WTO (1995–present), neoliberalism rejects the Cold War's other options for capitalism alone. Hollywood was integrated into larger corporations, which contained costs by repurposing content and off-shoring production (Miller et al. 2005). Franchises like Harry Potter (2001–11) and Lord of the Rings (2001–3) convey how Hollywood financed, produced, distributed, and exhibited fewer films with larger budgets, combin¬ing blockbuster's saturated advertising and high concept (Wyatt 1994) with classical Hollywood's economies of scale (Schatz 1996). Hollywood became transnational with its studios owned by corporations based in Australia, Europe, and Japan. Hollywood production of vampire franchises mutates and migrates—Blade from Los Angeles to the Czech Republic and British Columbia; Underworld from Hungary to Canada to New Zealand—for cheaper labor.
Vampires also migrate and mutate across media platforms, infiltrating film, television, video games, and web series. Teen vampires became ubiquitous. Twilight and The Vampire Diaries moved from novels to screen. A spinoff of the latter, The Originals, moved from television to novels. All experimented to enhance audience engagement with web series. Disparaged by horror fans, teen vampires capture the imagination of a millennial generation. No longer menacing neighbors but instead intimate schoolmates, vampires are normal¬ized as native-born citizens. Within a cultural shift from multiculturalism's mutual contaminations to neoliberalism's hierarchical segregations, vam¬pirism less frequently conveys how difference in race/ethnicity might alter the composition of an imagined US nation. Instead, vampirism conveys how difference in species—often as a trope for religion or economics—might save or destroy the entire world.
Given neoliberalism's dehumanizing processes, vampires sometimes become advocates for human right to rights. Vampire hunters, by contrast, think in anthropocentric terms. Battlegrounds are fragmented and extraterritorial, as during the Cold War, yet they are increasingly privatized in for-profit vigi¬lantism. Neoliberalism masks racial/ethnic profiling as national security and risk assessment. Enemies are considered terrorists to be eradicated, as slayers execute vampires. More than other groups, women—particularly, cisgender counterparts to Lorde's mythical norm (1984: 118)—benefit under post-multicultural neoliberalism.
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- Vampires, Race, and Transnational Hollywoods , pp. 163 - 192Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2017