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- Title
Masculinity, Visibility, and the Vampire Literary Tradition in What We Do in the Shadows.
- Authors
Limpár, Ildikó
- Abstract
What We Do in the Shadows, a 2014 mockumentary that focuses on four vampires living together and having difficulties in adapting to the challenges of the 21st century indicates a new turn in vampire movies: not only does it make fun of the horrific or romantic vampires of cinematic productions and literature of our present and our past, but it also mocks people's fascination with the recent vampire renaissance. Reading the vampire as a cultural signifier in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's concept of the monster, the paper argues that the film is a reflection on the paradigm change in the vampire culture and expresses the fear that the dominance of the vampire narratives rooted in the Masculine Gothic tradition has been challenged by the Feminine Gothic vampire narratives. The choice of genre contributes to communicating this fear: firstly, the mockumentary hides the underlying anxiety with laughter; secondly, it highlights the issue of visibility-non-visibility, which allows us to connect the vampire text to current discourses on white male power; and thirdly, it links this vampire text to its predecessors via the themes of interview and technology. All these functions support the conclusive argument that the mockumentary should be read as a story of communal survival, which directly links the interpretation of the film's vampires to the ontological fears that they express in their cultural context.
- Subjects
WHAT We Do in the Shadows (Film); VAMPIRE films; MOCKUMENTARY films; ANXIETY; LAUGHTER
- Publication
Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 2018, Vol 29, Issue 2, p266
- ISSN
0897-0521
- Publication type
Article