Undead

"The portrayal of the vampire as host and/or guest is one of the most frequently rehearsed tropes of the vampire mythos. As one who stands on ceremony, attending to formal details of courtesy, the bloodsucking monster frequently plays an intricate game of manners with his or her victims, and repeatedly demonstrates a magnanimous hospitality to the living. As the generosity of the vampire host too often serves to shroud an implicit threat of violation, the vampiric welcome produces contradictory meanings, simultaneously repelling and arresting in its intrinsic ambiguity. When Jonathan Harker visits the mysterious home of Dracula, he is greeted by the castle's master with courtesy and generosity: "Welcome to my house. Come freely. Go safely; and leave something of the happiness you bring!" (Stoker [1897] 1997, 22). Blithly ignoring any literal interpretation of Dracula's ambiguously threatening request to "leave...the happiness", Harker enters the castle, relying on the Count’s avowed allegiance to the codes of hosptality to protect him."

"The vampire as host, however, poses only one kind of threat to the mortals populating fantasy tales. Of even greater terror is the moment when the creature of darkness steps over the threshold of a human settlement. Vampires have long reflected human fears of invasion-a national, religious, racial, ethnic and/or sexual Other infiltrating the familiar and the domestic of dominant values. Whether the monster is read as representing an immigrant (see e.g. Hudson 2007), a Jew (as in many Gothic works with anti-Semetic tropes; see e.g. Reed 2013), the queer (as in Fincher 2007; Haggerty 2006; Hughes and Smith 2009) or a female who refuses to conform to rigid gender norms (see e.g. Brode and Denyeka 2013; Stasiewicz-Bienkowska 2013), the vampire Other is often depicted to pose both as an allure and a "threat from outside which will change us from within" (Mutch 2013, 15). Consequently , vampire narratives operate as an "ideal plateau for the villainous capabilities of the invites guest...[who] claim ownership of the homes they are invited to, reducing their hosts to victims" (Watkiss 2012, 523-524)."

"Through the analysis of Sheridan le Fanu's novella Carmilla (1872) and Bram Stoker's novel Dracula, (1897), Green points to the ways in which the figure of the vampire becomes a terrain of confused and uncertain temporalities, where the continuity of the past into the present produces unexpected constraints and raises the question of consent, simultaneously bringing the vampiric body liberation from the tyranny of time."

"The following chapter, "Breach of Consent: Jean Rollin and Le Viol du Vampire", by David Baker, considers the exploitation of women and of male voyeurism through the figure of female vampire. The author articulates the complex ways in which Rollin's 1968 production serves to disrupt the traditional binary logics of an aggressive vampire Other and a human victimised Self, problemarising and bringing to the fore the relationship between hospitality, victimhood, female body, rape and consent."

"Grappling with the representations of puberty and adolescent body as abject spaces-in-between and intertwining the figures of the innocent and the evil child, these chapters problematise the ideas of liminality, age of consent, (im)maturity, child's agency and child abuse."

"With the social and ethical context of the transformations of adolescence as the centrepiece of her chapter, Amanda Howell in "Coming of Age, With Vampires" gives voice to the figure of teenager as the Other in society. Comparing three cinematic and television productions (Lost Boys, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and Let the Right One In, and engaging with the metaphor of threshold crossings, the author stresses the role of the vampire trope in negotiating the cultural angst and challenges associated with puberty. Of particular interest to this discussion is how adolescent protagonists face an untested freedom and unaccustomed responsibility for the self which entails the challenge of consent."

"Rooting her analysis in Jungian analytical psychology, Terrie Waddell continues the exploration of the figure of the vampire as a being that is eternally imprisoned in a transitional space. In her chapter, "Consensual and Non-consensual Sucking: Vampires and Transitional Phenomena", Waddell identified recent cinematic campire protagonists as the uncanny hybrids of mother/infant/lover. Concentrating on the act of body fluid exchange (blood and venom) between the vampire and their victim, the author argues for the reading of the vampire as signifying the immature and liminal and the potential."

"Using as a lens the concepts of rape myths and patriarchal terrorism, the chapter reveals the ways in which the mistreatment of human females by their male vampire intimate partners is rationalised and presented as forgivable and or beneficial to both the victims and broader society. As the narrative frequently disguises transgressive and evil acts of abuse as desire and romantic love, and places male protagonists in positions of power, the urgent problem of female consent becomes trivialised."

"Through the figures of lesbian vampress and her human romantic interest, the author examines the promises of female empowerment and agency, transformations of class and gender relations, release from the bonds of patriarchy and a consequent quest for women's liberated identity."

"The reason good women like me and flock to my pictures is that there is a little bit of vampire instinct in every woman."

"When AIDS was at its most brutal, frightening, my-God-what-are-we-going-to-do era, that was when vampire stories and stories about blood and trust swept the literary world."

"So again Coth parted with his son in anger, and Jurgen returned again toward Barathum; and, whether or not it was a coincidence, Jurgen met precisely the vampire of whom he had inveigled his father into thinking. She was the most seductively beautiful creature that it would be possible for Jurgen's father or any other man to imagine: and her clothes were orange-coloured, for a reason sufficiently well known in Hell, and were embroidered everywhere with green fig-leaves."

"You must understand that it is little rest a vampire gets on earth, with so many fine young fellows like yourself going about everywhere eager to be destroyed."

"Most vampires, I’ve discovered, are men, for some reason. I guess it’s because Dracula, people are kind of feeding off that."

"The idea of atavism was pervasive in the late nineteenth century, and police forces across Europe developed files of “mug shots” of criminals to be able to identify the “criminal type.” A version of this atavistic type is Count Dracula, as portrayed in Bram Stroker's Dracula (1897). Dracula himself is a version of degenerate, the Transylvanian aristocrat who has revolved into a parasitic being, feeding on the blood and life of others. The vampire in this text is the embodiment of Otherness: non-European, able to shift shape and identity, of predatory sexuality, unnaturally long-lived, and strange and threatening in facial expression and behavior. Jonathan Harker's description of the Count resembles the cataloguing of Lombroso's physiognomy..."

"Van Helsing: The strength of the vampire is that people will not believe in him."

"Dio Brando: What a simple thing, the food chain. As pigs feed on grass, so does man feed upon them. And I, at the top of it all, feed upon the humans. They exist to serve me and quell my thirst."

"She [Susan] is very lovely, Mr. Mears — very toothsome if I may be permitted a small bon mot."

"The world is coming down around our ears and you're sticking at a few vampires."

"[Italian socioreligiologist Massimo] Introvigne maintains that the vampire inhabits countries devoid of the liberating notion of Purgatory. …Perhaps dealing with the myth of the vampire today is a practical and even ascetic exercise."

"And I need you now tonight And I need you more than ever And if you only hold me tight We'll be holding on forever And we'll only be making it right 'Cause we'll never be wrong Together we can take it to the end of the line Your love is like a shadow on me all of the time I don't know what to do and I'm always in the dark We're living in a powder keg and giving off sparks I really need you tonight Forever's gonna start tonight"

"Drawing on Winnicott, this chapter argues that screen vampires remain in a state of metaphorical symbiosis with what can be symbolically termed “mother”. But, as shape-shifters feeding on blood while simultaneously transferring blood to sucking others, they also present as complex mother/infant hybrids. This addiction to blood, often likened to heroin in contemporary narratives, refers back to the breast and, by extension, the symbiotic union with mother and lover where the fluid of one is consumed by, and transmitted to, the other. Traditionally, non-consensual blood exchange was central to the horror genre, but recent interpretations position the vampire as a romantic addict, heroically struggling with consent and desire. Winnicott saw the process of separation from the breast (representative of mother) as entry into a psychological phase called the potential space. Despite the shifting nature of the vampire genre, it will be argued that even the most politically correct vampires remain caught in this liminal, narcissistic stage of development. For the vampire, everything of addictive value becomes an aspect of itself—transitional objects (victims) therefore become the self-objects. For suckling infants, insatiable lovers and vampires, instinctual yearning often takes precedence over the autonomy of the desired other: the question of consent therefore, becomes a moral dilemma only for those engaged in the process of psychological maturity or individuation."

"You're [a vampire], right? Can't stand sunlight or smelly vegetables, or silver things. The masters of the night, which for some reason have tons of weaknesses..."

"Great Pompey's shade complains that we are slow, And Scipio's ghost walks unavenged amongst us!"

"GHOST, n. The outward and visible sign of an inward fear."

"Accounting for the uncommon behavior of ghosts, Heine mentions somebody's ingenious theory to the effect that they are as much afraid of us as we of them. Not quite, if I may judge from such tables of comparative speed as I am able to compile from memories of my own experience."

"Man's need of self-esteem entails the need for a sense of control over reality – but no control is possible in a universe which, by one's own concession, contains the supernatural, the miraculous and the causeless, a universe in which one is at the mercy of ghosts and demons, in which one must deal, not with the unknown, but with the unknowable; no control is possible if man proposes, but a ghost disposes; no control is possible if the universe is a haunted house."

"Where entity and quiddity, The ghosts of defunct bodies, fly."

"Behind every man now alive stand 30 ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living."

"When thoroughly reliable people encounter ghosts, their stories are difficult to explain away."

"That the dead are seen no more," said Imlac, "I will not undertake to maintain against the concurrent and unvaried testimony of all ages and of all nations. There is no people, rude or learned, among whom apparitions of the dead are not related and believed. This opinion, which perhaps prevails as far as human nature is diffused, could become universal only by its truth: those that never heard of one another would not have agreed in a tale which nothing but experience can make credible. That it is doubted by single cavillers can very little weaken the general evidence, and some who deny it with their tongues confess it by their fears."

"So many ghosts, and forms of fright, Have started from their graves to-night, They have driven sleep from mine eyes away; I will go down to the chapel and pray."

"Of calling shapes, and beck'ning shadows dire, And airy tongues that syllable men's names."

"For spirits when they please Can either sex assume, or both."

"Whence and what are thou, execrable shape?"

"All heart they live, all head, all eye, all ear, All intellect, all sense, and as they please They limb themselves, and colour, shape, or size Assume, as likes them best, condense or rare."

"What beck'ning ghost along the moonlight shade Invites my steps, and points to yonder glade?"

"Ghosts are not the souls of the dead, but the souls of people written out of history when history changes."

"The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and gibber in the Roman streets."

"There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave. To tell us this."

"I can call spirits from the vasty deep. Why, so can I, or so can any man; But will they come when you do call for them?"

"What are these, So wither'd, and so wild in their attire; That look not like the inhabitants o' th' earth, And yet are on 't?"

"Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand?"

"A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?"

"Now it is the time of night, That the graves, all gaping wide, Every one lets forth his sprite, In the church-way paths to glide."

"Ghosts don't do things to you. Ghosts make you do unspeakable things to yourself."

"I kept on ignoring him. The dead are only ghosts, after all."

"All on my own Here I stand. Am I humble, am I ghost? I'm on a limb to climb To something lawless I hope Am I humble, am I ghost? I found a way To look towards this day But it all hooked up This could only go one way I'm not alive, I'm not alive enough."

"Here's to the ghost We still seem to host How he's becoming us Here come the vultures Here come the vultures Screaming down at us"

"Who gather round, and wonder at the tale Of horrid apparition, tall and ghastly, That walks at dead of night, or takes his stand O'er some new-open'd grave; and, (strange to tell!) Evanishes at crowing of the cock."

"The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she."

"The unexpected disappearance of Mr. Canning from the scene, followed by the transient and embarrassed phantom of Lord Goderich. (Quoted, "He flits across the stage a transient and embarrassed phantom.")"

"Thin, airy shoals of visionary ghosts."

"My people too were scared with eerie sounds, A footstep, a low throbbing in the walls, A noise of falling weights that never fell, Weird whispers, bells that rang without a hand, Door-handles turn'd when none was at the door, And bolted doors that open'd of themselves; And one betwixt the dark and light had seen Her, bending by the cradle of her babe."

"I look for ghosts; but none will force Their way to me; 'tis falsely said That even there was intercourse Between the living and the dead."

"The Jews of our days believe that after the body of a man is interred, his spirit goes and comes, and departs from the spot where it is destined to visit his body, and to know what passes around him; that it is wandering during a whole year after the death of the body, and that it was during that year of delay that the Pythoness of Endor evoked the soul of Samuel, after which time the evocation would have had no power over his spirit."

"First came up the ghost of my comrade Elpenor, for he had not yet been buried under the earth of broad roads. We had left him unwept and unburied in Circe’s palace, since other concerns were pressing upon us. I wept on seeing him and felt pity in my heart. I gave voice and spoke to him: “Elpenor, how did you come under the dark of the west? You beat me on foot, while I came with my black ship.”"

"“O Rivers, Earth and you who punish whoever of the dead is forsworn, be wit nesses and accomplish this spell for us. I have come to inquire how I may come to the land of Telemachus, whom I left on the bosom of his nurse, my child.” Such was his outstanding spell."

"She lifted her veil slowly. What a sight presented itself to my startled eyes! I beheld before me an animated corpse."

"Take you up when you feeling down When you're sick he will come around Takes his cures from out the ground He's the one who can hypnotize And you'll never believe your eyes He can cause the dead to rise."

"Oh glory of Haemonia, that hast the power to divulge the fates of men, or canst turn aside fate itself from its prescribed course, I pray thee to exercise thy gift in disclosing events to come. Not the meanest of the Roman race am I, the offspring of an illustrious chieftain, lord of the world in the one case, or in the other, the destined heir to my father's calamity. I stand on a tremendous and giffy height; snatch me from this posture of doubt; let me not blindly rush on, and blindly fall; exort this secret from the gods, or force the dead to confess what they know."

"Ye Furies, and dreadful Styx, ye sufferings of the damned, and Chaos for ever eager to destroy the fair harmony of words, and thou, Pluto, condemned to an eternity of ungrateful existence, Hell and Elysium, of which no Thessalian witch shall partake, Prosperine, for ever cut off from thy health-giving mother, and horrid Hecate, Cerberus, cursed with incessant hunger, ye Destinies, and Charon, endlessly murmuring at the task I impose of bringing back the dead again to the land of the living, hear me! -if I call on you with a voice sufficiently impious and abominable, if I have never sung this chant unsated with human gore, if I have frequently laid on your altars the fruit of the pregnant mother, bathing its contents with the reeking brain if I have placed on a dish before you the head and entrails of an infant on the point to be born- I ask not of you a ghost, already a tenant of the Tartarian abodes, and long familiarized to the shades below, but one who has recently quitted the light of day, and who yet hovers over the mouth of hell: let him hear these incantations, and immediately after descent to his destined place! Let him articulate suitable omens to the son of his general, having so late been himself a soldier of the great Pompey! Do this, as you love the very sound and rumour of a civil war!"

"He asked the boy who he was. He replied “I am the demon of your son.” And thus he offered him a small written tablet. He unrolled it and saw these three lines written on it:Indeed the minds of men wander in folly. Euthynous lies in his destined death. It was not good for him himself to live, nor was it good for his parents."

"The cemuc barley is reserved for the necromancer."

"The very same day in which they were interred they appeared at evening, while the sun was still up, carrying on their shoulders the wooden coffins in which they had been buried. The whole following night they walked through the paths and fields of the village, now in the shape of men carrying wooden coffins on their shoulders, now in the likeness of bears or dogs or other animals. They spoke to the other peasants, banging on the walls of their houses and shouting "Move quickly, move! Get going! Come!""

"Father, let me have the Bull of Heaven To kill Gilgamesh and his city. For if you do not grant me the Bull of Heaven, I will pull down the Gates of Hell itself, Crush the doorposts and flatten the door, And I will let the dead leave And let the dead roam the earth And they shall eat the living. The dead will overwhelm all the living!"

"It would not be easy to believe that the corpses of the dead should sally (I know not by what agency) from their graves, and should wander about to the terror or destruction of the living, and again return to the tomb, which of its own accord spontaneously opened to receive them, did not frequent examples, occurring in our own times, suffice to establish this fact, to the truth of which there is abundant testimony."

"…were I to write down all the instances of this kind which I have ascertained to have befallen in our times, the undertaking would be beyond measure laborious and troublesome."

"Thereupon snatching up a spade of but indifferent sharpness of edge, and hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart. This being torn piecemeal, and the body now consigned to the flames..."

"The will appears to be strong, strong enough to draw the hugr [animate will] back to one's body. These reanimated individuals were known as draugar. However, though the dead might live again, they could also die again. Draugar die a "second death" as Chester Gould calls it, when their bodies decay, are burned, dismembered or otherwise destroyed."

"[I]f there is a phenomenon that fully deserves to be called the "fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture," it is this fantasy of the return of the living dead: the fantasy of a person who does not want to stay dead but returns again and again to pose a threat to the living."

"From ghoulies and ghosties, And long-leggedy beasties, And things that go bump in the night, Good Lord, deliver us!"

"Goul or ghul, in Arabic, signifies any terrifying object which deprives people of the use of their senses; hence it became the appellative of that species of monster which was supposed to haunt forests, cemeteries, and other lonely places, and believed not only to tear in pieces the living, but to dig up and devour the dead."

"GHOUL, n. A demon addicted to the reprehensible habit of devouring the dead. The existence of ghouls has been disputed by that class of controversialists who are more concerned to deprive the world of comforting beliefs than to give it anything good in their place."

"The dead walk among us. Zombies, ghouls — no matter what their label — these somnambulists are the greatest threat to humanity, other than humanity itself."

"I am not yet born; O hear me. Let not the bloodsucking bat or the rat or the stoat or the clubfooted ghoul come near me."

"For all their laughter, ghouls are a dull lot. Hunger is the fire in which they burn, and it burns hotter than the hunger for power over men or for knowledge of the gods in a crazed mortal. It vaporizes delicacy and leaves behind only a slag of anger and lust. They see their fellows as impediments to feeding, to be mauled and shrieked at when the mourners go home. They are seldom alone, not through love of one another's company, but because a lone ghoul is suspected of stealing food. Their copulation is so hasty that distinctions of sex and identity are often ignored."

"Belligerent ghouls Run Manchester schools Spineless swines Cemented minds"

"Belligerent ghouls Run Manchester schools Spineless bastards all"

"All law enforcement agencies and the military have been organized to search out and destroy the marauding ghouls. The survival command center at the Pentagon has disclosed that a ghoul can be killed by a shot in the head or a heavy blow to the skull. Officials are quoted as explaining that since the brain of a ghoul has been activated by the radiation, the plan is, kill the brain and you kill the ghoul."

"Unable to stand up, unable to sit down, he laments. Unable to eat, unable to drink, he laments. Held fast by the door-bolt of Namtar, he is unable to rise."

"Father, let me have the Bull of Heaven To kill Gilgamesh and his city. For if you do not grant me the Bull of Heaven, I will pull down the Gates of Hell itself, Crush the doorposts and flatten the door, And I will let the dead leave And let the dead roam the earth And they shall eat the living. The dead will overwhelm all the living!"

"A man who does not value his god is thrown out in the desert; his body is not buried and his heir does not provide his ghost with drinking water through a libation pipe."