Vampires, race, and transnational Hollywoods /Dale Hudson.
- Edinburgh : Edinburgh University Press, (c)2017.
- 1 online resource (xiii, 282 pages) : illustrations.
- Traditions in American cinema .
Includes bibliographies and index.
Introduction: migrations and mutations -- Blood, bodies, and borders -- "Making" Americans from foreigners -- Classical Hollywood vampires: the unnatural whiteness of America -- International Hollywood vampires: cosmopolitanisms of "foreign movies" -- Vampires of color: a critique of multicultural whiteness -- Terrorist vampires: religious heritage or planetary advocacy -- Other vampires, other Hollywoods: serialized citizenship and narrowcast difference -- Conclusion: history and Hollywood, mashed-up.
Dale Hudson explores the movement of transnational Hollywood's vampires, between low-budget quickies and high-budget franchises, as it appropriates visual styles from German, Mexican and Hong Kong cinemas and off-shores to Canada, Philippines, and South Africa. As the vampire's popularity has swelled, vampire film and television has engaged with changing discourses around race and identity not always addressed in realist modes. Here, teen vampires comfort misunderstood youth, chador-wearing skateboarder vampires promote transnational feminism, African American and Mexican American vampires recover their repressed histories. Looking at contemporary hits like True Blood, Twilight, Underworld and The Strain, classics such as Universal's Dracula and Dracula, and miscegenation melodramas like The Cheat and The Sheik, the book reconfigures Hollywood historiography and tradition as fundamentally transnational, offering fresh interpretations of vampire media as trans-genre sites for political contestation.