Blacula? Blade? Vampire in Brooklyn?
On Tue, 23 Feb 1999, Yoshie Furuhashi wrote:
> Richard Dyer writes in _White_ (London: Routledge, 1997):
>
> ***The idea of whites as both themselves dead and as bringers of death is
> commonly hinted at in horror literature and film. Horror as an emotion is
> surely a universal, even if what stimulates it and how it is articulated
> are culturally and historically specific. However, horror as a genre does
> seem, despite some interesting exceptions, to be a white genre in the West:
> African-American cinema has produced only a handful of horror films
> compared to its many action, thriller, music and drama films. Horror is
> licensed to deal with what terrifies us--partly by giving it free reign for
> the safe length of a movie, partly by being low, dismissible and often
> risible, partly by providing happy endings in which the horror is laid to
> rest. _It is a cultural space that makes bearable for whites the
> exploration of the association of whiteness and death_.
>
> It is at the heart of the vampire myth. The vampire is dead but also brings
> death. Because vampires are dead, they are pale, cadaverous, white. They
> bring themselves a kind of life by sucking the blood of the living, and at
> such points may appear flushed with red, the colour of life.... Just as the
> vampires' whiteness conveys their own deadness, so too their bringing of
> death is signalled by whiteness--their victims grow pale, the colour leaves
> their cheeks, life ebbs away.
>
> The horror of vampirism is expressed in colour: ghastly white, disgustingly
> cadaerous, without the blood of life that would give colour. The vampire's
> bite, so evidently a metaphor for sexuality, is debilitating unto death,
> just as white people fear sexuality if it is allowed to get out of control
> (out from under the will)--yet, like the vampire, they need it. The vampire
> is the white man or woman in the grip of libidinal need s/he cannot master.
> _In the act of vampirism, white society (the vampire) feeds off itself
> (his/her victims) and threatens to destroy itself._ All of this is so
> menacing that it is often ascribed to those who are not mainstream
> whites--Jews, South East Europeans, the denizens of New Orleans. _Horror
> films have their cake and eat it: they give us the horror of whiteness
> while at the same time ascribing it to those who are liminally white. The
> terror of whiteness, of being without life, of causing death, is both
> vividly conveyed and disowned_. (emphasis added & parenthetical
> documentation omitted) (p. 210)***
>
> So, how does Buffy revise & reproduce the Whiteness of this Genre?
>
> Yoshie
>
__________________________________________________________________________ Michael Pollak................New York City..............mpollak at panix.com