TUES 11 MAR, 6PM
TE MATA TAIRONGO AUDITORIUM, LEVEL 2
$20 MUSEUM MEMBERS
From its origins in ancient folklore to its emergence as a key figure of Gothic literature, the vampire has carried with it powerful ideas about blood, evoking fears of disease, spiritual impurity and the imagined threat posed by other racial or ethnic groups. Across the past century, these ideas have been adopted, adapted, interrogated and inverted by cinema and other moving-image media.
With their suite of audiovisual tricks, filmmakers have found new ways of depicting the vampire’s variability, showcasing a creature that flits between seduction and repulsion, visibility and invisibility, restrained elegance and gory excess. At the same time, blood itself has been reframed, placed under the microscope of modern science and linked with fears of pathogenic transmission and genetic manipulation. The screen vampire thus combines complex and even contradictory ideas about blood: blood retains its powerful religious connotations, but is also linked to sexual exchange, viral contamination, genetic coding and even the invisible flows of global finance and digital data.
Drawing on a range of classic and contemporary vampire films from Nosferatu (1922) to Nosferatu (2024), join Associate Professor Allan Cameron for a talk that will explore the volatility of blood’s meanings on the silver screen.
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Sir Christopher Lee in Dracula: Prince of Darkness (Hammer Film Productions, 1966)