Join Associate Professor Allan Cameron from the University of Auckland as he explores the history of vampires and blood on the silver screen.

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)

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Associate Professor Allan Cameron

Allan Cameron is an Associate Professor in Media and Screen Studies at the University of Auckland Waipapa Taumata Rau, with recent work focusing on horror cinema and the technological mediation of the human face. He is the author of Visceral Screens: Mediation and Matter in Horror Cinema (Edinburgh University Press, 2021) and his new video essay, "Vampire Optics,” which explores the screen vampire's special relationship with light, will soon be appearing in the online journal, [in]Transition.

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Exhibition courtesy ROM