Vampires and the Making of the United States in the Twenty-First Century

Simon Bacon

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2025
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781040350928
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Vampires and the Making of the United States in the Twenty-First Century offers a unique and multifaceted study of how vampires on screen have shaped America and how specific environments here have shaped their vampires.

Examining the figure of the vampire within the framework of uniquely American environments — both physical and immaterial — the book delves into the questions relating to American geography, identity, racial and ethnic tensions, American colonial past and its urban and environmental history. With contributions from a diverse and international team of authors, the collection follows the vampire across the geographical and ideological landscape of the US to consider what cultural and historical environments have gone towards creating the contemporary undead and why the post-Trump America of the twenty-first century is a truly vampiric one.

This timely and truly innovative volume will resonate firmly with scholars and students of popular culture, film and media studies, horror, American studies and urban and environmental studies.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I Towns and Cities
• 1 FORKS: Exploited Reservations, Ongoing Subjugation and Indigenous Historicisation—The Whitewashing of Washington State in the Twilight Novels
• 2 CHICAGO: Some Girls White—Taking the “Urban” Out of Urban Fantasy in the Chicagoland Vampires Series
• 3 NEW YORK CITY: Bloodlines and Skylines—Vampires, Colonisation and Gentrification in New York City
• 4 HOLLYWOOD: Vampires in Hollywood, 1985–2020
• 5 LOUISIANA: Vampires of the American South—Exploring Undead Louisiana in True Blood and The Originals
• Part II Environments
• 6 CARNIVAL: Vampire Vagabonds—Revealing Regional Haunts in American Vampire Lore
• 7 SUBURBIA: Blood in da ‘Burbs
• 8 URBAN DECAY: “He Could Be the Boy Next Door …”—Urban Decay and Race in Martin
• 9 DRIFTERS: Vagrant Vampires—Bloodsuckers in America’s Arteries
• 10 BORDERLANDS: “From Here to Modernity”—The Heterotopic Meaning of the Vampires in Dusk till Dawn (Series 3)
• 11 WINTERLANDS: Hideous Winter—Vampires, Violence and Snow in American Screen Horror
• Part III Ideologies
• 12 THE MARGINS: Boardwalk Vampire—Staking a Claim to the Edges of the American Nightmare
• 13 THE FOLK: Necrogeography—American Folk Horror Cinema and New England as a (Bad) State of Mind
• 14 THE OLD SOUTH: “No One Likes to Reminisce about the Old Slave Days” —Romanticising the Old South, Confederate Vampires and Transatlantic Slavery in Twenty-First-Century Vampire Media
• 15 CAPITALISM: Vampire Capitalism—Daybreakers and American Bloodsuckers
• 16 THE FUTURE?: A Future America—Possible Topographies of a Future Vampiric America in Stake Land (2010) and Crimson Winter (2013)
• Index