Dark Renewals

Horror and humanization of the vampire and the zombie among folklore, cinema, and television seriality

Abstract

Looking at the transit of the vampire and the zombie from their respective folkloric frames to those of cinema and television seriality, a picture emerges composed of incessant mutual contaminations, transformations and regenerations. Indeed, thanks to massive encroachments into genres other than horror and an extraordinary cross-media diffusion, the conceptual dimension of the two figures sedimented in previous centuries has begun to be no longer exhaustive: vampires and zombies are constantly being reborn.
Starting from a brief survey of the "cultural inventions" of the vampire and the zombie, this study aims to reflect on the allegorical-textual correspondences between the two figures, trying to outline the main coordinates of a dialectic between continuity of tradition and forms of transformation and regeneration. Therefore, the analysis will be carried out along a threefold temporal-thematic articulation, which is useful in defining the framework of historical, cultural and media correspondences between two of the most incisive teratological figures of both the past and contemporary times. Initially, we will turn to the context of their respective folkloric beginnings in order to trace the elements of an archetypal matrix of fantasies around the two figures. Next, we will focus on (trans)medial coagulation, that is, the process of unifying the intricate inventory of folklore voices into literary and filmic forms that have established a narrative and visual canon. Finally, the analysis will end with ironic humanization, a trend found especially in contemporary television seriality, in which a regeneration of the allegorical and figural inventory of vampires and zombies can be discerned, articulated along intertextual references to past forms and their transit through genres other than horror.