Bram Stoker’s Dracula is rife with anxieties about death and bodies. Victorian society was concerned with keeping corpses in their graves. Lucy’s vampiric transformation and Van Helsing’s attempts in keeping her body in the grave—even at the extent of decapitating her—demonstrate the importance of dead bodies belonging in designated final resting places. However, Dracula and his lineage of un-dead bodies do not end with Lucy. Repeatedly, bodies are suspended in liminal spaces between life and death, between pure and “unclean.” These anxieties are historicized through the unconventional formatting of the novel and are emphasized when Jonathan Harker pens in his endnote that, “We were struck with the fact, that in all the mass of material of which the record is composed, there is hardly one authentic document… We could hardly ask any one, even did we wish to, to accept these as proofs of so wild a story.”
By looking at modern adaptations of vampire lore, we can compare societal anxieties that arise in conjunction with vampire stories. What We Do in the Shadows is a recent mockumentary following a group of vampire flatmates as they disclose centuries of secrets and deal with mundane daily tasks. I am interested in the pastiche format of the documentary genre that mimics Dracula’s piecemeal diary entries, newspaper clippings, etc. While we know that What We Do in the Shadows is not “authentic,” there is a seeming need to present the film as a historical artifact, incorporating a number of archival images, and an emphasis on the “truthfulness” presented by the documentary format. Finally, the comedy genre that is used with What We Do in the Shadows highlights contemporary attitudes toward social anxieties and stands in contrast with the fears that Victorians aligned with Dracula while simultaneously serving a similar function.
About the presenterSamantha Przybylowicz Axtell
Samantha is a recent PhD graduate from Northeastern University. Her dissertation was about women who kill in Victorian literature with a focus on gender, genre, sympathy, and representation. Her work combines Victorian fiction with modern true crime in a way that shows the ways we talk and write about crime haven’t changed all that much over the years. Samantha also works with aspects of true crime that emphasize victimology and advocates for the wrongfully convicted. She is the current Graduate Rep for MAPACA and co-chair for the True Crime Area.