Browsing by Subject "Southern Gothic"
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Item Interview with the southern vampire : reviving a haunted history in contemporary film and television(2015-05) Austin, Katharine Griffin; Frick, Caroline; Fuller-Seeley, KathrynIt is difficult to imagine a time without vampires, a fixture of Western popular culture since the nineteenth century. The vampires of today, however, are a far cry from Bram Stoker's Dracula. Stoker’s creation is a monster, a metaphor for all things feared by Victorian culture. Contemporary vampires, on the other hand, are increasingly depicted as marginalized figures striving for redemption and human connection. Within this shift from monster to social outcast, a peculiar trend has emerged: vampire fiction set in the American South that deliberately addresses the region's haunted history. As mythical beings, vampires often serve as mediators for an era's particular anxieties or fears. So why does current Western society need not just sympathetic vampires but sympathetic Southern ones? What particular concerns do these Southern vampires negotiate? And how does a Southern locale engender this purpose? To answer these questions, I first consider how such media engage with the Southern Gothic. Chapter one focuses on HBO's True Blood (2008-2014), examining how Southern vampire texts negotiate race and class structures and promote the possibility of a modern, integrated Southern society. Chapter two compares Interview with the Vampire: The Vampire Chronicles (Neil Jordan, 1994) and The Originals (The CW, 2013-Present) to explore how Southern vampires mediate feelings of collective guilt and motivate (or avoid) reparation efforts. To understand not only the elements but also the cultural import of this regionalized media trend, I next extend these readings with an examination of audience reception. Chapter three focuses on viewers of The Originals, surveying the diversity of audience engagement with the series as well as identifying recurring trends within that diversity. In combining all three threads of analysis, I conclude that vampire texts set in the American South perform a complex and at times paradoxical function, promoting feelings of nostalgia for an imagined South as well as engendering processes of critical self-reflection.Item Looks like the birthplace of Bela Lugosi : The Texas chainsaw massacre and films of the Southern Gothic(2014-08) Reiss, Hallie Karlyn; Frick, Caroline; Schatz, ThomasFilms depicting, made in, and recreating the American South are always categorized as other kinds of genres: horror, film noir, romantic epic, women’s pictures, etc. On the other hand, the literary tradition of the Southern Gothic is often referred to when categorizing certain kinds of Southern films, yet it is still a genre that is considered to be primarily footed in literature. In those films, the identification of the Southern Gothic is based upon the predetermined conventions of the literary genre, and is brought to life through visual and verbal clues. For the purposes of this thesis, I would like to convey how the literary genre of the Southern Gothic is also exemplified in the medium of cinema. I plan to do this by using examples from a selection of films which fall within the confines of the literary genre, but paying particular attention to the 1974 film, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. I hope to convince readers that The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, a film which has its own set of predetermined genre tropes and history, might also be read in terms of the Southern Gothic literary tradition, and is a prime example of the way in which the literary genre is also cinematic. To do this I will use the 1939 film, Gone With the Wind as an example of the Old South, of which to base the opposing Southern Gothic ideals. My analysis will include case studies in which I analyze the way in which Southern hospitality is utilized in works of the Southern Gothic, and also how the Southern Gothic focuses on freakish characters to highlight the underbelly of the traditional Southern mythology.