The Vampire Lectures

by Laurence A. Rickels

A wild and wide-ranging “psycho-history” of the vampire Bela Lugosi may--as the eighties gothic rock band Bauhaus sang--be dead, but the vampire lives on. A nightmarish figure dwelling somewhere between genuine terror and high camp, a morbid repository for the psychic projections of diverse cultures, an endlessly recyclable mass-media icon, the vampire is an enduring object of fascination, fear, ridicule, and reverence. In The Vampire Lectures , Laurence A. Rickels sifts through the rich mythology of vampirism, from medieval folklore to Marilyn Manson, to explore the profound and unconscious appeal of the undead. Based on the course Rickels has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for several years (a course that is itself a cult phenomenon on campus), The Vampire Lectures   reflects Rickels’s unique lecture style and provides a lively history of vampirism in legend, literature, and film. Rickels unearths a trove that includes eyewitness accounts of vampire attacks; burial rituals and sexual taboos devised to keep vampirism at bay; Hungarian countess Elisabeth Bathory’s use of girls’ blood in her sadistic beauty regimen; Bram Stoker’s Dracula , with its turn-of-the-century media technologies; F. W. Murnau’s haunting Nosferatu ; and crude, though intense, straight-to-video horror films such as Subspecies . He makes intuitive, often unexpected connections among these sometimes wildly disparate sources. More than a compilation of vampire lore, however, The Vampire Lectures makes an original and intellectually rigorous contribution to literary and psychoanalytic theory, identifying the subconscious meanings, complex symbolism, and philosophical arguments-particularly those of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche-embedded in vampirism and gothic literature.

Genres: Vampires, Literary Criticism, Nonfiction, Psychology, Psychoanalysis, Horror, Literature

384 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1999

Reviews

[Terence · Rating 2 out of 5]

DNF - I picked up this collection by a lit professor about vampires in the media (books & film), hoping to read some interesting if not actually insightful essays.

Unfortunately, the essays are almost unreadable to anyone outside of academe, full of near impenetrable jargon and meaningless puns (oh...the humanity).

Even if you are a lit major and used to parsing sentences like "Carl-Theodor Dreyer's film Vampyr is almost impossible to follow, but its non-followability has everything to do with its self-representation as medium, which goes comparison hopping around the other visual media of representation (like painting)" [a mild example], I couldn't recommend this.

[Normally, I give DNFs one star but in this case I was able to glean a few interesting ideas amidst all the byzantine verbiage and so I didn't wholly waste my time.]

[Steve Wiggins · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are lots of great ideas in these lectures, but the style is a bit post-modern for my taste. Having been a lecturer for 18 years, I found that straightforward exposition of ideas generally worked best. Nevertheless, I found quite a lot that we informative here. It certainly added to my list of "must watch" vampire movies. See more at my blog: Sects and Violence in the Ancient World.

[Becca]

Don't expect a normal "lit crit" book that's easy to follow. Reading this is really like listening to a series of brilliant lectures. Best of all, there are so many seeds of ideas that you can use to jump-start your own thinking. One thing I especially love is the focus on older forms of vampirism, which seem much closer to zombies....

[Kristin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I had a lot of hope for this book. It was written by a fellow who teaches a college class on vampires. Neat, right? This book is so needlessly dense it's almost impossible to read. It sucks all the fun out of an otherwise interesting idea.

[Rhonda]

I've waiting a long time to read this; I could have waited longer. Anything informative or useful was utterly overwhelmed by the irritating, superior, smug voice of the narrative.

[Fachrina]

Didn't finish this.

[Lara · Rating 2 out of 5]

I saw this in a bookstore and remembered that I had it at one time. I am not sure I finished it, and in any case it wasn't memorable. Great cover, though!