This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book shows that gothic has energetically participated in the cultural flows and deterritorialisations that characterise globalisation. It reviews the question of cultural exchanges with specific reference to virtual networks and online vampire communities. The book offers one of the earliest examples of globalgothic with an analysis of a global dance practice, 'Ankoku butoh'. This was first performed in Japan by Tatsumi Hijikata in 1959, on the eve of Japan's signing of the US-Japan Mutual Defense Treaty. It reflects upon Mataku as an active engagement between non-Western and Western cultural practices. The book considers the degree to which the vampire communities reveal cultural homogenisation and the imposition of Western forms and the degree to which there is hybridisation and a productive melange of cultures.

Many Hong Kong horror films focused on the reworking of traditional Chinese stories and beliefs in order to revisit identity politics in the context of a post-Handover Hong Kong. Fruit Chan's Dumplings has been one of the most commercially successful of these films. By the time it was produced in 2004, the situation Ackbar Abbas described was no longer quite so clear. Administrative borders, as the opening scene of Dumplings makes clear with Mei moving her raw materials from Shenzhen to Hong Kong with such ease, were no longer a sign of division. This film challenges the familiar categories of East and West, tradition and modernity, around which Hong Kong identity politics centred, terms which the conditions of globalisation render meaningless. Simultaneously, through the trope of cannibalism, Dumplings critiques globalisation, showing Hong Kong and China merging together, equally driven by the prevailing imperative of the global economy: consumption.