In ‘Monster Culture (Seven Theses)’, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen asserts that monsters of all varieties should be considered as ‘cultural bodies’ (Cohen 1996: 4) that embody specific cultural moments as they give shape to particular times, places and feelings. ‘The monster's body’, writes Cohen, ‘quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy … giving them life and an uncanny independence. The monstrous body is pure culture’ (4). The vampire clearly serves this purpose, acting as a flexible metaphor condensing widely held yet culturally nuanced anxieties and desires. The vampire has found a congenial home in the United States where the ‘pure culture’ of its overdetermined body has materialized fears and fantasies related to preoccupations with racial, sexual and economic otherness – issues that have haunted the American psyche from the colonization of America by European powers to the present. In keeping with representations of other monsters, the American vampire has also undergone a metamorphosis over time, from something to fear into something to emulate.

This chapter will chart the development of the American vampire narrative in four sections. I will begin by outlining a ‘prehistory’ of the American vampire narrative. Although ‘actual’ vampires as supernatural blood drinkers are rare in pre-twentieth-century American literature, one can nevertheless identify ‘proto vampires’, particularly racialized cannibal blood drinkers and controlling women, which reflect nineteenth-century anxieties about race and gender. Furthermore, the appropriation of European vampire models becomes notable in the later part of the nineteenth century through adaptations for the American stage, providing a more familiar template for twentieth-century literary and cinematic representations. The second section will emphasize the legacy of Bram Stoker's 1897 Dracula in American literary and cinematic adaptations of the vampire narrative in the first part of the twentieth century, particularly the continued demonization of female sexuality in silent films of the 1910s and 1920s. Moving to the second half of the twentieth century, the third section will note the proliferation of vampire narratives via their emphasis on the increasing celebration of the vampire as a hero liberated from stultifying social convention and as an embodiment of post-Watergate scepticism of authority. My final section attends to twenty-first-century representations that extend the ironic humanization of the vampire, often in order to contest hegemonic structures of race, gender and sexuality. Lacking a reflection of its own, the vampire as pure culture nevertheless mirrors back culturally specific anxieties and desires.

By looking at the example of Don Coscarelli's unapologetically silly 2002 film, Bubba Ho–tep, I want to propose that we consider sf, fantasy, and indeed cult films of all stripes as both literal and figurative “strange attractors.” Excluding perhaps what J. P. Telotte refers to as “classical” cult films in The Cult Film Experience —mainstream Hollywood films such as Casablanca (Michael Curtiz, 1942) that have inspired fiercely loyal fan followings—cult films typically are works that foreground their thematic, structural, and/or aesthetic deviation from loosely defined Hollywood norms. They literally attract due to their strangeness. Borrowing from chaos theory, however, we can find another sense in which cult films might be considered as strange attractors. Chaos theory studies the behavior of non–linear systems (such as weather) that are extremely sensitive to initial conditions. Small variations in those initial conditions can yield widely varying outcomes, making long–term prediction impossible. Within chaos theory, a “strange attractor” is the focus of a pattern of seemingly chaotic behavior—it is, according to James Gleick in his famous study Chaos, “the trajectory toward which all other trajectories converge” (150). Moreover, the strange attractor—much like a cult film—is posited retroactively; the pattern signals the presence of a focus that cannot otherwise be identified.

In his Looking Awry, an explication of Lacanian psychoanalysis, Slavoj Žižek appropriates this idea of the strange attractor as a way to explain the working of a concept intimately related to human desire, the Lacanian objet petit a (opa). For Lacan, human subjects are fundamentally marked by lack. The objet a, the unattainable “object cause” of desire, is that which the subject fantasizes would complete him or her, what one loves but cannot fully grasp or possess. In Seminar 11, Lacan—sounding as though he is discussing the sf cult fans of Rocky Horror and Mystery Science Theater 3000 —expresses this relationship as, “ I love you, but, because inexplicably I love in you something more than you —the objet petit a—I mutilate you ” (268). Žižek, after a brief synopsis of chaos theory, then asks, “Is not the very form of the ‘strange attractor’ a kind of physical metaphor for the Lacanian objet petit a ?”(38).