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.