Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- PART I GOTHIC FILM HISTORY
- 1 Gothic Cinema during the Silent Era
- 2 ‘So why shouldn’t I write of monsters?’: Defining Monstrosity in Universal’s Horror Films
- 3 Film Noir and the Gothic
- 4 Transitional Gothic: Hammer’s Gothic Revival and New Horror
- 5 Gothic Cinema from the 1970s to Now
- PART II GOTHIC FILM ADAPTATIONS
- 6 Danny’s Endless Tricycle Ride: The Gothic and Adaptation
- 7 Jekyll and Hyde and Scopophilia
- 8 Gothic Parodies on Film and Personal Transformation
- 9 The Gothic Sensorium: Affect in Jan Švankmajer’s Poe Films
- 10 Dracula in Asian Cinema: Transnational Appropriation of a Cultural Symbol
- PART III GOTHIC FILM TRADITIONS
- 11 The Italian Gothic Film
- 12 Gothic Science Fiction
- 13 American Gothic Westerns: Tales of Racial Slavery and Genocide
- 14 This Is America: Race, Gender and the Gothic in Get Out (2017)
- 15 ‘Part of my soul did die when making this film’: Gothic Corporeality, Extreme Cinema and Hardcore Horror in the Twenty-First Century
- Filmography and Other Media
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
10 - Dracula in Asian Cinema: Transnational Appropriation of a Cultural Symbol
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2020
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction
- PART I GOTHIC FILM HISTORY
- 1 Gothic Cinema during the Silent Era
- 2 ‘So why shouldn’t I write of monsters?’: Defining Monstrosity in Universal’s Horror Films
- 3 Film Noir and the Gothic
- 4 Transitional Gothic: Hammer’s Gothic Revival and New Horror
- 5 Gothic Cinema from the 1970s to Now
- PART II GOTHIC FILM ADAPTATIONS
- 6 Danny’s Endless Tricycle Ride: The Gothic and Adaptation
- 7 Jekyll and Hyde and Scopophilia
- 8 Gothic Parodies on Film and Personal Transformation
- 9 The Gothic Sensorium: Affect in Jan Švankmajer’s Poe Films
- 10 Dracula in Asian Cinema: Transnational Appropriation of a Cultural Symbol
- PART III GOTHIC FILM TRADITIONS
- 11 The Italian Gothic Film
- 12 Gothic Science Fiction
- 13 American Gothic Westerns: Tales of Racial Slavery and Genocide
- 14 This Is America: Race, Gender and the Gothic in Get Out (2017)
- 15 ‘Part of my soul did die when making this film’: Gothic Corporeality, Extreme Cinema and Hardcore Horror in the Twenty-First Century
- Filmography and Other Media
- Notes on Contributors
- Index
Summary
The focus of this essay is the vampire in Asian cinema. By vampire, I do not mean a monster native to Asia that academic and popular writings have come to associate with it, like the Filipino aswang or the host of blood-drinking Indian demons (such as the vetala, the yakshi and the rakshasha), but Dracula himself – or rather a vampire based on Stoker's design. His representation, moreover, can be direct or indirect: obviously a replication of the Anglo-American prototype, or a hybridised configuration, like the Malaysian pontianak and the Chinese jiangshi, that nevertheless palpably manifest his characteristics (usually his fangs and blood-drinking). As we shall see, the latter strategy can sometimes transform the hybrid into an effective motif bearing allegorical implications, but at others potentially undermine the cultural meaningfulness of the film. Hence, the subject of my inquiry is Asian cinema's appropriation of Stoker's vampire as a Western icon itself. Admittedly the lack of films featuring Dracula or a Dracula-hybrid potentially signals the lack of the phenomenon's importance to the development of Asian horror. However, my concern here is not so much with how often Dracula appears in Asian films (although I will briefly address this point) but why he appears at all. By clarifying the symbolic role Dracula performs in Asian horror films, I hope to establish a possible reason why he is adopted as a motif other than the allegation that his appropriation is mainly for profit.
This chapter explains Dracula's apparent adaptability to Asian cinema. After briefly reviewing Dracula's claim as a pre-eminent symbol in Anglo-American popular culture, I demonstrate Dracula's inherent versatility and ambiguity as a symbol capable of accommodating multiple, constantly shifting and even contradictory meanings corresponding to the nation's evolving culture at different points in history. As I will argue, it is precisely these qualities that render his ideological loyalty uncertain on the one hand and enable his transcendence of national borders to become a transnational, multicultural symbol on another, and hence his attractiveness to Asian cinema. This chapter also considers a common, if deleterious, perception regarding twentieth-century Asian horror (with the exception of Japanese and Korean or J- and K-horror) that could also apply to Dracula's presence in its films.
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- Gothic FilmAn Edinburgh Companion, pp. 136 - 152Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2020