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Vampires research essay
The evolution of vampires in pop culture
The evolution of vampires in pop culture
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The Humanization of Modern-Day Film Vampires
His thirsts have not changed. He craves the taste of blood, the warm, life-sustaining liquid that flows so gently from the necks of his victims into his own foul mouth. He continues to hunt in the night, cursed forever from the purity of sunlight, and his immortal body still remains ageless, untouched by the rugged sands of time and trauma. Yet somehow the vampire is different than he once was. He is richer, more human in color. His clothes are no longer binding and elaborate as the capes and suits of old; he often opts for simple denim or leather pants and coats. In fact, the modern vampire can often be mistaken for any other man or woman out for a midnight stroll. These observations all show evidence of the humanization of vampires in pop culture, an evolution from the soulless, purely evil animals they once were to merely darker versions of man. As humans struggle to control their own inner desires under the burden of society, increasingly protagonist vampires question and fight to suppress their own dark thirsts. It is this denial of nature unknown to the strictly evil vampires of old that identifies the modern-day film vampires more closely with their human counterparts today.
Vampires, in retrospect, weren’t always the socially in-tune creatures that they are today. For what reasons did these changes occur? According to social critic I.C. Jarvie, “if we look again at the movie past . . . we find that the critical posture, the portrayal of society, has long been an important subtradition of the American cinema” (Social Criticism xiii). Thus, if we refer back to some of the earliest vampire films, we might receive some clues about the nature of the society that bir...
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...to pursue it. As Benjamin Hoff remarks in the Tao of Pooh, “when you know and respect your own Inner Nature, you know where you belong” (41). Perhaps, in modeling what were once seen as beasts after us, we are learning to accept rather than shun our own primitive natures. Our place in the world is as creatures that are human.
Works Cited
Day, William Patrick. Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture. Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 2002.
Hoff, Benjamin. The Tao of Pooh. New York: Penguin Books 1982.
I.C. Jarvie. Movies and Society. New York: Basic Books, Inc., 1970.
I.C. Jarvie. Movies as Social Criticism. Metuchen: The Scarecrow Press, Inc., 1978.
Ursini, James and Alain Silver. The Vampire Film. Cranbury: A.S. Barnes and Co., Inc., 1975
Waller, Gregory A. The Living and the Undead. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1986.
...teams to generate profits from larger teams; however, a floor is also important to institute because it will force teams to spend a minimum amount of money. The salary floor, in contrast allows competitiveness to rise in winning and free agency.
A salary cap gives all the teams an equal chance to sign players. It also keeps teams with a lot of money not able to acquire every all-star they want , or any player who is a free agent. Some Major League Baseball teams like the Anahiem Angels and the Atlanta Braves are owned by very wealthy people and companies. The Anaheim Angels are owned by Disney.(Worisnop, 128) So with no surprise the Angels can produce a team which can be very competitive, and have several all-star players. Just recently they exercised this advantage by signing Mo Vaughn for ninety million dollars over seven years.(Antonen, 2) There were at least four other teams that wanted to sign this all-star, but the Angels easily had the money, and outbid everyone who wanted to sign him. If there was a salary cap in Major League Baseball then the Angels would have thought twice about giving that much money to one player. With the its roster for one year. So giving one player 12.8 million dollars for one year does not really make sense if the salary cap is fifty million dollars a year. That would leave only 37.2 million dollars for the twenty-four other players, which equals each player getting on average a little less than one and a half million dollars a year.
As long has there has been business, Management and Labor have warred against each other for a bigger piece of the pie. Major League Baseball is no different. In the early years of professional baseball the owners controlled the salaries of the players and decided where they could play and what they would be paid. The players were bound to their team by the Reserve Clause that stated, the services of a player will be reserved exclusively for that team for the next season. This resulted in keeping the player’s salaries artificially low because the players were not allowed to offer their services to any other team. The Reserve Clause was in effect for more than One Hundred years of baseball history. It was challenged several times but the owners had won every time, until in 1970 when the St. Louis Cardinals traded outfielder Curt Flood to the Philadelphia Phillies. Flood refused to play for the Phillies and sued to become a free-agent. Flood’s case was in court for several years going all the way to the Supreme Court. He was never able to play in the Major League again. While he did not win his case, he laid the groundwork for a later case that involved two pitchers, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally who filed a grievance against the league contending that, because they didn't sign contracts with their previous teams they were free agents. The owners and the Players Association agreed to submit to binding, impartial, arbitration in order to settle this case. On December 23, 1975 the arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled in favor of the players and the Reserve Clause was broken, and the era of free agency began in the Major Leagues. In 1976 when free agency began the average player salary was only $52 thousand dollars, but it has increased steadily ever since. By 1990 the average salary for a Major League Baseball player had risen to $589 thousand dollars. This Year baseball will start the 2001 season with an average player salary of more than $2 million, about 40 times higher than the typical wage in 1976 when free agency began.
Walter, Andrew. "Point: Salary Caps Provide Parity in Professional Sports." Points of View Reference Center. Alabama Virtual Library, n.d. Web. 2 Jan. 2014.
Carmilla is an example of a woman who loves her food far too much. Carmilla is consumed entirely by her food, even sleeping in a coffin of blood: “The limbs were perfectly flexible, the flesh elastic; and the leaden coffin floated with blood, in which to a depth of seven inches, the body lay immersed” (Le Fanu 102). There exists a unique relationship between the vampire and their victims. Food becomes defined in terms of victimhood, distinctly separated from humanity’s general consumption of meat. The need for human victims makes hunting synonymous with courtship, as intense emotional connections are established between the vampiress and her food. As seen in the intense relationship developed between Laura and Carmilla, the vampire is “prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemence, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons” (105). For Carmilla, cruelty and love are inseparable (33). The taking of the victims’ blood for sustenance is a highly sexualized exchange of fluids from one body to another. The act of consumption is transformed into an illicit carnal exchange between the hunter and the hunted.
Stevenson, John Allen. A Vampire in the Mirror: The Sexuality of Dracula. 2nd ed. Vol. 103. N.p.: Modern Language Association, 1988. JSTOR. Web. 6 Jan. 2014. .
“Take me out to the ballgame” is a song well known among baseball fans. Unfortunately, when it comes to money Major League Baseball is unfair. Rich teams can afford any player they desire, while poor teams have to invest in their rookies and young stars. Studies show that most stars go where the big money is. Money plays a large behind-the-scenes part in regards to the sport of baseball. So rich organizations have the upper hand. Certain star players command such high salaries that teams must alter their payroll distribution in order to sign them. The MLB needs a payroll cap because the money differential between MLB teams makes affording and keeping players an unfair system.
The main character in the short story “A Rose for Emily” written by William Faulkner is Emily Grierson. She lives in Jefferson Mississippi, in a fictional county called Yoknapatawpha County. The people of Yoknapatawpha saw Miss Emily as "a small, fat woman" who was very cold, distant, and lived in her past. Her home "was a big, squarish frame house that had once been white, decorated with cupolas and spires and scrolled balconies in the heavily lightsome style of the seventies...”. She lived in a little community that was changing and becoming more modern unlike her house. Her house, as Faulkner describes, "...smelled of dust and disuse-a close, dank smell"; "it was furnished in heavy, leather-covered furniture". The look of Emily’s home bothered Emily’s community along with many other things about her. Emily has a "hereditary obligation upon the town". She is from a family of wealth that brought tradition to Yoknapatawpha County. When the town started making modern changes fitting into the next generation Emily became stubborn and showed this by refusing to pay taxes to her county. Emily repeats, "I have no taxes in Jefferson" four times before dismissing the deputation. Thomas Robert Argiro, the author of a critical essay called “Miss Emily After Dark” states that, “[Emily]… struggles with personal grief, a restricted social life, socio-economic decline, and romantic misfortune…” (par.2). Miss Emily is misunderstood by the townspeople and is resistant to the changes around her as well in her life.
Vampires have been a popular figure in literary works for almost 200 years; from John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) to Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight (2005), the figure of the vampire has changed and developed over time but still remains popular and recognisable throughout literary history. The figure of the vampire is often used to represent ‘the other’, or as a manifestation of social anxieties at the time of writing. This is why it is interesting to study the how the tropes found within vampire fiction differ between texts, and the reasons behind these differences or transformations in the figure of the vampire. I will look at a range of texts to study how sexuality
For centuries, gothic authors depict the vampires as evil, repulsive, and socially secluded “creatures”, leaving the audience terrified by the gruesome details of the murdering and sucking the blood to kill the victims, in order for the vampire kind to survive. However, the modern vampire is drastically pulling away from that negative connotation, and becoming difficult to differentiate amongst the public. Since many Americans are struggling to make ends meet, they tend to seek out alternative methods of achieving money, such as donating blood for a payment. This not only helps struggling families in their time of need, but also helps people struggling with organ failure. This source of saving human blood is represented in Twilight, as the Cullen family of vampires, feed exclusively on animal blood in order to save human life. Though the gruesome murdering of the human victims from a vampire attack has been taken out of today’s stories, the general gloomy and eerie mystique of...
In Twilight, Edward Cullen presents the question; “ But what if I’m not the hero? What if I’m the bad guy?” The role of vampires is very controversial. Back in the day they were evil, soulless monsters and people genuinely feared them. However, in the present day it seems that we have grown to love them and even hope to one day be them. There are a plethora of vampire stories and many of them have become immense hits. With so many vampire stories, it is not uncommon that readers are able to identify a vast amount of similarities. Although similar in aspects, there are still many differences between the classic and modern day vampires. Two highly popular stories, in which we can easily identify similarities and differences, are Bram Stoker’s Dracula and Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight.
If a child cannot read all facets of their life (socially, academically, relationally, financially, etc.) then they will suffer and this will continue into adult hood. Reading and understanding what you read is essential in almost everything we do such as school work, homework, buying a car, buying a house and much more. It is our job as educators to not only teach a child to read but to ignite a passion for reading, striving to make it something that comes almost as natural as breathing, and something we cannot live without. Developing a comprehensive literacy classroom is an integral part of doing exactly that.
In the year 1897, Bram Stoker releases the crown jewel of the 20th century: his vampire epic Dracula. Ever since Dracula, Transylvania, and castles have been associative of vampirism, the world has become “bloody”. There are slight deviations to the novel, but the majority of them are fairly partial to the novel. Worldly views show Dracula as an old man with a new face. The inception of Bram Stoker’s Dracula has been the melting pot of the recreations and incarnations of the world’s deadliest, bloodsucking vampire, Count Dracula.
Diction plays a critical role in the development of the tone in a story. The type of words the author uses directly leads to the tone of the entire literary work. If ...
The author’s op-ed piece was published in 2009, the very peak of the vampire contagion, where one could find these creatures wherever they looked. This pandemonium that arose from vampires is what drove del Toro and Hogan to pen “Why Vampires Never Die.” Furthermore, the purpose behind this essay is to give an abridged description of the past of vampires for the people who had become fanatics of the creatures. Also, this essay showed how vampires have persisted in pop culture. They suggest that vampires have been remade by diverse cultures at different times, and this change echoes that society's angst and concerns. The novelist’s imply that Stroker’s Dracula may mirror an exaggerated human on a prim...