Can you elaborate on antisemitism within Dracula and such? I love vampires in media but I can’t continue to enjoy them if I feel they are blatantly antisemetic.
disclaimer! i am not a jewish person, i just have a ba in english and have written and read about vampires a lot, specifically i’ve written and read about dracula like four times in my academic career because every time i read that book i find something new to talk about. if you want actual answers about antisemitism you need to ask a (willing! do not use marginalized people as google) jewish person, they are the experts on their own persecution and i have merely read books and watched documentaries and spoken to people about it
i’m not gonna tell you to cut vampires cold turkey because that doesn’t feel especially nuanced and vampires are their own genre with a variety of lore, tropes, visuals, and what-not to choose from and i think it would be disrespectful to any jewish creators who have created vampire media (what we do in the shadows) to say “throw the whole thing out!”. just like how i would never tell you to completely stop consuming cosmic horror because the architect of the genre had worms for brains since there’s like a huge movement of writers of color and/or jewish writers and/or irish writers taking worms for brains’s ideas and making them good and not shitty. everyone knows i’m a slut for vampires, right? what’s not to love? however, the complicated thing about horror is that it doesn’t exist in a vacuum. most monsters are never just monsters but representations of something else whether it be a fear, a concept, or a people group. monsters, in the hands of the white horror “masters” often just meant anyone who wasn’t a straight white man, and in dracula that’s especially emphasized
in my thesis project which was mostly on jordan peele’s masterpiece get out, i asserted that the vampire, because it’s an idea that has existed in some form in cultures scattered throughout history, can represent different things at different times. just as zombies or cannibalistic monsters can represent everything from lust to capitalism to the poor, vampires can represent everything from lust to capitalism to the jewish people. vampires, in the hands of the antisemite, are especially violent symbols because often vampires are seen feeding off of innocent white women clothed in white living in civilized white western cities and towns or innocent white children clothed in white living in civilized white western cities and towns and well.... that’s blood libel
this is, like, a broad oversimplification of my own months of research and analysis work but stoker specifically ran right into antisemitism with the portion about dracula coming from transylvania to britain to kill a bunch of white hoes and “spread the vampire curse” when quite a few of the immigrants to britain at the time from that region were jewish folk fleeing pogroms. stoker also has it so that when she’s turned, sweet innocent white queen lucy’s hair turns dark and her eyes look like the devil’s and also there’s the fact that christian imagery repels dracula like there’s a lot to unpack here but basically what you need to know is that while stoker gave the vampire genre a lot to work with, so much of the imagery in his novel is, um, gross at best and built from victorian racial science and fear of the other and the fact that it became the standard for what we know as the modern vampire is uncomfortable but necessary to recognize so that we can figure out what to do about it
basically, we have to ask ourselves re: monsters, what is this text emphasizing about this monster? what makes this monster monstrous exactly? it’s what you have to ask about king kong and evil aliens with “dreads” and the hillbilly cannibal trope like you have to ask “WHY is this scary?”. you might not like the answer most days, but that’s okay because if you’re a writer like me you can attempt to re-wire these monsters to be powerful, subversive, and respectful to those who have historically been disrespected by horror. like it is possible to create a vampire that isn’t an antisemitic stereotype but it takes a lot of research, honest questions, hard work, and research
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