In Bram Stoker’s 1898 novel, Dracula migrates from Transylvania to London, buying property in that city; quoting Moses in Exodus, he famously tells Jonathan Harker he is “a stranger in a strange land”. Migration is the thing that makes this ancient vampire modern. In the aftermath of Stoker’s novel, newer versions of Dracula continue to migrate, arriving at other destinations and attempting to make themselves at home there: bearing out the sociologist Georg Simmel’s observation in 1908 that the stranger is “the man who comes today and stays tomorrow”.

In this talk Professor Ken Gelder (School of Culture and Communication, Faculty of Arts) will track the modern vampire’s arrival in three quite different places: the American South, Japan and Sweden. To try to make sense of these vampiric destinations, this talk will look at Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter (2010, 2012), Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and the True Blood television series; Hideyuki Kikuchi’s Vampire Hunter D (1983) and the anime film director Mamoru Oshii’s Blood: The Last Vampire: Night of the Beasts (2000); and John Ajvide Lindqvist’s novel Let the Right One In (2004), adapted to film in 2008 and re-adapted in the US in 2010.

Ken Gelder is Professor of English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. He has been a visiting fellow at University College, London, and the University of Edinburgh. Ken currently teaches courses in modern and contemporary literature, popular/genre fiction, Australian literature and subcultural studies. His books include Reading the Vampire (Routledge, 1994), Uncanny Australia: Sacredness and Identity in a Postcolonial Nation (with Jane M. Jacobs: Melbourne University Press MUP, 1998), Popular Fiction: The Logics and Practices of a Literary Field (Routlegde, 2004), Subcultures: Cultural Histories and Social Practice (Routledge, 2007) and New Vampire Cinema (British Film Institute, 2012). He is also editor of The Horror Reader (Routledge, 2000) and The Subcultures Reader: Second Edition (Routledge, 2007).

This free event is a public program accompaying the exhibition Dark Imaginings: Gothic Tales of Wonder, currently on display in the Noel Shaw Gallery, Baillieu Library. The exhibition continues until 31 July 2018.