The Vampire Lectures

by Laurence A. Rickels

Based on the course Rickels has taught at the University of California, Santa Barbara, for several years (a course that is itself a cult phenomenon on campus), The Vampire Lectures reflects Rickels's unique lecture style and provides a lively history of vampirism in legend, literature, and film. Rickels unearths a trove that includes eyewitness accounts of vampire attacks; burial rituals and sexual taboos devised to keep vampirism at bay; Hungarian countess Elisabeth Bathory's use of girls' blood in her sadistic beauty regimen; Bram Stoker's Dracula, with its turn-of-the-century media technologies; F. W. Murnau's haunting "Nosferatu"; and crude, though intense, straight-to-video horror films such as "Subspecies". He makes intuitive, often unexpected connections among these sometimes wildly disparate sources.

Softbound Univ of Minnesota Press (1999)