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Terror Tracks - Music, Sound and Horror Cinema - Philip Hayward

Music of the Night: Scoring the Vampire in Contemporary Film

Terror Tracks - Music, Sound and Horror Cinema - Philip Hayward

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The vampire himself –-- because the memorable cinematic vampires tend to be male (in fact, they tend to be Dracula) -- – has generally been presented as a character simultaneously dangerous, terrifying and yet also exotic. He is a model of the colonial Other in Western culture, the foreign and demonic savage who seduces and destroys respectable white women, a threat to patriarchal dominance and to Western culture itself. However, since the early 1980s there has been a shift in the construction of cinematic vampires that arguably goes hand in hand with the increased recognition by western culture of the danger of othering groups and individuals. Dracula has traditionally been enigmatically alien: his seductions have been a ruse, the means to achieving his true goal, namely, drinking the blood of his victims. The modern vampire is often cast as a victim himself, an altogether more sympathetic figure; and the way in which this shift in our perceptions of what a vampire is has been articulated, in part, through music. This chapter examines how the music written for cinematic vampire narratives has changed since the days of Hammer (discussed by Michael Hannan in this volume), and how these changes therefore affect how we read the vampire.

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