Journeying through twilight
She broodingly stomps about, complains that you don’t understand her, can’t seem to fit in anywhere, struggles with her body and body image, warms up to some but is cruel to others...sounds like most teenagers.
But Concordia grad Stacey Abbott (below), BFA 91, has another take on this characterization. “Actually, it’s a good description of a vampire,” Abbott says.
She should know. While Abbott says she has little in common with vampires—except when she spends time in the dark watching movies and “wearing sunglasses when it’s sunny”—her understanding of vampire culture runs deep: she’s been studying, teaching and writing about it for the better part of the last two decades.
The graduate of Concordia’s Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema is a reader (or senior academic) in Film Studies at Roehampton University in London, United Kingdom.
Her research focuses on the horror film genre, especially vampire films. She reveals that her favourite vampires include Count Orlok in F.W. Murnau’s film Nosferatu (1922), Martin from George Romero’s Martin (1977) and Darla from the television series Angel (1999-2004), although she professes a fondness for all the vampires in Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark (1987).
Abbott’s interest in horror cinema took root during her childhood, when she says her first encounter with a vampire was with Sesame Street’s Count von Count, a Muppet character loosely based on Bela Lugosi’s Dracula. She reveals that her academic curiosity in horror grew out of the thrill and promise of being scared while watching slasher films as a teenager.
While at Concordia in 1990, she read Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976) and became excited about the strikingly complex figure that is the vampire. “I began to realize that horror was one of the most cinematic genres, drawing upon carefully constructed shot composition, sound and cinematography to create a frightening atmosphere and effect,” Abbott says.
She found a supportive group of teachers who steered her toward academia. “In many ways, all of the professors who taught me inspired me: Peter Rist, John Locke, Carole Zucker, Mario Falsetto, Catherine Russell, Tom Waugh and Joanne Larue,” Abbott says. “They saw potential in me as a film student and encouraged me to be more confident in myself and excel in my research and writing. They really fostered my abilities and set me on my path.”
Cinema Professor Peter Rist recalls Abbott’s class presentation on horror films. “For such a young person, she showed so much poise,” Rist says. “She balances an intellectual rigour with a keen interest in genre films. When she was a student at Concordia, she was also one of the first people to be aware—and interested in—Hong Kong action cinema.”
After she graduated, Abbott held various jobs, including one in the university’s audio-visual department, which was then called Visual Media Resources. She decided to pursue a master’s degree in film studies abroad because programs in Canada were in short supply. Rist recommended the Film Studies and Film Archiving program at the University of East Anglia in the U.K.
“At the time, we didn’t have a graduate film studies program at Concordia, so Stacey had to go elsewhere,” Rist says. “Grants weren’t easy to come by but she persevered and made a very smart choice to go to the University of East Anglia to do the Film Archive MA. No doubt, one of the reasons she initially chose to go into film archiving was her experience at Visual Media Resources.”
Abbott’s master’s dissertation on the post-modern vampire was titled “Sex, blood and rock’n’roll: The contemporary vampire genre, 1970-1989.”
Upon completing her MA, she chose to stay in England and, in 1996, landed a job at the British Film Institute, where she spent six years, first as administrator for its MA program and later as education officer at the National Film Theatre in London.
She also worked with Laura Mulvey, a leading film theorist, and soon began a research PhD part-time at the University of London’s Birkbeck College.
In August 2002, she completed her doctoral thesis called “Up to date with a vengeance: The modern vampire from Dracula to Blade,” at Birkbeck at the University of London and, the following month, began teaching film studies full time at Roehampton University.
Teen vampires
bbott explains that adolescence mimics vampire culture because it breeds all forms of rebellion. Vampire films and books often depict characters undergoing transformations they don’t understand. “Vampires’ needs are changing; they are suddenly being overwhelmed by new, strange desires and physical hungers,” she says. “They don’t have anyone to talk to about what’s going on and feel that no one would understand. They feel alone and suddenly different from everyone around them.”
Abbott cites the movie Near Dark to illustrate her point. “The film is a coming-of-age story in which the boy, Caleb, must choose between the violent but exciting world of the vampires and the rather mundane human world. Although Caleb makes the ‘right choice’ and rejoins his human family, we can’t forget how easily he slipped into the vampire world,” she says.
Abbott’s work also examines how the modern vampire is redefining gender roles to reflect cultural and social concerns. “In 19th century literature and painting, the female vampire represented women who defied the traditional image of woman as wife and mother,” she says. “The female vampire is not nurturing but sexually aggressive. From today’s perspective, this is a form of rebellion, although in the 19th century and early 20th century, she was usually punished for her sexuality.”
But vampires aren’t redefining femininity alone. Abbott contends that series such as Angel (a spinoff of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, 1997-2003) present “a clever deconstruction of contemporary masculinity and masculine friendships. Vampires continue to serve as a means to challenge and explore not just gender stereotypes but race, ethnicity, sexuality and age,” she says.
Sign of the times
The vampire also challenges the social mores of its time, Abbott points out. As such, it is easy to perceive the vampire as an eminently modern persona that struggles with male and female stereotypes and is rebellious and independent. “Independence is particularly a part of the reluctant vampire tradition. But at the same time, the vampire is also tied to the past and restricted by its physical needs, which are defined by a thirst for blood, whether it gives in to them or not. This means that vampires are always struggling against the past and the vampire legacy,” she explains.
The link between modernity and vampire culture is one that Abbott explores in her book, Celluloid Vampires (2007), which puts forth that “the medium of film has completely reinvented the vampire archetype” and that vampires “reflect the cultural and social climate of the societies that produce them, especially during times of intense change and modernization.” As societies undergo social and industrial transformations, so do vampires, who move into new locations and slip into new identities. “The vampire is born out of the processes of change within the modern world,” Abbott writes.
She says the study of vampires is relevant even today because their feelings of alienation mirror our own. “This is something we see from Interview with the Vampire to Twilight,” she says, adding the vampire itself is something that defies the laws of nature or, as in 19th century literature and folklore, the laws of God. It is such a pervasive myth that it refuses to die. “The vampire is dead but it walks around. It is nocturnal, while the civilized world is generally a diurnal world. The body rules it, while society tells us we should be ruled by the mind. It continues to regenerate and renew itself to express the anxieties and fears for each generation. Our continued fascination with them tells us so much about ourselves,” she says.
So what does the current Twilight (the popular book and movie series) craze reflect about our society?
Abbott suggests the depiction of young-female angst may have much to do with it. “The author, Stephenie Meyer, has tapped into the teen girl’s psyche, which is dominated by insecurities and the desire to be special in some way. Bella [the protagonist] is so nondescript that anyone reading the book can immediately project oneself onto her. She is an avatar,” Abbott says. “What’s more, Twilight offers a narrative in which traditional notions of good and evil are overturned and authority is questioned. These all tie in to the issues that we see around us on a daily basis.”
Deborah Jermyn, a reader in the School of Arts at Roehampton and Abbott’s colleague, says Abbott’s research has raised awareness about the topic, even before its current vogue. “Stacey’s work has tremendously enriched contemporary Film and Cultural Studies by placing the vampire genre in its full social and historical context, giving critical weight to an area too easily dismissed as merely populist,” Jermyn says. “At the same time, it has been incredibly prescient; as she was completing her PhD and publishing it as a monograph, no one—except perhaps Stacey!—could have anticipated just how timely it would prove to be and how big the cultural revival of the vampire myth was about to become. She has, therefore, been at the forefront of the critical debate about new texts like the Twilight series and True Blood, which have been phenomenally successful worldwide.”
From horror to comedy in a heartbeat
As a film scholar, Abbott has yet to exhaust her intellectual analyses of the horror genre. Yet, there is another variety—far removed from horror—that has captured her attention: romantic comedy.
She recently co-edited a book entitled Falling in Love Again: The Romantic Comedy in Contemporary Cinema (2009). “Popular cinema reflects changes in the world around us,” Abbott maintains. “Romantic comedies are sometimes dismissed as being frivolous but when looked at closely, they really provide a commentary on developing attitudes towards sex, love and gender roles.” Movies such as Pillow Talk (1959), Breakfast at Tiffany’s (1961) and When Harry Met Sally (1989) speak to society’s evolving morality.
Abbott is excited about another field of study: contemporary “quality” television, which she considers as an emerging art form. Abbott attributes the popularity of shows that include Dexter, Angel and The Shield to the narrowing distinction between dramatic television and cinema in the United Kingdom and the United States.
As these lines blur, so do the parameters that define what will next grab Abbott’s attention. One thing is certain: whether the subject is a vampire, Holly Golightly or Norman Bates, she will study the persona in situ and in historical context until her intellectual curiosity directs her anew.
—Anna di Giorgio, BFA 81, is a Montreal-based freelance writer.