The characters of the vampire and the zombie are considered two figures of disguised human in many popular fictions and both of them are considered big icons of gothic and horror fiction. For a better understanding of these two figures, we shall firstly analyze the prototypical characteristics of the genre where these characters usually appear. The Gothic was a literary and artistic response to modernity that emerged in the late 1700, at a time of political and intellectual ferment and that looked backward to pre-modern, pre-industrialized civilizations; this is a genre that turned principally into today’s horror fiction and possibly into some crime and fantasy literature. Gothic fictions are usually characterized by the presence of a general …show more content…
Mythically it represents a figure of primal and destructive power.
The vampire began to appear in English Literature around the nineteenth century and it was also in this period that the interpretation of this figure started to change as from a mythical phenomenon it turned into a desirable cultural product.
The figure of the vampire has been analyzed and studied for years and many critics believe that, socially and psychologically, it represents a projection of what we cannot accept within ourselves. For this very reason it’s always been portrayed with human physical characteristics (vampires look like normal people, but they actually are disguised images of the human, an evil human).
It symbolizes (or it can be used as a metaphor to do so) everything that our society and our culture wants to hide and suppress such as sexuality, otherness, fear and not acceptance of a different way of living. These are all qualities that we can usually find in the character of the vampire in literature and in the emblematic example of the gothic horror novel “Dracula” written by Bram Stoker in
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The girl went on her knees, and bent over me, simply gloating. There was a deliberate voluptuousness which was both thrilling and repulsive, and as she arched her neck, she actually licked her lips like an animal, till I could see in the moonlight the moisture shining on the scarlet lips and on the red tongue as it lapped the white sharp teeth. Lower and lower went her head as the lips went below the range of my mouth and chin and seemed about to fasten on my throat.”
Dracula, (as any other vampire figure) doesn’t only evokes fear in people because of his nature to kill, but what is mostly scary of such unhuman being is that he’s different. He is not part of the normality, he is a foreign. Although we live in a globalized era where geographical limits have been overthrown by technology and cultures mixed up by immigration and curiosity to discover the world, despite all of this, we are still part of a society where the ‘otherness’ is considered scary and sometimes