Hollywood Gothic

The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. Most of us can recite without prompting the salient characteristics of the vampire: sleeping by day in its coffin, rising at dusk to feed on the blood of the living; the ability to shapeshift into a bat, wolf, or mist; a mortal vulnerability to a wooden stake through the heart or a shaft of sunlight. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commidity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all.

Author: David J. Skal
Publisher: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux-3pl
Published: 10/18/2004
Pages: 384
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 1.07lbs
Size: 8.38h x 5.66w x 1.10d
ISBN: 9780571211586

About the Author

David J. Skal is the author of numerous books on popular culture, including The Monster Show (Faber, 2001) and Death Makes a Holiday. He is the co-editor of the Norton Critical Edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula.

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