Greetings Everyone!
I hope all of you will pick up a copy of my newest
book, Horror as Racism in H. P. Lovecraft! You can get it at Amazon,
Bloomsbury and other on-line book sellers.
In my previous series of postings, we have studied
Lovecraft’s theory of devolution—Lovecraft believed that pure-blooded white,
Anglo-Saxons who have intimate contact, especially sexual contact, with blacks
or non-whites risk devolving, i.e. moving from a higher evolutionary stage to a
lower stage. That is, their blood is tainted by contact with those who don’t
have pure blood and they become more like animals than humans. Indeed, they can transform into monsters. Additionally,
these whites also risk producing hybrid children who literally are
monsters.
Lovecraft’s theory was influenced by two great vampire
novels: Bram Stoker’s Dracula and
J. Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla.
Both the title characters are undead, devolved creatures that are more animal than human. Thus, being “undead” is equivalent to being a
Lovecraftian hybrid.
Interestingly, the recent film Nosferatu, which
has drawn mixed reviews, captures perfectly what the real vampire may have been
like, at least the historical vampire.
According to records dating back as far as the 1200’s in Europe and
elsewhere, vampires are almost always lower-class, peasant workers, ordinary
looking if not outright ugly; not
gorgeous or handsome counts or countesses, and certainly not the teen
heartthrobs pictured in the Twilight
saga or in the Interview with the Vampire film franchise.
Though Count Orlac, the vampire in Nosferatu,
is, indeed, a nobleman, at least in terms of his title, he is a grotesque,
hideous monster. He is only remotely
human in appearance, and though he is undead, like Dracula and Camilla, he is
much more repulsive than they are. He is
basically a rotting corpse, decaying second by second, literally falling apart
as he seeks out his victims. He drinks
the blood of both males and females
alike, and he does this like a large, filthy, leech, laying naked on top of
them as he slurps up their blood gluttonously.
At the end of the film, Orlac is destroyed by sunlight
streaming in through the apartment window of his last victim, the wife of the
film’s rather ineffectual male protagonist—the final image of Orlac’s naked,
rotting body lying on top of the
heroine’s dead body, represents the epitome of graphic, unpleasant cinema.
The message of Nosferatu is the same as the
message of Bram Stoker’s and Le Fanu’s
novels: devolution results from tainted blood and is a stronger force
than evolution!
https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/horror-as-racism-in-h-p-lovecraft-9798765107706/
JLS
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