Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture: What Becomes a Legend Most

While vampire stories have been part of Western culture since the beginning of the nineteenth century, it has been in recent dccades that they have become a central part of American popular culture. Vampire Legends in Contemporary American Culture examines how vampire stories – from Bram Stoker’s Dracula to Blacula, from Bela Lugosi to Love at First Bite – have become part of our ongoing debate about what it means to be human.
William Patrick Day looks at how writers and filmmakers as diverse as Anne Rice and Andy Warhol present the vampire as an archetype of human identity and how many postmodern vampire stories reflect our fear of and attraction to addiction and violence. He argues that the prevailing tendency of authors in the first half of the twentieth century to use vampire characters to caution against succumbing to sexual impulse has since changed; today, in the vampire’s struggle between embracing and denying its nature, we see reflected our own uncertain balance between moral restraint and liberation.