This is hopefully the beginning of keeping track of my work on vampires, specifically in film. To be completely candid, I have no idea how to blog. But I hope that this public writing not only motivates me to do more in my research, but also connect and inspire others to look into vampirology as a topic worth discussing.
First, I am going to go over all the work I have done prior to the creation of this blog, and provide links to all work involved. I think this will be a good baseline in which I can write more consistently and provide an almost live feed of my methods. I will provide a summary for a quick run down of my work so far here:
- A quick compilation of literary vampire works to familiarise myself with the field
- Creation of the List (more details later)
- Compilation of and cross-referencing of vampire films on IMDB
- Transference of the List onto Letterboxd
- Writing my Under Graduate Thesis
- Additions to my Letterboxd list from my peers
- Re-establishing the List as the main source of research notes and data
My initial interest into vampirology began when I was in college. I remember sitting in my childhood home after a long week of classes and just going, “what if I watched every vampire film?” Utterly insane, nigh impossible task. But I am also an incredibly obsessive person, and a need to do something with my spare time. So I started where everyone in the modern age starts: Wikipedia. But I specifically went to the list of vampire works, and wanted to catalogue as much vampire media as possible. Everything from Romantic literature to academic works to movies and tv shows, I wanted to know as much as possible about what has been said about vampires. But it would have been too much to try and dip my toes into everything, I needed to target one specific medium. I could argue that I wanted to add to the lacuna of film history and delve deep into the vampire genre, but in reality I was lazy and not that well of a reader. And vampire film continues to be my more well known area of expertise.
I decided that I wanted to catalogue every vampire film in existence, and started by simply copying the vampire films from Wikipedia into a spreadsheet. But I noticed that some of the entries were just wrong; either the film was only adjacent to vampires or was clearly a misnomer. If I wanted to double check every single one, I’d have to watch all of them. And that was when the list was truly born. I would obsess over my List during my classes, adding new entries in a robotic fashion. First, I went to the International Movie Data Base (IMDB) and put in the tag for vampire films. And there I found my first realisation. Authors such as Weinstock and even Youtube video essayists were just putting in the vampire tag on IMBD and calling it a day. Most sources say there are ~2000 vampire films. But if you actually look at the entries, you’ll notice that movies like The Crow are on there; add on to the fact that a lot of the entries are user submitted, and you get a cacophony of un-standardised films. So I waded through the films, decade by decade, making sure that these films were even vampire films to begin with, and that they even existed at all. At the same time, I had begun watching the more well known movies. Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931) and Nosferatu (1922) were the most famous of my first watches, and I was motivated to get into the cinematic and vampiric implications of these motion pictures. With the help of my childhood friend, who is a film student and fellow vampire fanatic, we delved into the implications of vampires on screen. We spent much of our free time at work (night time park maintenance) watching and critiquing films, talking about and hypothesizing about vampires and how they were portrayed. One of the best times of my life-minus the smell of hot park trash.
It was also around this time that I learned about Letterboxd, which is a social media site for cinephiles. Most people use it for fun, finding movies they like and reading hilarious reviews. But I found the stats tool, and my brain exploded with joy. I could not only transfer my List onto Letterboxd, but do a lot of the functionality that I was looking for within the app without having to program all of the data visualisation. It took me a long time, but I was able to transfer all that I had on Letterboxd into my own list. For the first time, I could see without fail all of the statistics that I would have missed or would have taken ages for me to put onto the List. And for a few months I had abandoned the List in favour of Letterboxd, in-so-doing I had developed a network of people who shared my fascination with vampire film. I started adding films to the list that they had seen or recommended, and they continue to influence and be influenced by the films we watch and the lists we make.
In my first foray into academic writing, I had to write a thesis for my undergraduate. I, of course, chose to write about vampire film. I thought that my professor would frown at the idea, but he was surprisingly supportive in my work. He was confused as to why it mattered so much to me, but he never doubted my passion or my rigour to look at vampire films under the historic lens. After a semester of writing and research, a few things further engendered me into the world of vampirology. First, was the use of movies as academic sources. It sounds strange, but under the historic lens, movies are a primary source in which we can glean information. Second, is the introduction to the field of vampirology and vampire film studies through academia. Names like David Skol, David Jones, Ursini, Radu, Tim Kane, and many others would become micro-celebrities in my world, as they were the foundation for my work. And finally, I was able to look into the movies that were being discussed, and put my own thoughts into the discourse.
Now, having seen over one hundred films as well as read several articles and monographs, I have come back, full circle, to the List. I’m going to be developing both the List and my Letterboxd, and hopefully fill in some of the gaps in the literature with the help of this blog.
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