Dawsferatu's House of Horrors

I’ve been driving a lot recently, which means I’ve been listening to a lot of podcasts. Back episodes, mostly. Weird Studies, Slothcast, Tales from the Mall, and Bad Books for Bad People were all on heavy rotation for a while. Then I got on a Quentin Tarantino kick. He has two ridiculously long appearances on The Joe Rogan Experience and on The Empire Film podcast. They’re both good. I’m probably the last person who’s listened to them. During both interviews, Tarantino pitches the 1980s as a time of cultural stagnation and self censorship. “They won’t let you do that,” was the rule of the day. “They” being the studios (and the viewing public said studios supposedly represent) and “that” being anything overtly violent or sexual. That is, until he came out with Reservoir Dogs in 1992 and single handedly changed the landscape of American cinema. Without Reservoir Dogs , Tarantino argues, we wouldn’t have gotten Se7en or American Beauty . We also wouldn’t have gotten The Boondock Saints ...

Both Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend and Charlaine Harris’ Sookie Stackhouse novels (and the adaptations thereof) use vampires as a stand-in for marginalized and/or oppressed groups. In I Am Legend , the vampires are the proletariat; in the Stackhouse books they are variously homosexuals, the X-Men, people of color, et cetera. But where in Matheson’s novella the vampires employ violent means to achieve their Revolutionary ends, Harris’ bloodsuckers take a somewhat subtler approach; opting instead to ingratiate themselves to mortals by appearing opposite Bill Maher on Real Time and opening integrated bars where the undead can mix and mingle with the living. Bill Maher, circa 2008   This evolution in vampiric praxis reflects a sea-change in American politics. When Matheson published I Am Legend in 1954, it likely seemed as if the only way any subversive ideology could gain a foothold in the United States was through violence. Thus, They came at sunset, muttering, snarling, screamin...