ABSTRACT

Though limited in numbers when compared to their Western counterparts, the Indian filmic vampire is an important case study in the history of Indian horror films. The chapter titled ‘Vampirism as structures of resistance’ studies the existing theories about the origin of vampires, their character traits and the Indian variants of what are generally regarded as quintessential European representations. This chapter explores vampires not as a monolithic presentation but as a body of heterogeneous signifiers. Analyses of vampires in the Hindi Purana Mandir (dir. Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay, 1984) and Bandh Darwaza (dir. Shyam Ramsay and Tulsi Ramsay, 1990), the Malayalam Vayanadan Thampan (dir. A. Vincent, 1978) and Dracula 3D (dir. Vinayan, 2012) and the Bangla Nishi Trishna (dir. Parimal Bhattacharya, 1989) reveal motifs of cinematic necrophilia, paternal incest, masculine anxieties of old age, decay and loss of physical beauty, pagan rural forces pitted against urban discourses and sexual anxieties trapped in the 3D digitised economy. This chapter concludes that vampires can be read as interstitial figures coding within themselves a host of sociological and non-normative sexual anxieties. Sometimes, the figure of the vampire directly metamorphoses such anxieties and at other times, their active or passive doings motor cross-cultural and personal voices of dissent.