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Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

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“Some people get a kick out of reading railroad timetables and that's all they do all day. Some people make huge model boats out of matchsticks. So what's wrong if there happens to be one guy in the world who enjoys trying to understand you?"

"Kind of like a hobby?" she said, amused.

"Sure, I guess you could call it a hobby. Most normal people would call it friendship or love or something, but if you want to call it a hobby, that's O.K., too."

Haruki Murakami, Norwegian Wood

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“Ultimately there will always be a secret self that I preserve, way down where even those few I deem to love or trust can't touch it. It's in there, safe. Someday I'll coax it out again, just for me.”

Kier-La Janisse, House of Psychotic Women

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Jonathan Wells, “April Morning”

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“Imagine that the world is a circle, that God is the center, and that the radii are the different ways human beings live. When those who wish to come closer to God walk towards the center of the circle, they come closer to one another at the same time as to God. The closer they come to God, the closer they come to one another. And the closer they come to one another, the closer they come to God.”

— St. Dorotheus of Gaza

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Because we remember pain and the menace of death more vividly than pleasure, and because our feelings toward the beneficent aspects of the unknown have from the first been captured and formalised by conventional religious rituals, it has fallen to the lot of the darker and more maleficent side of cosmic mystery to figure chiefly in our popular supernatural folklore. This tendency, too, is naturally enhanced by the fact that uncertainty and danger are always closely allied; thus making any kind of an unknown world a world of peril and evil possibilities. 

When to this sense of fear and evil the inevitable fascination of wonder and curiosity is superadded, there is born a composite body of keen emotion and imaginative provocation whose vitality must of necessity endure as long as the human race itself. Children will always be afraid of the dark, and men with minds sensitive to hereditary impulse will always tremble at the thought of the hidden and fathomless worlds of strange life which may pulsate in the gulfs beyond the stars, or press hideously upon our own globe in unholy dimensions which only the dead and the moonstruck can glimpse.

—H.P. Lovecraft, Supernatural Horror in Literature

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“Devouring God: Cannibalism, Mysticism, and Ethics in Simone Weil” by Alec Irwin, quoting La Connaissance Surnaturelle by Simone Weil

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What are your favourite vampire stories in all medias — books, movies, anime, non fiction? Love your blog!

literature: la morte amoreuse, théophile gautier the lady of the house of love, angela carter bewitched, edith wharton "the vampire", conrad aiken

non fiction: as always, joyce carol oates' "aesthetics of fear" our vampires, ourselves, nina auerbach vampires, burial and death, paul barber from demons to dracula, matthew beresford "making the implict, explicit: vampire erotica and pornography" by bernadette lynn bosky in the blood is life (i can email this to you if you'd like, i took a scan from my uni's copy)

film, tv, anime: thirst (2009) dir. park chan-wook only lovers left alive (2013) dir. jim jarmusch vampire hunter d: bloodlust (2000) dir. yoshiaki kawajiri fright night (1985) dir. tim holland let the right one in (2008) dir. tomas alfredson ganja & hess (1973) dir. bill gunn the hunger (1983) dir. tony scott a girl walks home alone at night (2014) dir. ana lily amirpour bram stoker's dracula (2000) dir. francis ford coppola the lost boys (1987) dir. joel schumacher penny dreadful (2014-2016) "the wurdulak" from mario bava's black sabbath (1963) la morte vivante (1982) dir. jean rollin nosferatu the vampyre (1979) dir. werner herzog midnight mass (2021) dir. mike flanagan

misc: phillip glass' 1999 ost for dracula witcher 3: the wild hunt's blood&wine dlc: the atmosphere in the night of long fangs quest; the lore of tesham mutna; the bruxae<3; the vocals in the beast of beauclair; regis, dettlaff, orianna...

adjacent/periphery: bataille's blue of noon, kristeva's powers of horror, sade's justine

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“It is equally clear that, in practical terms, the vampire is not that difficult to recognise. The Byronic figure, seductive, erotic, possessing a hypnotic power which makes its questionable charms seem irresistible to its victims is still the starting point for all but a few film characterisations. Most often, as the revenant in order to extend its existence offers sexual pleasure and, coincidentally, appeals to the death wish of its prey, the dramatic interplay between the vampire and its lovers becomes a fusion of basic human instincts, not just self-preservative libidinal but also self-destructive, a ritual of ‘seeking to’ as Freud suggests, ‘bring them back to their primeval, inorganic states.’ The bride and groom of the vampire are, like the lists of unfortunates who have captured the fancy of the Greek gods, confronted by a potent metaphysical entity and, without the knowledge of ceremonial or symbolic defenses, killed by advances which are overwhelming by their sheer physical and sexual power. The key to the mythical qualities of Reynardine, Ruthven, Dracula and all those who follow after them in film is in this super-humanness. In a totemic sense these undead represent the arch-need of man to purge himself of his severest repressions, they are tokens through which vicariously the most sacred of taboos may be violated and sins that cry to heaven for vengeance committed. They rise up out of men’s hidden fears and desires, glorying in their revulsive appetites and endowed with an epic quality like that of Milton’s striding, primordial Death:

To me, who with eternal famine pine, Alike is Hell, or Paradise, or Heaven, There best where most with ravin I may meet: Which here, though plenteous, all too little seems To stuff this maw, this vast unhidebound corpse. (Paradise Lost X, 597-601)

Most often then, the vampire is, like Satan, a ruthless stalker of men, attaining the life-blood of the body through the soul, possessing its lover in all senses of the word by instilling a cupidity for love and death in the mind of its object and simultaneously fulfilling it. The very nature of the undead state, willed or unwilled, violates not only the Christian concepts of life and afterlife but the dispassionate, intellectual notions of love as well. Small wonder then that Reynardine requires ‘concealment all from the pious men,’ because, for these most basic of reasons, the vampire is unnatural, sometimes definitely diabolical, and by virtue of its loathsome practices necessarily antithetical to society and its values.”

— James Ursini & Alain Silver, The Vampire Film: From Nosferatu to Bram Stoker’s Dracula

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“… [T]he vampire film is defined neither by a unity of vision nor by a cultural context. When interest in the phenomenon first swept through Western Europe during the Age of Reason, it was not only the aspects of the perverse and risqué that appealed to ‘reasonable’ men but also the forbidden, preternatural frisson. While Bram Stoker or Baudelaire may be the first who come to mind in association with vampire fiction, the wide range of poets, philosophers, and artists that have been linked to the vampire from Byron or Rousseau to Goethe or Edvard Munch is ample evidence of the breadth of interest. On film, the vampire has a graphic reality that is both liberating and limiting. But no amount of rubber bats, stage blood, or plastic fangs can frighten or amaze a viewer without imagination. Many recent portrayals of this creature of the night have attempted to be more tragic than terrifying, focusing on the plight of a being whom, like Tennyson’s Tithonus, ‘cruel immortality consumes.’ In the end, it is the vampire’s humanity, his or her alienation and despair, which most appeals to the Romantic and Existentialist alike. From that combination of rapacity and wretchedness, the image of the vampire often coincides with that of Shelley’s Medusa:

‘Upon its lips and eyelids seem to lie  Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine  Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,  The agonies of anguish and of death.’”

— James Ursini & Alain Silver, “Preface to the Second Edition,” The Vampire Film: From Nosferatu to Bram Stoker’s Dracula

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“Sex, for Bataille, is intimately associated with and necessarily includes anguish. It is the intermediary between birth and death, and in the sexual encounter we experience the chasm at the edge of existence. When two beings embrace, they momentarily experience the surpassing of life that is death. In interpenetrating, a man and a woman go to their limit, which is a state of undifferentiation in which their separate identities merge. For this reason the sexual encounter is dangerous.”

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susan sontag

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“Nothing has changed. The body is a reservoir of pain; it has to eat and breathe the air, and sleep; it has thin skin and the blood is just beneath it; it has a good supply of teeth and fingernails; its bones can be broken; its joints can be stretched. In tortures, all of this is considered. Nothing has changed. The body still trembles as it trembled before Rome was founded and after, in the twentieth century before and after Christ. Tortures are just what they were, only the earth has shrunk and whatever goes on sounds as if it’s just a room away. Nothing has changed. Except there are more people, and new offenses have sprung up beside the old ones— real, make-believe, short-lived, and nonexistent. But the cry with which the body answers for them was, is, and will be a cry of innocence in keeping with the age-old scale and pitch. Nothing has changed. Except perhaps the manners, ceremonies, dances. The gesture of the hands shielding the head has nonetheless remained the same. The body writhes, jerks, and tugs, falls to the ground when shoved, pulls up its knees, bruises, swells, drools, and bleeds. Nothing has changed. Except the run of rivers, the shapes of forests, shores, deserts, and glaciers. The little soul roams among those landscapes, disappears, returns, draws near, moves away, evasive and a stranger to itself, now sure, now uncertain of its own existence, whereas the body is and is and is and has nowhere to go.”

— Wisława Szymborska, “Tortures”

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“To Carthage then I came Burning burning burning burning”

— The Wasteland, T.S. Eliot (via wutheringss)

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“Languages die like rivers. Words wrapped round your tongue today And broken to the shape of thought Between your teeth and lips speaking Now and today Shall be faded hieroglyphics Ten thousand years from now. Sing — and singing — remember Your song dies and changes And is not here tomorrow Any more than the wind Blowing ten thousand years ago.”

— Carl Sandburg, from “Languages”, with thanks to weissewiese

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“Small as a doll in my dress of innocence I lay dreaming your epic, image by image.”

— Sylvia Plath  (via songofiaras)

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“You’ll need coffee shops and sunsets and road trips. Airplanes and passports and new songs and old songs, but people more than anything else. You will need other people and you will need to be that other person to someone else, a living breathing screaming invitation to believe better things.”

— Jamie Tworkowski (via dulcetdecember)