Vampire, zombie stories change as generational shifts take place

Each generation has reshaped the stories of vampires and other undead creatures to fit with changing times, argues Gregory Waller in a new edition of his book “The Living and the Undead: Slaying Vampires and Exterminating Zombies.”

According to an IU press release, Waller, professor and chair of the IU Department of Communication and Culture, said “the changing meaning and scope of the violent confrontation between the living and the undead has often been at the heart of an ongoing story.”

“To some degree, you can connect each version of this story to a particular historical moment,” he said in the release.

Through his examination of a range of novels, stories, plays, films and TV movies, Waller determined an analysis relating to the explosion of vampire and zombie films, fiction and criticism in the past 25 years.

“It’s more of a cumulative history, in that one version doesn’t displace the
previous one. The previous ones still sort of remain in play ... There are residues as those stories get recycled,” he said in the release.

Waller focuses on how stories about vampires and zombies not only tell the story of the undead but also revolve around the living beings involved in the story.

“It is a story where the heroic act, in the older versions at least, was to find a comatose body, get this object that has no other use in the universe, a sharpened stake, and run it through the heart of that creature, who could often at times be a beautiful woman,” he said in the release. “I was fascinated by the fact that my students almost all knew how to kill a vampire — utterly useless knowledge.”

Waller does not see the popularity surrounding vampire and zombie fiction dying any time soon.

“It’s got amazing legs and durability as a popular phenomenon across media,” he said in the release.

— Bailey Loosemore