Hideous Winter—Vampires, Violence and Snow in American Screen Horror

Shakespeare used winter as a metaphor for the withering, blighting aspects of time, a force which truly tested the strength of the individual. While this poetic metaphor rings true, medical research records dramatically increased mortality every winter, suggesting that the season’s trials are not merely lyrical. Winter acts as a crucible which, even in the modern world, tests humanity to its limits and when the natural environment is at its most adverse. This bleak snowy landscape throws into stark contrast that most human of supernatural predators, the vampire. One of the first widely publicised reports of a vampire epidemic Visum et Repertum, published in 1732, details an outbreak in Serbia during the winter of 1731–2. The icy winters of Northern and Eastern Europe resonate with many severe winters experienced by immigrants in the early American colonies to fix the frozen landscape as part of the American imaginative world, securing it in the geography of cinematic horror. The vampire proves its tenacity by evolving to survive in imaginative shapes and forms, its adaptability allowing it to shape-shift, fitting into stories and answering narrative needs very far from its folklore origins, often in the frigid American wilderness. This vampiric motif is pushed in dramatic new directions and into startling new shapes by Carpenter’s remake The Thing (1982), in which the alien consumes and imitates its human prey cell by cell. Vampiric consumption reaches new forms in Bird’s Ravenous (1990), which sees frontier explorers consume each other, gaining supernatural strength and vitality along with an insatiable hunger. Slade’s 30 Days of Night (2007) sees the vampire return to more recognisable form as they descend en masse to bleed the Alaskan town of Barrow dry. The vampire seems to have found a home in the “New” world and seems better adapted to survive in these chilling wastes than its frail human prey. The resulting imagery resonates on many levels. The false “death” of winter seems to evoke the undeath of the vampire, the winter’s ferocity might be embodied as the blood-sucker’s unslakable thirst. Both perhaps remind humanity of the ultimate alterity and enigmatic danger of the natural world surrounding us. Jack Halberstam sees monsters as mechanisms of meaning, cognitive technologies by which the world is made sensible. W. Scott Poole argues that monsters raise profound questions about what it means to be human. An analysis of vampires in winter across these films reveals the socio-political horror of the blood-sucker, spectral anxieties concerning identity, hierarchies of power, privilege and violence and an assuaging of colonial guilt.