An Intertext that Counts?<i>Dracula</i>,<i>The Woman in White</i>, and Victorian Imaginations of the Foreign Other

Bollen, Katrien; Ingelbien, Raphaël

doi:10.1080/00138380902990226

Cited by 4 publications

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“…The film thus reproduces a long-standing regional stereotype, conceivable as an allegory of East–West European relations, by representing an Eastern European as an inscrutable and dangerous interloper who threatens to cause havoc as she intrudes into Western society. Historical precedents for this theme are readily discovered in Bram Stoker’s Dracula , and in Wilkie Collins, The Woman in White (Bollen and Ingelbien, 2009). Critical work on Dracula (Arata, 1990) has confirmed its rhetoric as driven by fears of unwelcome Eastern European incursions into Victorian England.…”

Section: Introduction: Horror and Its Functionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Mapping the unassimilable: The Balkan other as meme in Val Lewton’s Cat People

Argiro

2015

European Journal of Cultural Studies

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World War II era Hollywood horror films were sometimes produced and promoted as wartime propaganda, and several featured characters of Eastern European origin as evildoers and monsters intentionally cast as such in a political sense. Certain of producer Val Lewton’s horror films from this period bear a curious thematic relationship to these propaganda films, although they are not considered as straightforward war propaganda. In particular, Cat People presents a bizarre story about a Serbian woman who is a shape-shifting ‘cat woman’. Her strange, irresolvable curse plagues her marriage to an American gentleman, and winds up breaking apart their dubious union. In view of its ethnic and cultural representations, Cat People reproduces long-standing Western European stereotypes about Eastern Europeans by trading in received gothic fantasies. The danger is that the film holds the potential for becoming a popular meme by relaying the demonizing of a Serbian immigrant, certainly an insensitive and reductive portrayal when viewed from a more contemporary and culturally informed perspective.

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Section: Introduction: Horror and Its Functionsmentioning

confidence: 99%