Craven, Allison (2023) Vampire Hydrology and Coastal Australian Cinema: Saturation, Sunlight, and Amphibious Beings. In: Craven, Allison, and Sandars, Diana, (eds.) Gothic in the Oceanic South: Maritime, Marine and Aquatic Uncanny in Southern Waters. Routledge, Abingdon, UK, pp. 167-185.

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Abstract

The modern fiction vampire partly derives from seventeenth-and eighteenth-century European folklore of the destructive risk of water to vampires and revenants. This folklore is adapted in the uses of water in Bram Stoker’s Dracula and more enigmatically in the “amphibious” vampire in Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla, narratives that Naomi Booth argues project the “dark ecology” of the contagion of nature. Combining methodologies from Melody Jue’s “amphibious scholarship” and Jue and Rafico Ruiz’s “saturation” and with reference to Joanna Zylinksa’s theory of “hydromedia,” the chapter explores the revision of the literary vampire mythos in Australian vampire films which incorporate the landscape convention associated with Australian Gothic and its accompanying trope of violent sunlight. In particular, the critical but marginal role of water in Daybreakers (Spierig Brothers) is considered for its revival and twist on the amphibious ecologies of Victorian vampires, and with respect to the coastal production locations of this film. Through Meg Samuelson’s theory of the porosity and “amphibious aesthetic” of “coastal form,” implications are found for colonial ambivalence about water and for Gothic traditions in Australian cinema.

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