Vampiric Temporality and Ambivalence in Nosferatu and Vampyr.

The vampire is frequently considered a border crossing agent, dissolving the line between self and other. Additionally, in F.W. Murnau's Nosferatu, Count Orlok has been read as infecting the bourgeois class with agrarian-aristocratic values. In this essay, I propose an alternative reading in which the modern vampire character poses a contagious challenge to modernity. As a representation of prior conceptions of time, particularly Henri Bergson's conception of time as a duration or duree, the vampire's threat to modernity is a temporal one. Filled with innovative apparatuses that seek to standardize and rationalize life, modernity's temporal "other" is a character whose life is not lived according to a regulating clock, but instead by the rhythms of life as felt by the body. I argue for a notion of vampiric-temporality, a conjoining of changing representations and understandings of time in modernity, expressed through the apparatus of cinema, with the invention of the vampire character. Cast on cinema screens, the vampire in Nosferatu and Vampyr is a contained monster, set up and engineered by modernity itself to both safely repulse and attract viewers and to test and prove that the rationalizing and ordering of life in the present is superior to the past's irrationality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]