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Vampirism is in the very materiality of film itself. Oil, extracted by drills from the earth, wasfundamental to the invention of celluloid filmstrips. The energy of once-living organisms,prevented from decomposition, is re-mobilized, further permeating the boundary between theanimate and inanimate. This paper looks at transnational vampire films produced in“borderlands” with the US: where permeable landscapes are mapped onto the bodies of itsinhabitants, at once vampiric (isolated, forbidden) and vampirized (vulnerable toexploitation). On the northern border- David Cronenberg’s Rabid dissects national, racial, andsexual body horror. The southern border exposes capitalism, neoliberalism, and the legacy ofimperialism as systems of vampirism in the borderlands, using Guillermo Del Toro’s Cronos.Whilst not on a literal border, Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night existsin a liminal space created through diasporic entanglements between the US and Iran, markedby oil extraction in both countries. Each film centres on a technologically penetratedlandscapes and technologically constituted vampires, suggesting the cyborgian nature of filmitself as a hybrid of human labour and technology. I look at transnational vampire film as amedium that can force us to confront our capitalist and colonial inheritance, whilst allowing“perverse” and “troublesome” bodies and identities to come into the light. While products ofa global capitalist industry, these films reflexively sink their teeth into exploitation in theborderlands: an ouroboros of extraction and rebirth.
