1/10th of a Second: A column by Zanskar Chaudhari
I am indebted to this horrible weather. It is May and already Delhi lies enfeebled against this orange assault. When my eyes open at 10, the light biting at the curtains is already redolent of afternoon conflagration. I hate the afternoon. This is what Delhi summers feel like––the afternoon begins in the morning, languorously travels through the day into a crepuscular sky, suspended finally between a moon that cannot see and a monster’s sojourn to a different timezone. The vampires prefer to stay in for the duration of the summers, and we’re left with the enervated dreams of beings who can no longer wander. It makes afternoon trysts with cinema an especially alluring proposition. It is the sun, ironically, that I have to thank for my renewed enthusiasm for the vampire.
Earlier this year, my partner and I tried to spend a week watching movies with vampires at their centre, to ensure gainful viewing of Robert Eggers’ adaptation of Nosferatu. The two we managed to watch were clear points of reference––FW Murnau’s original Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, an early 20th century German Expressionist remix of Bram Stoker’s classic Dracula; and Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, a baroque, lavishly rendered retelling, starring Gary Oldman as the eponymous Count transformed from decrepit ghoul into mustachioed bourgeois, but not without buckets of crimson elixir. Less than a month ago, we marched to the IMAX screen tucked away inside Select CityWalk to watch Ryan Coogler’s Sinners – a Bluesy vampire musical set in the Jim Crow South that seamlessly imbricates ecstatic genre-storytelling over an emotionally and politically dense narrative foundation. Suspecting a second viewing after a week spent turning it over in our heads would reveal further profundities, we went and watched it again.
In the intervening months between the two latest vampire offerings, I feasted on Abel Ferara’s black and white pseudo-philosophical treatise The Addiction; and Tom Holland’s haunted house genre-mash up Fright Night1, stories so diametrically opposite and emotionally effective in their telling that one wonders whether all movies could do with fits of blood soaked carnage. More recently, John Carpenter’s Vampires and Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys were inducted into my personal vampire canon––the former, a lurid display of masculine rage set against the tawny remonstrations of a dipping sun in which our foul protagonists have to grapple with an evil nastier than themselves (it’s a bizarre and unscrupulous manifesto on male friendship). The latter is a mullet-and-leather jacket one-two punch in the shape of a coming-of-age story about teenage rebellion and falling in with the wrong group; the other side to Holland’s own 80s romp in which evil lurks in your neighbour’s house, right here in the suburbs.
To be a vampire––to commit a vampiric act––is essentially a choreography of extraction. This finds potent resonance within Marx’s Das Kapital, where he describes capital as being “dead labour, which, vampire-like, lives only by sucking living labour, and lives the more, the more labour it sucks.” The narrative of Stoker’s Dracula, published in 1897, essentially a cacophony of fictional archival material, is premised upon the acquisition of a property deed. Dracula emerges from his coffin, from the social and cultural atavisms embodied by the fog behind which Castle Dracula sits, into a rapidly industrialising Western matrix as trains, telegraphs, and other technological exemplars of 19th century England create new pre-conditions of social and political relations. To provide definitive historical coordinates of cinema’s origins is hardly as simple as foregrounding the kinetoscope or the magic lantern as its ontological starting point. The vampire’s predisposition to modernity’s attendants is well established within the political and narrative registers of these respective texts, but it is in the vampire’s tempestuous relationship with screens, the ones on which it is projected and the ones in which it vanishes entirely, that its indexical power resides. As much literature can attest to, “the history of cinema did not begin with a ‘big bang’”. What we can content ourselves with, and what fortunately requires little detective work, is that the modern vampire and cinema burst onto the scene at roughly the same time, and therefore, the same milieu. Almost a century and a half later, the vampire persists. It is cinema now that finds itself in peril of disappearing.
Cinema is documentative by nature; movies that take on as their object the contemporary mainstream are naturally animated by its aesthetic and affective energies. A New Yorker article written by Namwali Serpell, published not too long ago, chafes against a new literalism prevalent in mainstream movies today, which she concludes is a sign that our art no longer trusts us with navigating slippages and ruptures, that the harmony between film and its audience needs to be painstakingly laid out. This problem appears in two ways, as far as I can see. The first way is the central position of certain reified subjects in most mainstream movies. Social and political assemblages understood as our moment of late-stage capitalism’s crystallised superstructure are reproduced, continually, as the normative edifice inside which mainstream narrative can seek safe-harbour. This is not new, but it has assumed a more manageable shape in the past. Popular cinema has always had an uneasy relationship with the material realities from which it emerges, and is most effective when that ambiguity can be leveraged to construct counter-texts.
Perhaps this is as simple as a paean for originality, for the possibility of the new as it considers the old and evolves, with its eyes open to the precarity of the camera’s totalising gaze. There is an enervation of cinema’s discursive powers that its keepers seem disinterested in restoring. The second is that most mainstream films today have no interest in coming out of the screen to speak with us, and of course they don’t need to. The hashing out has happened already, a seemingly topdown injunction lurking increasingly across aisles and between buckets of inordinately pricey popcorn, which reaches desultory apotheosis as the film object hops from streamer to streamer. It is the preponderance of these two problematics that lays the groundwork for our current crisis. Last year’s runaway success The Substance embodies this perfectly — a self styled Cronenbergian fable that barrels so haphazardly toward the inevitability of its own aesthetic designs that its makers forget its characters need to serve more than just anticipated paroxysms of viscera and blood shooting across our screens. As they negotiate and reflect the real, fictive modes lay down at least provincial claim to the authority of reimagining our world. Either the characters can transform, or the world can be built anew. Which brings us back to the vampire.
Nosferatu poster (Albin Grau, 1922) / Wikimedia Commons
The denouement of many vampire films involves reversing the vampiric transformation. Whether it’s the protagonist or their loved ones, for a happy ending in these stories, the head vampire needs to be vanquished so that all who have been turned can return to their pre-bloodlust ways. The vampire film presupposes transformation as a radical gesture, a violent molecular transfiguration that alters the machinery through which our perceptual biases become legible. Vampire narratives can broadly be sectioned off into two categories — the ones where reversing the transformation reinscribes a set of moral codes characteristic to the human subject, and the ones where vampirism implies a teleology of unharnessed potential, the possibility of radical reconstitution wherein human fallibility is superseded by enhanced physical and spiritual compositions. Across these exist a largely set series of tropes — protocols and procedures on how to kill the vampire, and how to curb its encroachment into the lives of our human protagonists. Since the vampire often ingratiates itself under pretences of affability and friendship, the humans are forced to rely on certain rules, the most relevant to this text being the vampire’s inability to appear in reflective surfaces. How then has it managed to inveigle itself before the dominant looking glass of the present moment––the cinema apparatus.
It’s a lofty claim. It is also an increasingly erroneous one. Our dreams and nightmares are now diffident reveries organised by and around a preponderance of media strategies that subject all of us to the logic of brain-rot. Despite this, there are pockets of resistance, veritable ideologues doing the good work inside the dense digital warrens of X and Substack. And if Sinners is any indication, the vampire film, having sought recourse in hypertextual glee2, still resonates amidst the detritus of rapidly impoverished cinema space. It helps, of course, that both Eggers and Coogler are defined in large part by their ability to cull the social and political import from genre trappings to tell stories about actual human beings. The vampire figure travels between narrative spaces, an undead archivist cataloguing and correlating fictive and real histories; while simultaneously extending its gaze across the cinema apparatus itself, the embodied archive of that matrix “burst…asunder by the dynamite of the tenth of a second” and the resulting “far-flung ruins and debris”.3
Things are always in peril of disappearing into cycles of interpretation and reinterpretation. It was Francois Truffaut who declared that all anti-war movies in fact wind up venerating it. But that movement from, for example, something like a state-sanctioned stable pathway in the form of exhibition models4 into that relatively chaotic vortex where film objects can be evacuated from their conditions of production, is no longer a straight line that encourages collective ownership of things. The vampire resists the flattening imperative of our current media landscape. The diptych of visibility and reflection that it facilitates, and the archival possibilities it creates, reveals the rapidity with which avenues for politically and culturally generative spaces are being closed off. One of the most memorable moments in Coppola’s Dracula involves a cinematograph as it captures Oldman’s Dracula flâneuring the streets of London, moments before he encounters Winona Ryder’s Mina for the first time. An offscreen voice declares the cinematograph “the new wonder of the world”. It is the instability of the vampire’s temporality that makes it cinema’s champion of choice for this moment. It is ancient and modern all at once; the evil that gives dark corners their menace and the sympathetic itinerant cursed to a shadow existence; tradition and modernity; celluloid and digital.
Cinema needs vampires, and so do we.
- The 2011 remake starring the late-great Anton Yelchin and Colin Farrell is woefully underrepresented in the canon. ↩︎
- The two vampire movies of 2025 are each in their own way constructed as the cumulative expression of a fecund genealogy. ↩︎
- See section XIII of Walter Benjamin’s The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. ↩︎
- Chapter 1 of the Report of the Film Enquiry Committee, 1951, describes itself partly as “appointed by the government of India to…enable films in India…for the promotion of national culture, education, and healthy entertainment. ↩︎
About the Author
Zanskar Chaudhari is a writer and researcher at The Alkazi Foundation for the Arts.
About the Column
1/10th of a Second is a bi-monthy column that clarifies cinema’s discursive potentialities, examining the canonical and the contemporary as they mediate our relationship with histories and ideologies. It is indebted to a tradition of film criticism inaugurated in 1951 by the legendary French magazine Cahiers du Cinema.