1.  One hundred years of vampire films looks at the longevity of the vampire genre, the box office takings of some of the recent major vampire movies, and the surge in interest in the vampire genre over the last 10 years.
2. Vampire origins: the price of immortality examines how the vampire genre prods our sensitivities about death and aging, and builds on a wealth of known Christian religious symbolism.
3. Vampires selling unsafe sex?  looks at the thinly-veiled, yet Rated-M sexual metaphors of the vampire genre and the way it has tracked the sexual interests of various generations, from the Victorian period to the swinging Sixties, and the recent focus on adolescence and virginity.
4. Vampirism ‘the bloodborne disease’ focuses on the recent medicalization of vampire stories and the zombie/vampire crossovers, paralleling popular fears of bloodborne diseases like hepatitis and AIDS.

Vampire roots: immortality & the religious price to be paid

 The long term interest in vampirism dates back well beyond Bram Stoker’s creation to blood sucking demons that feature in nearly every culture on earth, from Eastern Europe, to Phillipines and Malaysian vampires sucking on the blood of foetuses.  

What if we didn’t have to worry about death or aging?

As personal experience of death has retreated out of the house over the last century and into the hospital ward it is more mysterious and probably no less scary. Vampires in many films now are not the decrepit Nosferatu types but frozen in the flower of Hollywood youth, or sometimes even their teens.

At a simple level the vampire genre of course enables an audience to experience the ever-popular idea of eternal life (the 80% of the population professing religious beliefs can hardly be wrong can they) but at a price. Because of course there is only one (depending on your religion) respectable route to salvation via God. 

It’s not clear that readers of the genre are more religious than anyone else but it’s amusing to note  Twilight author Stephanie Meyer’s Mormon background and Anne Rice’s subsequent conversion to Christianity.    

A bucket-load of religious iconography

There are of course religious trappings threaded all through the vampire story in terms of their operating in darkness and aversion to light, the Cross, and holy water. People become vampires after being excommunicated and of course there is the redemptive end to Coppola’s version of Dracula (1992) where Dracula reunites with God by having Mina behead him.    

It it perhaps not unexpected that in the Christian church you drink the blood of Christ at Communion!

True Blood the HBO television series even makes drinking the blood of vampires a drug gateway to a semi-religious rapture. 

So what happens if you take away the fear of death for the reader or perhaps even scarier in our culture the fear of aging (always assuming of course the vampire can obtain an adequate blood supply and doesn’t come across anyone athletic with a stake)?    

For side-stepping God there’s a price

As one would expect given the often annoying moral calculus in fiction and drama there’s a heavy price. At the root of it all vampire tales perhaps  reinforce the taboo against cannibalism in most cultures.

Tragedy and tortured loneliness is well-explored in Frances Ford-Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and in Interview with the Vampire you can almost imagine Tom Cruise sitting on the therapist’s couch as opposed to next to the narrator.     This is the Greek fear and pity cathartic angle: the tragedy of the vampire who is semi-human but cannot enjoy human things like real food or sunlight (or maybe, as we’ll explore shortly, sex).    

In the thoughtful 1987 vampire flick Near Dark and in Rice’s Interview with the Vampire the price of vampirism is perhaps most poignantly expressed through the characters of the small boy Homer and the girl Claudia who are effectively adults frozen in time in children’s bodies, the theme of forestalled development.

It will be interesting to see which  fiction series will form the next vampire cinema blockbuster or TV series. Place your bets below.

By any conventional measure Agora the film sucks.  There’s no onscreen sex, the good guys variously die and are disillusioned at the end, it’s centred on an unknown philosopher played by Rachel Weisz, and the underlying romance is a story of unrequited love.  

And if that wasn’t enough already it pretty much offends 80% of the average US movie-going audience – at the time of writing, 6 months after release, it’s made 98.4% of its revenue outside the US. It’s the sort of thing that your average broadsheet film reviewer wouldn’t want to touch with  a bargepole – because a positive review is probably guaranteed to lose you subscriptions from the faithful.  

It’s almost impossible to imagine how the producers ever managed to get it funded.  

Except this is a film that you will still be thinking about a week after you saw it and one of the most pointed polemical films you’ll see in years.  

This is a movie with a message. And what a message it is for today.  

Despite being set in Alexandria in the 4th century AD, it is a very thinly toga-veiled allusion to the secular and religious clashes of  the twenty-first century. Whilst it has been reviewed as particularly anti-Christian, every religion gets it in the  neck (usually literally) as we watch the conflict between the pagans, Jews, and Christians play out in the city (the Christians just happen to win).   

Along the way there is a forceful exposition of how religion subjugates women, and of the close and often ugly ties between religions and politics.  

And the biggest loser of all: reason, because unlike the facts religion is the thing that ‘cannot be questioned‘ literally or politically. A point most strongly made (possibly with historical license) when the great library of Alexandria is sacked and its scrolls burned, and then is physically occupied to become the HQ of the Christian church in the city, as well as a barnyard to house chickens and goats.     

Somewhat ironically, given the film’s subject, the Christian movie guide quoted in the title of this review prints the address details of the producers next to the guide’s review so as a latter day moral enforcer you can contact the producers and set them to rights…  

Agora review on Christian movie guide - protest instructions

An old philosophy professor that I knew used to start his lectures to first year students by talking about the famous ’filioque‘ dispute between the Eastern Orthodox (Christian) church and the Western church, about ‘whether the Holy spirit proceeded from the Father, or the Father and Son‘.   

What seems like the ultimate theological irrelevance became one of the crucial differences splitting the Christian  church and indirectly contributing to the fall of Constantinople to the Turks in 1204 some 800 years after this film is set. Yes, whole political empires collapsed as a result of this obscure theological argument with the breaking apart of the Eastern and Western European political blocs.  

“Why on earth,” this professor I knew said, “should thinkers concern themselves with a dispute that can never be proved either way?”  

While Rachel/Hypatia in Agora is trying to explain the movements of the planets in our solar system by matching astronomical observations to different geometric shapes, we are told by one of the Christian moral enforcers in the film that the sky is ‘a big chest with heaven at the level of the lid’.  At the end of the film Hypatia then dies, her discovery lost in the Dark Ages that follow, until nearly 1000 years later and Galileo.  

This film is a worthy cinematic (and less ponderous) accompaniment to religious critiques from people like Richard Dawkins. In this regard only, it is possible to agree with the Christian movie guide review referred to in the title.

However this Christian reviewer misses the point: this film is not about Christianity, paganism, Judaism, or for that matter Islamic sectarianism (which of course as a religion didn’t even exist in the fourth century). It’s about the way that tenets of religious faith become unquestionable, and the inability of reason to solve faith-based disputes like that of the filioque, given time, leads to violent intolerance of dissent. 

In a  life imitating art moment, a church in Alexandria was car-bombed at New Year killing 21 churchgoers and injuring 70, itself following Christians rioting in Cairo in November. 

No clearer example could be imagined of the relevance of Agora’s message.

What’s all the buzz about curation?

Over the last couple of years there has increasing interest in the concept of curation, the idea that as the amount of content on the web expands exponentially, it may not be the availability of the content itself, but how it is organised and prioritized for you that matters (check out Google Trends on the growing use of the term ”curation”).

Whole new business models are springing up involving web sites who don’t employ journalists but rather act as hosts and curators of good quality blog posts.

A remarkable example in the financial world is SeekingAlpha.com where most of the good articles you read there every week have not been paid for by the site, and are written by people only loosely affiliated with it.

Added to that  kind of traditional editorial curation via websites is curation occurring in spades on social media services like Twitter, where by following experts or enthusiastic amateurs in certain areas, you have a high quality pre-selected flow of news delivered to you by people who you trust (but might have never met).

Personal curation

However the concept of curation that is of interest to me personally at the moment is (oddly enough) ‘personal curation’: content organised for my own personal purposes and not for an external audience.

The concept of personal curation is kind of odd really, surely with Google around the idea that you would want to retain and organise information for personal purposes is perhaps redundant?

There’s no need as you perhaps did 30 years ago, to print or photocopy documents that interest you and stick them in a filing cabinet never to be seen again. 

Why not simply search for them again? Or even just build bookmark lists?

In such a search-driven world a large part of your personal worth in the workplace as a domain expert, for example, might consist of your ability to understand the language used in relation to a certain concept, and with some ok syntactical search skills to be able find that information using the mother of all search engines.

Finding information does not seem to the issue. The personalised newspaper is here today and we’ve previously written about apps like Calibre that enable you to integrate the full text of literally any RSS feed out there on the web into your e-reader on iPad, Kindle, Nook, or whatever it might be.

Timeshifting your personal reading

You can also help organise information by ‘timeshifting’ the flow of links coming at you to save them for later  using something like the web-based bookmarking service ReadItLater (RIL), which will track which articles you have (and have not) read, and synchronise across multiple devices like your Desktop browser or your smartphone.

RIL works via Bookmarklets on your browser which add any pages you’re viewing to your personal list at ReadItLaterList.com (what we’re reading at Drivelry at the moment here), so you don’t have to interrupt your current piece of work to read that interesting item that just surfaced on Twitter. 

But what you do with an article after you’ve read it?  How can you retain and organise that information?

Retention of information you’ve read

Bookmarks, while easy to use, can rapidly fall prey to idiosyncratic folder taxonomy.  I’ve personally got 92 different folder categories under my bookmarks, and over 1100 favourites saved going down at least 4 levels.

Ouch.

The flow of email coming at you can be partially tamed (for retention and relocation purposes at least) through use of a full text search system running on your desktop such as Microsoft’s freebie Windows Search add-on.

My Desktop PC currently has almost 20 years of files and emails indexed this way via Windows Search.

An added benefit is that Windows Search will recognise sub-types of files and (providing you’ve used an appropriately keyworded bookmark name) enable you to search through your bookmarks as well, along with Office documents and even external network drives.

Saving e-book documents for later reference

On something like the Kindle you can ‘clip’ individual articles that you read to save for later.

However the Kindle saves them into a single text file which can be searched only very clusmily on the Kindle itself using the Kindle’s built-in keyboard.  You can periodically export it as a text file using Calibre and save it to your desktop where it will be picked up by Windows Search but as a single very large file on your Desktop PC it is not very useful for search purposes.

You can also use Calibre to automatically (say once a week) extract the full text of all recent articles in your ReadItLater list and load to any E-Reader.

Despite preferring the E-ink display of the Kindle over the backlit screen of say an iPad, one of the drawbacks of the Kindle is that if you see a link on the Kindle which you would like to read later  you cannot easily add it to your favourite social bookmarking service, and neither can you bookmark a current article so it becomes part of your personal searchable archive (see below).

In the medium term it’s likely therefore that I will give up using the Kindle for anything but books unless it starts to support this sort of functionality. 

Build your own Google Custom Search Engine from your favourite social bookmarking service

To be able to search the full text of  articles that you previously read and bookmarked there is another way to do it aside from saving the full-text of all web pages you read to your Desktop.

Essentially you export your entire ReadItLater bookmark archive and saved Desktop bookmarks and load them into a free personal Google Custom Search Engine (although you may not want the full-text of a lot of your Desktop bookmarks as they will often point to pages like your online banking application).

A reasonably straightforward process for creating a Google Custom Search Engine from your RIL bookmarks is described here (a 20 minute process to complete assuming a good working knowledge of say Microsoft Office).

Even better, by registering for the RIL Digest service (which produces a single web page with a magazine style layout of all your recent bookmarks)  you can point your Google CSE at the Digest and it will automatically crawl and index all your future bookmarks.

You now have  a cloud-based ‘memory‘ which learns as you read articles on the web. Drivelry’s memory is here.

1.  One hundred years of vampire films looks at the longevity of the vampire genre, the box office takings of some of the recent major vampire movies, and the surge in interest in the vampire genre over the last 10 years.
2. Vampire origins: the price of immortality examines how the vampire genre prods our sensitivities about death and aging, and builds on a wealth of known Christian religious symbolism.
3. Vampires selling unsafe sex?  looks at the thinly-veiled, yet Rated-M sexual metaphors of the vampire genre and the way it has tracked the sexual interests of various generations, from the Victorian period to the swinging Sixties, and the recent focus on adolescence and virginity.
4. Vampirism ‘the bloodborne disease’ focuses on the recent medicalization of vampire stories and the zombie/vampire crossovers, paralleling popular fears of bloodborne diseases like hepatitis and AIDS.

Does the vampire live forever?

Northrop Frye the Canadian literary academic had a theory that there are only a few plots that get endlessly recycled in different stories.    

Looking at the vampire genre  it sounds pretty plausible because there are just so many vampire story and film variations.   

IMDB actually includes 685(!) vampire-related movies dating back to the silent era around 1910 (including foreign language and ‘straight to video’ releases) some of which are tempting just because of the sheer ridiculousness of their titles. Fancy ”Batman Fights Dracula’ (1967) for example? Or in an equally light-hearted ‘vein’ how about the recent  “Vampires Suck” parody complete with its ‘Team Jacob’ and ‘Team Edward’ (the two male protagonists in Eclipse & New Moon) references?   

Even if you just stick to more major titles you end up with about 284 vampire movies  (based on a list at Washington State University, Updated) made over the last 100 years. AND about sixteen vampire movies scheduled for 2011. 

Bram Stoker and Dracula’s children

Thinking back even just over the last 20 years there is an amazing range of variations on the standard vampire plot:  

• Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992) based closely on the the 1897 novel that really started the modern vampire film. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, with Keanu Reeves and a certain amount of thinly disguised moaning from Winona Ryder, the more sophisticated film took double its US box office takings from foreign Box Office earnings and is still one of the biggest vampire blockbusters of all time.
• other  thoughtful vampire flicks like 1987′s underrated Near Dark cowboy version or 2007′s Rise (might be described as ‘intellectual vampire movies’)
• race exploration crossovers like Eddie Murphy’s Vampire in Brooklyn (1995), itself a remake of a 1972 black Dracula movie Blacula,   (a nice attempt to re-colonize the ‘whites only’ vampiric world) or True Blood’s (2008) strong references to race issues in the American South.
• vampires in space and Alaska: 2007′s 30 Days of Night embedded in a claustrophobic snowbound world
• splatter-fests/martial versions like 1996′s From Dusk Till Dawn set in a stripper’s bar, or 1998′s Blade with Wesley Snipes and its equally commercially successful sequels
• Tom Cruise’s Interview with the Vampire (1994), based on the Anne Rice novels, an imagined less European (and more American) history of vampires (“we can  have cultured vampires in America”)
• adolescence and vampirism going back to 1987′s The Lost Boys,  Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) and Twilight (2008)  
• combo horror with Vampires v Werewolves: Underworld (2003), and the New Moon (2009) and Eclipse (2010) instalments of the Twilight series
• borderline zombie/vampire variations (zombies are not ‘undead’ but infected with a bloodborne virus): 2002′s 28 Days Later or 2006′s Ultraviolet
• ‘bleed-through’ vampire sub-plots in TV series like Supernatural, Doctor Who, Smallville, Charmed and The Simpsons to of course being the main plotline in series like True Blood (2008) or The Vampire Diaries (2009)

Take your fangs off my wallet

Huge interest in vampires equals huge earnings at the box office and in associated merchandizing (Amazon is currently even selling ‘Bella Swan Replica Jewelery’). Box Office Mojo estimates total vampire flick box office earnings at almost $2 billion since 1978 and puts the average takings of each vampire movie at over $35m, making a vampire film one of the safer bets a movie producer can take.    

The rising tide of blood

 Based on Google Trends data (going back to 2004) the level of search interest in the term ‘vampire’ has more than doubled over the last 5 years, with significant peaks coinciding with the Twilight phenomenon (major vampire title release dates and their level of box office takings shown in green). 

Both Underworld: Rise of the Lycans and Daybreakers might well have done better had they not coincided with the two Twilight Saga release dates.   

The Twilight series has also joined another select group: that of films where the sequels have grossed more than the originals such as the Lord of the Rings film trilogy.

Why do we (and Bella Swan) love vampires?

No doubt having a decent looking lead actor like Robert Pattinson or Taylor Lautner is helpful but vampires also play to our obsessions about disease, mortality and sex. It’s a potent mix and one that will be considered in the next article in this series.

Love them or hate them, the vampire theme is important in our culture.

It will be interesting to see which  fiction series will form the next vampire cinema blockbuster or TV series. Place your bets below.

• those 140 page Annual Reports you have to read occasionally
• various frivolous and not-so-frivolous blogs that you’d love to keep up with
• mainstream news sites like the New York Times or the Economist where most of the major stories are actually carried for free online
• niche news sites you’d like to be able to browse occasionally
• 30-40 page PDFs that you have to read for work

If this sort of content appeals to you then it has definite implications for what sort of e-reader / e-book you buy.   For example, the following e-book features bear watching if you expect to be reading other things aside from books:  

• screen size: a lot of news websites and large PDFs contain tables and images. Unlike standard text, tables become meaningless when you can’t see the row labels.  You need an e-book with a 10 inch screen to handle this type of A4 content to be able read effectively, but  most e-books come in significantly smaller sizes. Screen size is measured diagonally so an average size e-book with a 6″ screen actually has a screen width of around 3 and a half inches … you won’t see an A4 width table in that – you really need at least a 5 inch wide screen (which roughly equates to a 10″ e-book screen size).
• battery life: as effectively a substitute printer you need a long battery life. You aren’t just going to be picking up your e-book as you sit back in bed at the end of an evening . Battery-draining features like wireless connectivity or colour LCD displays such as the new iPad provides need to be weighed up against battery life.
• page-refresh rate: on the Sony PRS-505 page refresh rate is about a second. This is probably the maximum tolerable if you are going to be reading a lot of content. Make sure the page refresh rate is faster than a second.
• data charges: if you’re going to avail yourself of all this valuable free content (if that’s not an oxymoron) do you really want to pay ongoing 3G charges for your reader? When you switch your machine on you will have dozens of publications to choose from all continually refreshed daily automatically by just plugging your e-book into your PC.  A current (or in the case of Amazon ‘implied’) 3G mobile data charge just doesn’t seem necessary.  Assuming you have a smartphone if you really want time-sensitive web content you can always use that.
• rich media support: closely related to the above issue, a 3G connection where you pay volume-related data charges could turn out to be quite expensive if your e-book supports rich media like video (for example the Apple iPad). Many of the news sites you are likely to use contain rich media (or in the case of blogs badly optimized large images) and you could even find that you’re paying to watch rich media ads!

At least at the moment your choice of e-readers that fit these criteria is pretty limited (a nice comparision table, from which the simplified table below is derived, can be found on the MobileRead website).  The iRex Digital Reader probably claims the high ground with a 10 inch display but has a notoriously short battery life and at over $800 is quite expensive. The Kindle DX at 9.7 inches looks better price-wise and it’s claimed it will run for 2 weeks with wireless off – but it seems likely that Amazon will impose some sort of data charge as their Terms and Conditions state:  

“You may be charged a fee for wireless connectivity for your use of other wireless services on your Device, such as Web browsing and downloading of personal files, should you elect to use those services. We will maintain a list of current fees for such services in the Kindle Store. Amazon reserves the right to discontinue wireless connectivity at any time or to otherwise change the terms for wireless connectivity at any time, including, but not limited to (a) limiting the number and size of data files that may be transferred using wireless connectivity and (b) changing the amount and terms applicable for wireless connectivity charges.”  

If you need an e-book now (and if information you read is a key part of your job it’s worth  it!)  then probably the Kindle DX is the only option (and at the moment anyway the data charges are not an issue because you can leave wireless switched off and there is no annual charge imposed by Amazon).   However if you’re prepared to watch and wait, there are other large-screen devices emerging – devices and their estimated release dates below (see the MobileRead site for more):