Representation in vampire films?

The representation of social groups in the vampire sub-genre.



This is a clip from the vampire film "Blade". This scene is the final confrontation of the film that has been built up to over its course and it does a good job of conforming to and breaking the stereotypes of different sects of people. This clip starts with Blade who is the main protagonist fighting and easily defeating a vast amount of plain enemies who are both human and vampire. The fact that the main character is able to defeat these enemies while being outnumbered shows his prowess and strength, where as the weak and defeated enemies are not given names and wear the same plain black outfit.During this fight he is shouting the name of the main antagonist, this re-enforces the stereotype of the manly vampire who is very powerful.
The female characters also fight and this breaks the idea of females not getting involved in fights and leaving them to the males. However the human female uses a shotgun and eventually triumphs over the female vampire not because she was physically stronger but because she outsmarted the enemy. this conforms with the idea of men brute forcing their way through and females being more logical a bought problems.


 This is a scene from the film "Let the right one in". This scene does a good job at showing the normal age and size difference that usually affects bullys and their victims, it then goes to reverse that idea as the vampire kills the bullys. The representation of the older bullys and the younger victim that is initially set up at the start of the scent is that of the larger and older male torturing this smaller and weaker child. These ideas are then drastically changed and challenged as the vampire dispatches the bullys, it is done well as we never see the carnage and only the body parts and blood streaks along with this small smiling girl dotted in blood. This shows the power and ferocity of vampires and the fact that one young girl could easily do this to the characters that no one else stood up to.

This was the actor and the outfit we decided on for our victim. We wanted to have a victim who would easily fit within our target audience and also had a plain outfit that could be owned by any of the viewers.
By deciding to make the victim a large male who are stereotypically seen as strong characters and then thrusting them into the role of the victim, we wanted to show that even tall young males were nothing to the vampires who posses superhuman traits.