Blog Post #1- chapter 3. Nice to eat you:Acts of Vampires

This chapter was an interesting read, i enjoyed the topic of the vampires and dark forces, clearly one of the first things that came to mind when reading this  for me, was the Bram Stokers Dracula film, in the film there are some scenes that could transfer as hinting towards the sexual nature that Foster says Dracula is about. Another thing that appears continously visually within the story is the usage of the color red, the main thing representing blood. I see this color in many other stories, especially associated with women, for example in the scarlet letter, or in the short story  The Red Shoes, this color could insinuate  or be associated with the loss of purity, and grotesque like what would come to mind when reading about a blood sucking creature. Which brings me into how many of these Victorian writers embodied their messages through grotesque beings like vampires and ghosts, this was something very interesting and new to me, normally i read these sort of stories for the spook of it and imaginative imagery, but hadn't ever really considered that it could represent something hidden deeper. The psycological realm of this creation of  unworldly beings by these writers has a really big effect i think on how we interpret things in our modern culture, one part i found interesting was when Foster mentioned Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and the whole concept of having a double, or another side to you, when learning about that particular story, i remmember thinking that it seemed like some sort of personality disorder. This is something as Foster mentions, Edgar Allan Poe did very well in his pieces, creating an eerie feeling that makes the reader somewhat uncomfortable but curious at the same time, one of his stories that comes to mind is The Black Cat, immediately you know that theres something going on there because of the black cat, which i suppose in our culture weve come to connect to something evil and demon, what i find interesting of this story and of many of Poe's is that- at least for me, they end with mystery, and the human characters seem to always become extremely paranoid and psychotic, as in the Black Cat, the main character begins to be tempted and obsessed with this cat, wich eventually ironically triggers him to murder his wife, the cat changed him and brought out the worst in him, another frightening part of him. As Foster describes, these victorian stories had some sort of controlling character that selfishly takes away from others for the sake of destruction, and twisting around of things. I think people are intreagued to these sort of tales because most people are always curious about the unknown, and all cultures hold their superstitions and folk tales, like the popular latin american legend of the ghost lady La Llorona, a story of a woman who from most sources, drowns her children in a creek out of jealoulsy caused from her husbands ways, and then now eternally wails for her children at night. Even though tales like these give the spooks, the story behind the action always leaves a marking impression on society, theres always some sort of human behaviour and morals at stake.



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