Kiss of the vampire analysis

Kiss of The Vampire (1963)

GENRE: Horror

SUB-GENRE: Gothic & Vampire


Layout/Images

This poster can easily be identified as a film poster due to the credits at the bottom of the poster. The main image is featuring two vampires and two victims and several bats appearing in the background. The colour “red” connotes blood and blood sucking. This deepens the thought of killing, murdering and alternately death. The pathetic fallacy in the poster (dark clouds), suggests the mood and atmosphere to be dark and evil which describes the vampires.


Conventions

The conventions of a vampire have been repeated throughout the years, as when I think of a vampire, I think back to centuries ago. To this day, the image of vampires has differed but remained original.


Conventions of a vampire include:

o   

    Sucking blood

o   Seductive romantic figure

o   Pale and Tall

o   Fangs

o   Black cloak

Within in the film poster, the conventions include:

o   Moonlight

o   The colour “red”

o   Blood

o   Castle

o   Bats

o   Black & Red

o   Cloaks/ Capes

o   Fangs

However, this poster challenges conventions as there is a male victim normally, the females would be the victims as a down stressed. This is where in a film a male hero would appear to save the female. This poster also has a female vampire featured which challenges representation of females in that decade. As men were the powerful dominant ones and the females were seen to be weak and sensitive. But vampires were sometimes shown to be a duet and featured as a husband wife or a couple working together as a team to kill.


Theory

Zoonen’s theory that men and women are represented differently in the media, as the female in the poster is seen to be distressed and the male is shown to be powerful as he’s sucked his victims’ blood. The power of the media has created stereotypes and certain representations of both genders that we now associate with their genders. The audience would be disturbed, by the fact there is a female vampire as normally the females ae being killed.


Neale’s theory that everything is made up of repetition and difference e.g. horror = darkness. Throughout the decades in media, the image and conventions on vampires have been repeated but differed as well for example: vampires are supposed to hate sunlight however, in ‘twilight’ the vampire’s glow in the sunlight. Some conventions have been altered so the audience is pleasured, and suspense occurs as it’s not what they originally thought.