Jeffrey Weinstock's The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema is a recent edition of Wallflower's Short Cuts series, described on the publisher's website as “a comprehensive list of introductory texts covering the full spectrum of Film Studies, including genres, critical concepts, film histories/movements and film technologies.” Such a description might prepare readers for the general approach the author takes to discussing the vampire film and its tropes. Throughout the text, Weinstock reviews some of the relevant scholarship on vampire cinema (that is, if the term can be used to describe vampire films, an issue Weinstock addresses), mainly offering subtle tweaks to existing ideas plus new readings of a variety of films, as opposed to radically new analyses. Newer readers on the subject will likely see The Vampire Film as a solid introduction to this discourse.
Weinstock opens the text with a marshaling of “a handful of governing principles that … hold true...
