What is it about vampires that fascinates the public imagination? Why is there something in a growing number of people that makes them savor accounts of vampiristic and serial killings more than normal murders--or love stories, for that matter?! More and more people are drawn towards such gory depictions (a whole culture industry has developed around the serial killer) and encounter them with a mix of empathy and revulsion. Are modern spectators regressing? In my work, I have set out to explain what fuels our continual interest in such kinds of fiction. The most striking aspect of vampire and serial killer fictions is that they simultaneously reflect the Freudian return of the repressed and the compulsion to repeat on more than one level. I argue that the organization of the human psyche is embedded or mirrored in these works; the exemplary figure of the vampire simultaneously represents structure and acts it out.

My book closely scrutinizes the concept of genre by employing theories of Sigmund Freud and Tzvetan Todorov and arrives at a model of the vampire as the perfect representative of genre for a variety of reasons. The psychoanalytic concepts of the return of the repressed and the so-called compulsion to repeat are not only categories Freud assumes as underlying the structure of the human psyche. It turns out that these principles also become the mechanisms underlying the concept of genre. I propose that the figure of the vampire is so appealing to its audience because of an inter-dependency of loop-like mental and narrative structures which lures both reader and writer incessantly back to the genre.

A survey of the materializations of the vampire brings to light not only the cyclical and repetitive reappearances of the motif in literature and other artforms, but also their association with deep-rooted, innate fears which have been the ballast of our collective unconscious since primordial times. As a wide-open or almost floating signifier, the vampire taps into a wide array of common human experience. Nightmarish images involving vampiric attacks find recurring outlets in fantastic literature, which thus becomes endowed with a cathartic function.

An excursion into the artform of film yields more interesting insights concerning the representation and public reception of the vampire image. In his study The Fantastic, Tzvetan Todorov indicates that language is the medium that makes fantastic creatures possible and "visible." Yet, by a close analysis of some exemplary vampire films, we are able to perceive how from the earliest beginnings of the artform, film--and not language--lends itself to be the medium of the vampire.

The last part of my project analyzes a close relative of the vampire: the figure of the serial killer, which in both film and literature has become extremely popular in recent years. What makes the grisly figure of the serial killer so appealing to its audience since it merely incorporates the structure and all the fearsome traits of the vampire, yet lacks the latter one’s alluring features (the promise of sex, class, and immortality)? My chapter on serial killers also enters the realm of legal history. It provides a case study of the notorious Weimar German serial killer Fritz Haarmann and the change in representation his story underwent in the last few decades--a change from his depiction as a brutal "human beast" to a sick and pathetic character deserving our pity.

One problem presents itself again and again over the course of the project: a certain tension, if not contradiction, between the kind of timelessness and universality of the alleged "deep structure" of the human psyche, as opposed to the historical conditions of (late) capitalism, becomes apparent at several points of my examination. Ultimately, one will have to ask whether the figure of the serial killer can indeed be seen as some kind of teleological outgrowth of human development under capitalism.