On The Cultural Codes And Contemporary Aesthetic Reception Of Vampire Movies

During the film developping process which last more than a hundred years, as folklore vampires had been world-wide spread by the film medium. In a large number of screen devils, the vampire is to the fore with its unique cultural characteristics. As a theme of Hollywood's classic horror movies, vampires have never had the audience out of sight. If the vampire in the screen is just as a single frightening symbol like an "other" at the beginning of the birth of it, then, with the changes of the social history, the metaphorical world of vampires has been enriched time by time and to some extent it as the alternative language used by the human to explorate the moral rule and cultural imperative. From every revolutionary change of vampire movies, we can peep into the social, cultural, emotional desire, and the changes of audience's modern aesthetic taste.Although vampires entirely based on the fictional and imagination, but the stigma which from the social cultural, the changes of the audience potential emotional desires, the business model of Hollywood movies, the imaginary space which gives by digital technology as well as the absorption of various art elements and nutrients which make a complete and rich cultural system for vampire movies. In the modern imagination, the vampire with different forms of entities continue to appear on the screen, not so much all kinds of vampire images in the movies portrays the dark world of monsters, as it is the lifes with sorrows and joys under all circumstances.Not just the shadow of human society and nature projected by vampire movies, but making up for the shortcomings by imagination of the real world of human, which ultimately become a modern screen myth in Hollywood commercial movies.Introduction part of this article illustrates the purpose and significance of the research on the vampire movie, and briefly reviews the present academic research on the status of vampire movies. The chapter one is to summarize and sort out the deveopment of representative western vampire movies and show the flow profile of the contemporary vampire film from objective angle.The chapter two is to illustrate cultural codes behind the films from four aspects,including the prototype theory, psychoanalytic point of view, religious point of view and the community theme reflected by vampires.The chapter three is to probe into aesthetic acceptance about the vampire films from three aspects, which is the psychological identity in Western culture, aesthetic pleasure acquired by images and the reationship between Hollywood movies mechanism and the audience's consumer psychology. Having had the research on the cultural level of vampire movies, we try to have a in-depth digging about the social and cultural meanings behind the film in order to explore the vampire film's unique charm.