Of borders and vampires : monstrous excess as resistive embodiments in Cronos and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night

In this thesis, I investigate the figuration of the vampire in two transnational horror films, Cronos and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (Girl). Parting from the premise that monstrous figures grapple with cultural conceptions of the Other, I examine how the vampire unique positioning as a recurring cultural metaphor for capitalist exploitation and predation interacts with contemporary shifts that reimagine the vampire as a marginalized figure. I argue that the films refigure the vampire as an embodied Other, whose presence catalyzes and exposes bodily excess—in primarily the form of disability in Cronos and feminine desire in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night—as a resistive force. The two filmic texts find the vampiric figure mirrored in other human characters or social conditions that are not presented explicitly as such, mainly through motifs of consumption and extraction. Thus, a productive tension arises between the embodied vampire as an unassimilable outsider and vampire-like social order, where the films ultimately beckon back to the body, specifically, to explore localized and globalized subjectivities, and their intersections with gender, race, age, and disability. In the first chapter, I focus on the central role disabled bodies have in Cronos, which I argue powers its temporal critique and its articulation of what critic Ellen Samuels has termed crip time. The second chapter examines Girl and its portrayal of violence and dance as a wayas way to highlight and disrupt gendered power dynamics in the film’s ambiguous feminist critique, before turning to its destabilizations of a hegemonic narrative gaze.