This blog post is part of “Searching for Secrets,” a second promotion originally inspired by the one I did with Harmony Corrupted: “Brace for Impact” (2024). That promotion was meant to promote and provide Volume Two, part one’s individual pieces for easy public viewing (it has since become a full, published book module: the Poetry Module). “Searching for Secrets” shall do the same, but with Volume Two, part two’s opening/thesis section and one of its two Monster Modules, the Undead (the other module, Demons, also having a promotion: “Deal with the Devil“). As usual, this promotion was written, illustrated and invigilated by me as part of my larger Sex Positivity (2023) book series.

Click here to see “Searching for Secrets” Table of Contents and Full Disclaimer.

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They Hunger; or Reintroducing Liminal Expression through Undead Feeding Vectors: the Universal Feeding Mechanism of the Undead (opening)

“Mercy is a chimera. It can be defeated by the stomach rumbling its hunger, by the throat crying its thirst. You must always be hungry and thirsty.” The Baron caressed his bulges beneath the suspensors. “Like me.”

—the Baron Harkonnen to his nephew, the Beast Raban, Dune[1]

(artist: Draldede)

Picking up from where “Capitalism as a Great Zombie” left off…

Per the Gothic, history is always in motion (and decay/regeneration) through liminal spaces and states. Even so, the undead are defined by two basic things: giving (and receiving) trauma as pain or punishment of some kind, and eating. We’ve looked at trauma a great deal thus far in the module, and likewise have considered how the process of abjection can be reversed by pleasurably reclaiming the imperial language of trauma (and pain), per the monomyth; i.e., vis-à-vis the undead less as neighbors to humans and more equal tenants under the same oppressive system. The more time you spend with the undead as human, the more the process can reverse, but also become more visible insofar as we are normally exploited; re: the apocalypse.

Now we shall examine this uncovering through liminal expression per the undead feeding mechanism (and its various historical preferences and metaphors); i.e., trauma making people decay and feed in anisotropic ways, hyphenating the mouth and the fang (the vagina and the cock) that concern trauma and feeding as likewise hyphenated: the knife dick/vagina dentata as “sodomy.” It’s a bit messy (as liminality generally is) and that’s part of the fun, but also part of the spirit of Gothic poetics: the graveyard (and corpse) as a psychosexual space-to-occupant (residence-resident) of rape play whose irony is optional and generally regresses towards fascism per the state’s usual machinations (trifectas, monopolies, and capitalist qualities): anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, thus rapes itself and everything around it as a matter of police violence.

We’ll examine feeding-as-liminal through two subchapters, one per vampires/witches (“Eat Me Alive”) and one per ghosts (“I See Dead People”); i.e., as complicated nocturnal feeders concerning rape trauma as part of the exchange, but in ways that often partially conceal and relegate to dark imaginary sites that transplant to and fro inside the colonial space: as overrun with degenerate, prurient forces; e.g., the male sexual-predator lothario, but also the sexually active and assertive monstrous-feminine (from cis-het women to various deviations from that group). Always out of sight, but not out of mind, such half-real, monomythic intimations recycle through the usual neoliberal refrains upholding Capitalist Realism, recruiting workers to play out genocide in small; i.e., profit is rape, which canonical media serves while fetishizing token elements per the Protestant ethic treating healthy appetites as sinful, wanton and undead—damned to death.

For example, the lily-white assassin from Diablo 2 (2000) declares “they’ll never see me coming” in ways that cannot ignore her rather loud, orgasmic battle cries as vampiric (“the creatures of the night, what sweet music they make!”); i.e., as part of an Orientalist witch’s phallic, poisoned (wasp-like) weapons: the heteronormative coding of poison being a woman’s weapon combined with the penetrative fang or stinger of various stigma animals (the snake, spider or again, wasp). In this policewoman’s fetishized form, she’s not the world-ending Medusa, but a token Amazon cop with vampiric, animalistic qualities policing state territories for the state, Radcliffe-style; i.e., something to “top” as an avatar that rapes the state’s usual targets/DARVO-assigned enemies like a lady of the night would: penetratively—a phallic woman (vagina dentata) ruthlessly and doggedly tracking and hunting state prey down.

Granted, there’s always an anisotropic function to such feeding as weaponizing sex, terror and force for or against the state, mid-kayfabe; i.e., as beings to feed in different ways that—like zombies in the state of exception—have psychosexual flavors that can be Numinously sex-positive per ludo-Gothic BDSM, but for which such subversions are far from automatic; they must be taught, and generally occur through all the usual taboo things—opera, heavy metal, witchcraft, hard drugs, Gothic spaces, monsters, and videogames, etc.

(source: Fandom)

For example, Judas Priest’s “Eat Me Alive” (1984), while enduring Thatcheristic censors, was really cashing in on the usual BDSM language made bare to a paying middle class “slumming” in homo-curious ways:

[Verse 1]
Wrapped tight around me like a second flesh hot skin
Cling to my body as the ecstasy begins
Your wild vibrations got me shooting from the hip
Crazed and insatiable, let rip

[Chorus]
And eat me alive
Eat me alive

[Verse 2]
Sounds like an animal, panting to the beat
Groan in the pleasure zone and gasping from the heat
Gut-wrenching frenzy that deranges every joint
I’m going to force you at gun point

[…]

[Verse 3]
Bound to deliver as you give and I collect
Squealing impassioned as the rod of steel injects
Lunge to the maximum, spread-eagled to the wall
You’re well equipped to take it all (source: Genius).

It’s basically a psychosexual camping of KISS’ “Love Gun” (1977). Such things are admittedly rather tame if you’ve lived and understand them in a sex-positive way. But the curious assimilation of Halford as a then-closeted gay man in Great Britain remains a vital element of critique insofar as we can critique him (and the other examples in this signpost); i.e., as someone who ultimately used queer rebellion’s synonymizing of sex and harm to make bank and garner fans through psychosexual dogma, first and foremost.

In short, we gotta hug Medusa as something dehumanized by capital (and for which they deflect blame back onto us); e.g., camp the Nazi fag as decaying into a Zionist shell of his older non-decayed self (re: “Judas Priest: Invincible Shield and Zionism,” 2024). We’ll examine Halford and others with vampires (and witches), in “Eat Me Alive,” then consider the Numinous, posthumanism, cryptomimesis and Metroidvania with ghosts in “Seeing Dead People”; i.e., as feeders of a less overtly sexual sort than vampires are, but nevertheless haunted by the same mechanisms that drive both to feed in a liminal sense.

Sex Positivity has repeatedly covered how liminal expression involves pastiche and doubles in opposition. This requires remediated praxis, a failure of sublimation, and conflict on the surface of the image—all concepts that occur in relation to the undead as something to see, thus recognize as proletarian, if indeed it even is; i.e., “friendly” to Gothic Communism. The “vector” is language itself, retaining a viral, abstracted quality told across the endless transfer of monstrous images speaking to undead essence exchange; i.e., associated with death and disease personified through different, harmfully sexualized[2] feeding behaviors:

• the vampire‘s regeneration of a corpse that regains/retains life-like components; i.e., the greedy sucking motions/wild drinking of blood, but also the canonical depiction as a powerful sexual predator/serial killer out of another time and place—their “Transylvanian” home an imaginary land of madness tied to whispered nighttime horrors, unchecked death/rape and vulgar, bloody displays of power they transfer unto fresh territories of predation
• the zombie‘s useless eating tied to a rotting corpse; i.e., of flesh or brains (or the absorption of colonial punishment from state bullets and knives)
• the ghost‘s feeding on lifeforce without needing a body so much as a likeness or suggestion of one; i.e., mimetic capturing of vitality or draining of essence, often tied to an ambiguous or ghastly site of murder trauma, and/or revenge
• and the composite‘s childhood craving of revenge against faulty parentage, humanity and Promethean knowledge

Information exchange happens by looking at and expressing with; i.e., to paint not just in blood, ectoplasm, or carrion, but the essence of these things as mimed code that gets the underlying point across: the liminal exchange of transformative information frequently viewed as alien, but also dated, “ancient” and brought back to life; e.g., the immateriality of ghosts, the replenished corpse flesh of vampires, and the patchwork assemblage of composite bodies, etc, as carriers of erotic data.

As canonical instruments of terror, the undead possess several commonalities useful to their collective feeding rituals. One is paralysis—to freeze their victims cold, often through a chilling gaze or undead countenance; i.e., a likeness of death on an animated form whose eyes (or facial expression) lacks the societally accepted notion of a human presence.

Furthermore, as a feeding class that often freezes their victims, the undead embody live burial through an aspect of monstrous expression we’ve examined previously with Metroidvania, castles, dolls, and haunted houses: the uncanny but also a mimetic tendency to mirror one another across space and time by consuming and disseminating media tied to the ghost of the counterfeit (again, the basic idea called echopraxis, or “the involuntary mirroring of an observed action,” which we’ll extend to haunted, cryptonymic material: cryptomimesis).

The uncanny warns viewers of something inside the domestic setting as haunted (with Freud’s word for uncanny, unheimlich, literally translating to “unhomely”); i.e., according to a transgenerational curse tied to a body and spaces within an operative membrane. Like zombies, vampires, ghosts and composites do more than express hidden trauma spilling out into the open; they denote a playful vector of exchange commonly associated with “feeding” in literal terms, but also figuratively through a creative process about the human condition—ludo-Gothic BDSM—as fed on the same kinds of poetic, paradoxical fuels within house and home (this “play” often attaches to queer people delighting at reactionaries clutching their pearls; e.g., at dildos and monsters with sexual agency and queer identity. Nothing is more fun than making a TERF or uptight cis person crap their pant at something as silly as the “dark scary dildo person from outer space”; i.e., the xenomorph).

As part of this larger poetic scheme, the ghost of the counterfeit is a canonical phenomenon that causes one to freeze between stages of disgust and fascination (adjacent to fight, flight and fawn) towards repressed abuses under the status quo persecuting fresh prey inside the normal policed territories; romantically dressed up as “past,” these injuries are tangibly felt within one’s living space as invaded, desecrated and enslaved by the feeding dead (sometimes literally invited inside, as the canonical vampire and their parasitic, predatory charm often are).

Something important to keep in mind are the usual “boundaries for me, not for thee” goings-on. Canonically we’re presented with an innocent Christian Europe (and America, later) under attack by corrupt degenerate versions of itself, or hostile alien forces invading home from “elsewhere.” Apart from the settler argument (re: “we were here first are our claim is the legitimate one”), the us-versus-them argument has old, pervasive double standards; e.g., ignoring Christian feeding rituals in Catholic dogma (the drinking of Christ’s blood and eating of Christ’s flesh) while presenting non-Christian elements as popular anti-Semitic tropes describing them as blood-drinking vampires, baby-killing witches, and/or flesh-eating goblins (all from Hey Alma’s “Anti-Semitic History of…” series; 2021, 2020, and 2023). Such activities are, in essence, interchangeable between monster types, themselves identified by act and accusation as much as outward appearance.

For example, there’s also werewolves, which combined with the above behaviors and charges—of wanton, improper and devilish consumption (“…of eating a meal, a succulent Chinese meal?”)—are subsequently used as similar xenophobic stereotypes; i.e., demonizing those outside the status quo, but especially anything threatening the nuclear family model from Hammer of Witches, onwards. There really isn’t some special prize for who is the biggest threat, simply because Pagan women (and other non-Christian dominions/Orientalist and anti-Semitic caricatures) will be treated basically the same as any idea of state degeneracy and corruption; i.e., as undead, demonic and/or animalistic threats that must be outed and destroyed by police forces in any capacity (official or vigilante). The same goes for homosexual men and other practitioners of “sodomy” (the love that dare not speak its name), non-white peoples, and anyone and anything else historically scapegoated for societal collapse (re: boom and bust). Concerning weaponized village persecution rhetoric taken to a systemic level, fear and dogma mobilize scared stupid people; i.e., to do the state’s dirty work for them, be that state the Church, mercantile capitalists, neoliberals, or some latter-day combination of these things (capital decays and regresses, remember).

In turn, abject qualities of an outwardly hideous (non-Western) physical appearance splice pick-and-choose systemic bigotries—a hellish salad of racism, anti-Semitism, Orientalism, queerphobia, etc—with degenerate undead feeding mechanisms to plant/play into false flag arguments; i.e., canonically blaming state victims for abusing the very things the state seeks to aim and control, DAVRO and obscurantism commonly presenting any of these monsters as cannibalistic and dark-skinned, or simply as “dark” rapists kidnapping women and children before “mishandling” them. Whatever synonymizing occurs serves the usual binaries at work, incensing and erupting public fervor against state victims by state victims:

(artist: The Sabu)

Unto itself, subsequent requests to “eat me alive” yield a variety of unironic, exploitation-style rape fantasies/calculated risks, one of the most common (and effective) being the captive scenario—specifically of white women wanting to sleep with wild savage rapists who drink blood, eat flesh, torture women and kill babies, in effect secretly and shamefully desiring this treatment versus having PIV missionary sex with their dutiful, good-boy husbands (who also rape them, and will coerce such fantasies out of their brides when it suits them).

Frankly you can swap out black men with any aspect of nature-as-alien, always bearing a monstrous-feminine flavor (anything that isn’t the status quo is monstrous-feminine). Whatever the form, the criminal element of pimping the plantation, kingdom or colony is the same: forbidden fruit, aka guilty pleasure, which upholds the usual double standards, punching down; i.e., husbands rape their wives; their wives have rape fantasies that commonly exploit foreigners, “the help” and other, even more vulnerable parties (e.g., Mrs. Epps from Twelve Years a Slave, 2013); and so on, inside the same basic “prison sex” mindset.

In turn, white middle-class women (and other tokenized forces on a descending ladder of preferential mistreatment) will gaslight, gatekeep girl boss for the elite; i.e., feminism decays, as does any fight for equality as a matter of convenience controlled through state concessions. Under capital, tokenized women will fetishize the state’s enemies while also cashing in on it through good-girl modesty arguments (re: “kissing up, punching down”) and white bad-girl double standards; meanwhile, fags will punch down against other fags, playing unironically into the “bury your gays” trope as they try to assimilate; and people of color will, per Fanon, put on white masks to police and segregate themselves, mid-assimilation—in effect playing the cannibals, rapists and vigilantes criminals the state wants them to be; etc. Any and all of this will hybridize as needed, but it serves the same historical-material purpose: bourgeois hegemony and control through police violence against workers and nature by the state, having the former divide-and-conquer themselves whenever and wherever possible.

(artist: Persephone van der Waard)

Last but not least, all of this can be poetically subverted, but liberation and exploitation exist inside the same Gothic shadow zone; they must be parsed, there, through dialectical-material scrutiny when illustrating mutual consent through informed, intelligent forms of performance, poetry and play! As such, iconoclasm becomes sex-positive the moment it humanizes both sides of a labor exchange and reclaims the monstrous language being used (often in combinations; e.g., zombie unicorns with breeding kinks, above); i.e., using it to challenge profit, thus genocide, during systemic catharsis developing Communism, helping people let off steam while conversationally interrogating their trauma; re: the pedagogy of the oppressed, finding similarity amid difference to challenge state instruments and articles of self-imposed police violence and internalized bigotry.

To it, remember our modular thesis:

Capitalism achieves profit by moving money through nature; profit is built on trauma and division, wherein anything that serves profit gentrifies and decays, over and over while preying on nature. Trauma, then, cultivates strange appetites, which vary from group to group per the usual privileges and oppression as intersecting differently per case; i.e., psychosexual trauma (the regulation of state sex, terror and force) and feeding in decay as a matter of complicated (anisotropic) exchange unto itself, but also shapeshifting and knowledge exchange vis-à-vis nature as monstrous-feminine: something to destroy by the state or defend from it (and its trifectas, monopolies, etc) using the same threatening aesthetics of power and death, decay and rape (source).

You have to challenge canonical appetites by subverting them, which requires camping what’s already present:

(model and artist: Jericho and Persephone van der Waard)

In short, fuck whoever or whatever you want however you want as long as doing so is sex-positive/mutually consensual, thus good praxis. By extension, cultivate (synthesize) undead feeding habits that point out the usual state hypocrisies the elite foster and use against you (turning workers into cops inside the usual decaying persecution networks/states of exception, mid-crisis). Capitalism alienates workers through feeding mechanisms presenting nature-as-alien, but also workers alienated from nature and it from them by sexualizing and fetishizing everything in sight; i.e., to antagonize, gentrify and decay the same old feeding mechanisms, driving them forwards to move money through nature while dividing workers and owners through infinite growth and efficient profit (the neoliberal handle of the bourgeois trifectas). Liberation of sex workers (thus all workers) happens through iconoclastic art, which starts by building new socio-sexual connections that stall and short-circuit the same old predatory forces at work making workers undead! —Perse

Give how each reunion is invariably different than before, and denotes a different connection between essence as something to feed on—but also exist between the material/immaterial and animate/inanimate of the world as we know it—this section was originally prepared (nearly two years ago) with three specialized main exhibit types:

• ideal hermeneutic case study (feat. vampires): the Gothic, Marxism, queer studies and ludology (now “The World Is a Vampire”)
• cryptomimesis; i.e., liminal riffing and ghostly lineages (feat. ghosts)
• composite bodies/collages (feat. the Bride of Frankenstein)

I’ve since decided to discuss composites in a different chapter (“Forbidden Sight,” in the Demon Module), reserving parts one and two of this chapter for vampires and ghosts; i.e., as feeders who consume, and are consumed, differently than zombies do/are in Gothic media at large:

• Part one, “Eat Me Alive”:
  • “a Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches)” (included in this post): Articulates what vampires basically are, and what about them we want to study and focus on; also considers the anti-Semitic, fascist, witch-hunt treatment of vampires in Gothic canon, and how we can recognize and subvert not just greedy authors, but various traitors (e.g., TERFs) abusing and policing the same vampire language we’re trying to reclaim!
  • “Understanding Vampires: ‘What Is (Problematic) Love?’; or, Positions of Relative Ignorance to Relative Clarity (feat. Bad Empanada and Marxist-Leninism)” (subdivision opening): A deeper dive into the struggle between not just total ignorance and knowledge, but warring schools of thought—i.e., Marxist-Leninism and anarcho Communism—and how vampirism manifests under an-Com principles that often, fall under fire when trying to escape the closet of state forces (and outmoded forms of Communism).
    • ” part zero, “A Vampire History Primer; or, a Latter-Day Conceptualization of Vampirism, from the 1970s Onwards (feat. Bad Empanada, Rob Halford, Anne Rice, Foucault, Judith Butler, and more)” (included with subdivision opening): Discusses a brief evolutionary history of the “problematic (monstrous-feminine) love” known as vampirism and sodomy from the 1970s onwards. Focuses initially on homosexual men like Rob Halford and Michel Foucault, before moving onto second-to-third wave feminists like Angela Carter and Barbara Creed, and finally an expanding of the lexicon and theory of gender studies (through Butler and others) to make room for GNC praxis using the same-old Gothic poetics (re: vampires, for our purposes)! We’ll also critique latent queerphobia in Marxist-Leninism (re: Bad Empanada) and academic, queer shortcomings/tokenism through an an-Com lens, and consider some of the larger historical-material currents leading up to the 1970s and beyond.
    • ” part one: “Leaving the Closet; or, a Trans Woman’s Scholarly Contributions to Older Histories of Sodomy and Queer Love (feat. Anne Rice, Chelyabinsk-40, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Castlevania, and more)“: Describes my journey towards self-discovery and new scholarship (e.g., Capitalism’s abuse of the environment being queerphobic, including in Soviet Russia) while slowly exploring relationships with older scholarship (from the 1970s, onwards)—but also GNC people who, despite hurting me, progressed away from obstacles and towards fresh opportunities to learn and love, cultivating Gothic Communism anew.
    • ” part two: “‘The World Is a Vampire’; or, Bloodsports and Prisons from Old World to New World, Archaic Mothers and the Monomyth to Bloodthirsty Capitalists (feat. The Darkest Dungeon and Alice in Borderland)“: Considers the bloodsport-and-prisons potential of vampires between The Darkest Dungeon and Alice in Borderland’s Old World and New World approaches (and bring up The Matrix and Foucault, where relevant).

• Part two, “Seeing Dead People“: Discusses ghosts in relation to Ghost in the Shell as a posthuman phenomenon, as well as cryptomimesis and ghostly feeding according to Tool and Silent Hill in response to Jacob’s Ladder (exhibit 43a); David Fincher’s Se7en in response to Nine Inch Nails’ “Closer” (exhibit 43b); artwork between myself and an anonymous model in response to another artist (exhibit 43c); and a “rememory” of an old drawing of myself and my ex Jadis, who especially loved Tool, Silent Hill and Jacob’s Ladder (exhibit 43d).

Even so, this section will still discuss vampires, ghosts and composites somewhat interchangeably (focusing more on vampires and ghosts, of course); i.e., as spectres of pre-fascist, fascist and post-fascist trauma under Capitalism: spectres of Marx trapped in between the individual pieces of language, inside the poster pastiche of monster mash spread out over centuries across space and time. Witches, as the crash course will show us, are often vampiric and ghostly to varying imprecise, nefandous and speakable-unspeakable degrees: walking shadows, caricatures, simulacra!

(artist: Jenny Le)

Before we dig into part one, I wish to clarify our heightened focus regarding undead feeding and its history as something to study. Although we’re fixated on undead bodies and their ghoulish, messy feeding habits, both are linked to signature habitats; i.e., places where the undead call home as having (in theory) once belonged to them and where they presently refuse to surrender to the living disturbing their slumber above ground. We shall examine those places as we progress, but focus less on the haunting by things entirely unseen[3] inside a Gothic chronotope and more on psychosexual expression through humanoid forms that are, more or less, entirely visible when they feed. Plain to see, these beings become defined by how they “feed” as part of a conspicuous messaging device (we’ll focus on torture and persecution through vampires and witches, but also when we examine demons, later in the primer).

Gothic Communism, then, seeks to reintroduce liminal expression as a liberating process, slowly supplying the means to communicate dead ideas to living workers feeding on the past: how buried histories of worker struggles live on through the self-restoration of a given legend, granting the egregore “life” per exchange as something to revitalize through class-conscious recognition of, and participation with, the past as undead—not just the animate-inanimate as reanimated, but the curiously in-between (which is largely what many “pure” ghosts represent; they are not strictly human or made by humans, but appear as such through human history and language, making their explicit humanization far more tricky[4]).

Moreover, the undead—and their complicated, blood-pumping feeding habits—operate in relation to the living who have “replaced” them inside a shared living space; i.e., as something to move through and interact with those inside, be they alive, dead, or undead. By examining how and where the undead eat (their hunting grounds, territories of violence), we can reintroduce liminality to Gothic imagination as part of a larger subversive process—one that helps workers communicate their trauma and exploitation through various feeding metaphors tied to older victims of systemic abuse and scapegoating (with vampirism being crude, pejorative analogues for queer behaviors, but also whores, Jewish people, and—as we shall see—witches and persecution mania).

To that, the undead have a highly specific material function: as visible, human replicas whose eating is a mixed metaphor in both praxial directions. This becomes highly useful when seeking to expose canonical forms, which try their damnedest to blend in at a societal level through spaces where undead feeding is commonplace, but camouflaged; e.g., the corporate vampire and its stereotypical haunt as updated forms of older residence types, like the office building or parking structure, but also the “garage” or “castle” as a place to “spent the night”: a peachy grave that eats you, versus the other way around (“Pac-man booty”)!

(artist: Sephy Pink)

As often is the case, older forms of the vampire and any sexual-marital trauma associated with them (especially towards women and monstrous-feminine beings) become generally “kept-up” through the appearance of an old castle, tomb or crypt inhabited by a vengeful (or at the very least restless) female/queer spirit as something to commune with. Generally this happens through a kind of threshold/membrane of Gothic poetics, language and behaviors, of which feeding is paramount; i.e., generally through slutty wraiths conjured up out of revenge for having been murdered by the state, the consummation of a larger “sacrifice” ritual, in optional quotes; e.g., cops supercharged on mandated sex, or sex workers reversing the paradigm by camping it—with a witchy vampire’s alien ass/”full moon booty” that claps back, the prey’s “eye spots” paralyzing Puritanical police agents in place! “Stare and tremble!” but with what? Fear? Shame? Hunger? Joy? All of the above? Such is liminal expression’s usual in-betweens, holistic and intersections at play!

As our crash course on vampires and witches shall hopefully demonstrate, living with trauma generally becomes a forever process—one of reclamation and liberation through some degree of fun and play! Camping canon and sexual control, “flesh and the power it holds” extends to essence at large; i.e., traded vampirically and like witchcraft back and forth, Lewis’ naughty Matilda (a gay man profaning the Madonna to seduce a rapey Catholic monk) beckoning you to try it on for size!

Eat Me Alive; or Undead Feeding Vectors, part one: a Crash-Course Introduction to Vampires (and Witches)

“In those younger years my home was a hive of unbridled hedonism, a roiling apiary where instinct and impulse were indulged with wild abandon. A bewitching predator slipped in amidst the swarm of tittering sycophants. Though outwardly urbane, I could sense in her a mocking thirst. Driven half-mad by cloying vulgarity, I plotted to rid myself of this lurking threat, in a grand display of sadistic sport. But as the moment of murder drew nigh, the gibbous moon revealed her inhuman desires in all their stultifying hideousness” (source).

—The Ancestor, “The Crimson Court,” The Darkest Dungeon 

So far, the primer has examined the creative history behind the canonical zombie as something to rehumanize, dislocating their xenophilic expressions of sexual trauma—but also the dreamlike spaces and toys around them—from Capitalist Realism’s canonical trappings and false-rebel impostors. We want to extend this ravenous liminality to vampires (and ghosts, in the next subchapter); i.e., the zombie’s diet—bodies and brains—is part of their liminal expression when returning home to feed, but also their rotted, abused bodies as things to rage at, revisiting awful, indiscriminate violence as something to levy against the status quo through Athena’s Aegis.

The same goes for vampires, we shall see; i.e., as poetic devices to fight over according to the Gothic power of such beings, which proletarian forces try to reclaim in order to develop Communism with. They drink blood, to be sure—and tend to be more overtly erotic[5] (and lily-white, pale) in their theatrical psychosexuality than zombies are—but the blood means different things per these anisotropic exchanges; i.e., of power in vitalistic language that concerns sex, temptation and butting up against creatures (often ladies) of the night during ludo-Gothic BDSM and oppositional praxis: blood witches, aka vampires.

This opening shall nurture that anti-Semitic idea, offering a crash course on vampires (and to a lesser extent, witches), then end with some food for thought.

(artist: Tako)

Regardless of the undead type, though, things generally merge stigma with liberation, the act of feeding becoming a “gateway” drug unto itself that leads towards general indecency and things of the night, which are then abjected onto the usual Galatean suspects by the usual punishers and Pygmalions; i.e., pro-state workers claiming positions of righteous decency and kissing up to “God” (capitalists, instead of the Church) while punching down against the elite’s enemies as an abject matter of profit (capital hauntologically invading the imaginary past): witch hunts occurring through anti-Semitic, queerphobic fear-and dogma—such persecution mania and bias turning workers vampirically undead (whose punitive union, by police agents raping nature inside the state of exception, something that we’ll briefly examine during this crash course: the fate of witches and their eternal black revenge against empire).

(artist: Yamino)

While zombies and vampires both feed (often on “helpless” things, left), the context of their performances differ considerably. Compared to the indiscriminate, battering-ram apocalypse of zombies (the rising slaves’ colonized uproar), vampires are more lavish, sinful and sarcastically luxurious; i.e., the middle class conveniently threatened by wealthy interlopers (re: Jews) and Halloween-style, Christian DARVO arguments (“temptations,” witchcraft). Both concern sex and dominion by state enforcers, but the flavor and feel of the poetry diverges surrounding such things. Instead of total apocalypse, bedlam and mass rioting in the streets, vampires take on white-collar criminalities married to ecclesiastical metaphors, their combined histories overall concerned with assimilation and possession; i.e., ruining the lily-white merchandise (above), wherein the middle class clutch their pearls at the pesky Jewish/queer stereotypes stealing straight men’s owed maidens!

To this, feeding per vampires and the forbidden fruit they offer jives with the strange appetites of demons (with vampires able to shapeshift as well, generally into different animals), leading to witch hunts, but also “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” sentiments that, unto themselves, speak to feeding as a matter of proletarian knowledge and power exchange; i.e., dignity in struggle and death; e.g., Maegen McAuliffe O’Leary’s non-English, Celtic iconoclasm, “What I Would Tell Eve” (2024):

Eat the fucking apple.

They are going to blame you

regardless.

You might as well go to the gallows

with a full belly

knowing more than God (source).

“Eating” constitutes the same process of abjection as something to enforce or subvert, its poetic reversal dealing with the same consequences regardless; i.e., police violence against nature-as-monstrous-feminine, per the state as needing babies (and baby factories), but also virgins to celebrate (for their perceived “rarity”) and whores to abject (for their actual regularity), thus punish/shame the latter as witchy non-virgins threatening the former with the usual double standards that men/token agents control both sides of (re: punching Medusa).

In turn, this predation happens from city-states all the way up to nation-states, unfolding per Capitalist Realism’s usual co-dependent, predatory trifectas, monopolies, and qualities of capital informing the perpetuation of monstrous caricature; i.e., the ghost of the counterfeit’s fearful-fascinated, pull-pull coopting of medieval poetics/revolutionary language and tokenizing/factionalizing of said poetics with DARVO, obscurantism and us-versus-them dialectics (of shelter and the alien) while also “playing Omelas” against different witches to burn, vampires to stake, cops-and-victims-style, until they finally push back, smothering empire in the cradle (effectively making them eat shit, crow, placenta, etc).

A note about the rest of the chapter’s concern towards vampires and ghosts: Both are literally walking superstitions. However, we don’t have time to play Robert Neville and plot out each and every aspect of those superstitions; i.e., our focus for vampires and ghosts remains feeding in relation to police violence. Generally those two aspects synonymize, insofar as vampires feeding on others or killing others who feed is already an apt metaphor for the kinds of power exchange we’ll be looking into. But given the penetrative nature of sex and violence, we’ll also be focusing much more on a vampire’s puncturing feeding habits/methods of seduction than something altogether more asexual like a fatal allergy to sunlight (synonymizing righteous violence with the sun, per fascist arguments; re: “Praise the sun!”), an aversion to religious systems, or vampires being picky eaters.

For example, I could write a whole book just about daytime cremations being a vampiric metaphor for burning witches at the stake, another book about garlic being an old wives’ tale (an antibiotic that counteracts the vampire as a walking disease associated with the Black Death), and another book about why they don’t have reflections or like crosses, etc. But given our work is overtly erotic and holistic, I’d rather stick to the titillating bits merely than catalog churchly dogma and its pick-and-choose prescriptions (of which various rituals orbit around vampires, in particular). Go read I Am Legend if you want a deft (and succinct) survey of vampire symptoms and superstitions; we’re focusing on the cops/victims core of the legend: blood, penetration and resurrection/persecution touching on the vermin, spifflicating aspect of the settler-colonial premise, per vampires and blood libel, witches, insects and disease!

To that, here or elsewhere, anytime I have said, say or will say “vermin,” I’m referring to the signature extermination rhetoric per the settler-colonial argument; i.e., as a matter of territory working as capital per the usual criminogenic tensions. As iconoclasts, we’re reclaiming what we enjoy from our exterminators treating us like vermin they can repeatedly annihilate, invade, rape, mark, breed, and so on, unto profit inside these territories. We are simultaneously needed and not unwelcome, feared and loved, oddly familiar and wholly alien. The state antagonizes nature and puts it to work, pimped out in ways we, per Sarkeesian, can enjoy and critique. We must, or we will not survive.

Lastly, we’ve already discussed feeding and police violence at length in the apocalypse section; i.e., devoting much of that to the zombie as a matter of authorial preference (mine), but for which the same basic ideas largely apply to vampires/ghosts and their own rich poetic histories (and really any monster you could invent or combine when speaking to persecution; re: witches and vampires). So even if it seems like we’re leaving a ton out (we are), you should have a basic-if-sound idea concerning how those things go together during us-versus-them engagements, and can apply the same arguments I used with zombies to vampires/witches or ghosts yourselves; i.e., concerning survived trauma under state rule and its purity and modesty arguments; e.g., of sin and salvation, vice and virtue, murder and mercy, etc, as things to hunt down/with and police during moral panic. Cloaked in that earlier knowledge, we needn’t overstay our welcome this time around (and can always do close-reads in a future edition or follow-up volume); like a hunter’s stake or a vampire’s fangs, we’ll be going in and out! —Perse

Keeping the above limitations in mind, I want to paint you a picture of vampires to reference, moving forwards (not ghosts, which are a bit more ontologically vague). We won’t have time to explore all of the martyred minutiae (or fluids) expressed here; it’s simply a taste, one to reflect on (a canonical vampire’s inability to do so suggesting their paradoxically vain nature, always hypnotized by those who can self-reflect).

Exceptions, dualities and double standards aside, vampires are unquestionably the better dressers/more stylish, moneyed and urbane than zombies; i.e., outwardly more attractive and human in their appearance until the mask drops due to their addiction (which lets them regenerate, but intensifies their bloodlust): the irresistible combo of deathly black and powerful, vitalistic red speaking to BDSM antics and torturous rituals of exchange founded entirely on these banner-like schemes. Like a count’s cloak, vampires wear their hearts (and their decaying past) on their sleeves, turning church-ordained love inside-out, making it dark, forbidden, and diseased, but also openly feudalistic (at least cosmetically—for Communists playing dress up); i.e., as dogmatic, whispered manifestations of syphilis and venereal disease, which tend to conceal their symptoms/orbit around someone’s dubious, seedy reputation and status (class character) versus things that are more obvious, like skin color, or congenital, like gonads.

All in all, the Red Scare remains hauntological, dressed up as “past,” and quickly fallen in love with (a bourgeois love spell/potion quaffed by the usual cops acting out evil fantasies, versus a collective push; i.e., towards development by various intersecting and solidarized workers, courting Communism by challenging Capitalist Realism):

(source Facebook post, Coloring Books Home: October 2nd, 2023)

Genitals and skin color do factor in, of course (usually pale skin, whereas the hyphenations of mouths and teeth make actual “junk” less important than these monsters’ oral fixation). All the same, vampires live and die by their clothes, making them (and the “positively dreadful!” actions associated with them) something to own, wear and parade about for different reasons: painting the town red with their own special sauce. Anti-Semitic, witchy stereotypes (such as big teeth/noses, animal appearances, magical powers, servile treachery and so on) splice with tyrannical European beauty standards (and greedy also-cruel behaviors; e.g., Vlad the Impaler punishing his enemies or Elizabeth Bathory bathing in the blood of virgins). Indeed, vampires are stunningly gorgeous and aristocratic, yet profane, worldly and fallen (from a Christian perspective) for all the same reasons, which can then be unmasked or, like Melmoth, interrogated in Faustian and Promethean rituals: exposing the outsider as trying to fit in, then applying the usual double standards amid the death theater’s witch-hunt executions; i.e., eroticizing divine punishment and exhibitionism/voyeurism (the public execution) versus the duality of queer expression and healthy (“adult”) sexual appetites (with older historical queers, usually men, having castles to play around with; re: Walpole).

Grassroots or astroturf, blood in turn symbolizes general predation, social-sexual exchange, rowdy sex and mechanisms of capital, vampires having their affluent fingers (and fangs) on that particular pulse while they feed for different reasons (we’ll get to these). It becomes a media circus, the victims having means while facing mobs of adoring fans and vengeful cults of witch hunters alike; i.e., dressing up during acts of “thrill killing” and self-defense (and in both directions), restraint becoming something of a myth eclipsed by scandal, intrigue, and repressed, unbridled sexuality uncloaked (a common form of female rebellion—the daughter against the father—is to have extramarital[6] sex)!

(artist: Cuwu)

In turn, practitioners of blood magic (which is what vampirism basically is—a kind of anti-Semitic witchcraft) are steeped in conspiracy and lore as a matter of gossip-style confirmation bias, the latter confirmed through rumors and brute force regardless of class or cultural character (an accusation leveled and hurled at all walks). Surrounding forbidden things like casual, extramarital sex, but also pedophilia (which capital conflates on purpose), such unspeakable legends and salacious rumors effectively make vampires a walking cliché/fetish for courtly love and medieval tyrants/clergymen; i.e., as sadistic, hedonistic, and gluttonous, etc (such anti-Catholic dogma lending latter-day witch hunts a Puritanical fanaticism): as armed and dangerous, something to canonically duel while bewaring the fangs and black magic converting righteous forms into unholy (reprobate) equivalents “preaching to the choir”; e.g., Julian Sand’s titular warlock summoning the antichrist to undo Creation (another Capitalist Realism argument) by assembling a Black Bible (“service to Satan” conflating queerness with planetary apocalypse, Richard Ramirez [and other serial killers] and home invasion. Yawn)!

Something holistic to keep in mind, then, is the anti-Semitic nature of vampires being dogmatically wedded to witches, goblins, werewolves, orcs, xenomorphs robots, et al, as all existing inside the same, broad persecution network; i.e., one policing and monopolizing indecent consumption, which in turn carries with it a dowry of queerphobic tropes and double standards. “Witchcraft” becomes synonymous with “blood spells,” infanticide, cannibalism, “sodomy” and “black magic,” etc, as being punishment for the out-group by the in-group dogmatically appropriating such stereotypes—specifically the language of violence, terror and morphological expression policing sex and force—for them and their masters; i.e., selectively and for their own enjoyment and personal gain concomitant to abusive systems. Any excuse that historically works, the state will recombine, hybridize and sell back in different monomythic forms to educate new generations of workers; i.e., swapping out various elements as needed to encourage would-be traitors to assimilate, tokenize, gentrify and decay in service to profit; e.g., Jewish conspiracy and Red Scare argumentation under Capitalist Realism (re: Jews are hoarding gold and secretly destroying the world, not Capitalism vaulting all of these things) unironically manifesting as thicc gobbos to literally pimp out the aesthetic (which can people can satirize to different degrees, below).

To it, witches grow undead per vampire myths, then are sacrificed inside a fluctuating state of exception; i.e., rife with tokenism, crisis, panic and decay through various other monsters, thus unironic sickness, predation and betrayal concerning all of them!

(artist: Huffslove)

The same basic idea applies to goblins and werewolves, etc; i.e., as beings of nature that, more often than not, are demonized and subsequently pushed to undead extremes by capitalist forces abusing Gothic poetics in the usual DARVO, obscurantist forms: as accusations (e.g., of Jewish “greed,” above) but also as self-persecution arguments that feed into settler mentalities, including tokenized ones that hybridize this with that; i.e., a witch having green skin, being short and thicc, and attracted to bright shiny objects effectively describing a goblin in the same breath. Insofar as the canonical function is appropriated, easily enough, their canonical function is the same.

But try as they might, the state likewise cannot monopolize these things; there remains the dualistic function and context of Gothic poetics, one where such dialectical-material implementations move power (wealth, empathy and knowledge, etc) anisotropically in one direction or the other.

To that, green skin marks stigma as something to play around with during moral panics (and witch hunts) as endemic to oppressed existence; i.e., using the same old anti-Semitic stereotypes of robbery and conquest romanced by Tolkien’s refrain into more recent, neoliberal conceptualizations; e.g., of those burgling dwarves and their tokenized “expert treasure hunter” traditionally enacting queer-coded home-invasion power fantasies that, all the same, parallel settler-colonial arguments and behavior under capital. Playing with those becomes a campy opportunity to interrogate, subvert and negotiate power dressed up as such. We can indulge in the thicc little green bastards, sitting adjacent to exploitation as a means of speaking to our own abuse through the same “cruising” fantasy language: the finer things in life, the devil in the details.

(artist: Huffslove)

Sex work not only combines elements of safety and danger inside an avatar that, true enough, has “slumming” elements (with Huffslove’s goblin being an elven princess turned into a goblin); it plays with taboos and criminalized, stereotypical elements of consumption that hint to the lived reality of sex workers (and marginalized communities, which generally are sexualized by the status quo) living within capital. There’s always going to be a taboo element of exploitation, bias, and persecution; the iconoclastic idea is to subvert them, thus not culturally appropriate others, in the process. Camp canon, put “rape” in quotes per liminal expression; i.e., as a plastic means of transformation (“a Barbie in a Barbie world…”), not the usual game of selling out to your conquerors; e.g., the “X-Men problem,” below, showing that such liminalities afford subversive or subjugated rebellious/assimilative potential through the same monsters, heroes, Amazons, what-have-you: something becoming sexy or sexist by virtue of its relationship to labor, nature and profit—cop or victim, often a manner of secret identities and other such “out in the open” disguises discouraging or encouraging blind consumption.

(artist: Yora)

Per the duality of the cryptonymy process, any monster becomes a mask that can be used in good faith or bad faith in order to challenge or serve profit;; i.e., abused by those saying they’re the oppressed rebel, fascism decaying any language of rebellion (re: feminism, rock ‘n roll, queer liberation) as historically reclaimed by oppressed parties afterwards, then abused by standard-to-token state proponents playing the white Indian or wearing the white mask (white in function, green in appearance, if that makes sense); e.g., Ian Kochinski being caught with loli-style child porn on his computer during a live stream, then trying to say it was “goblin porn” (simultaneously appropriating other cultures and entire poetic artforms into a “pedo-jacket” DARVO his young and/or predatory[6a] fanbase can parrot for him; Bad Empanada’s “Vaush P*dophilia Controversy: Disgusting Fans & Orbiters MELT DOWN Defending Him,” 2024). It becomes a game inside a game, one filled with bluffs made by mad actors, players and educators; that’s how fascists work, hence Capitalism and its seemingly more moderate forms. It becomes a game inside a game, one filled with bluffs made by bad actors, players and educators; that’s how fascists work, hence Capitalism and its seemingly more moderate forms, but also oppressed people acting in bad faith against activists[6b] to trample liberatory nuance and surety of purpose.

Simply put, context matters. For example, my partner generally sees themselves as a “shortstack goblin” or dinky little gremlin, etc; but they’re also short, fat and Indigenous, using the spunky language of goblins to be sexually descriptive and culturally appreciative while acknowledging the playful side such plucky poetics equally afford. Small people exist, and such fictions speak to their lived realities as adults; and just as often, there’s a fantastical element to such media, speaking to possible worlds, peoples, and identities trying to intersect and solidarize, “Talkin’ About a Revolution” (e.g., as a trans woman, I often identify with Elphaba Thropp, despite not having green skin or female genitals; i.e., as a trans woman, I’m still a witch to burn at the proverbial stake). The beauty of struggle is the attempt, living and dying with those you love united radically against tyranny (not for it) as mundane as old white capitalists and as tragic as the middle class punching down. It’s possible to play with such language of domination and bondage, slavery and escape, and not be culturally appropriative; i.e., green skin is generally a xenophobic marker for “spectral blackface,” but historically concerns bias, stigmas and taboos that were simply “black” as a matter of the dialectic of shelter and the alien: made inside medieval Europe (and its hauntologies) concerning places and times when systemic racism and slavery didn’t exist but now does.

The praxial idea is to use pre-capitalist rhetoric to process  trauma while pushing towards a post-scarcity world in a xenophilic way that shirks tokenism and police infiltration/subterfuge. It’s not “edgy” or contrarian to want basic human rights, nor rights for animals and the environment argued for by stewards of nature (which workers are).

In any event, we really don’t have time to close-read these other monsters, here, but anything I say about vampiric appetites unto witches likewise applies to goblins, werewolves, ninjas, jinn, or anything other egregore you could possibly dream up and chimerize (we’ll explore goblins more in Volume Three, and werewolves more in the Demon Module and also in Volume Three). The Gothic is modular, thus friendly to hybrids! —Perse

Such doubles reverse the direction that right the flow of power and resources; i.e., the virgin lamb of God and the whore profaning said virgin, stealing such souls for themselves; e.g., the Belmonts and Dracula playing cops and victims per the usual Crusades righting the flow during a liminal hauntology of war blasting the castle, the church, the land and lord. In canonical terms, it’s DARVO, another settler argument defending the nuclear home from older occupants dressed up as decrepit foreign plots (then occupying that in bad faith). In ecclesiastical language, it’s a schism, the decaying Church desecrating and eating itself amid fresh factions cannibalizing older ones, mid-feeding-frenzy (reversing excommunication in the same territories).

Furthermore, such tooth-and-nail competitions of forged sovereignty have slowly evolved over the centuries into a Protestant ethic that routinely conjures up the Count (a queer, Catholic monstrous-feminine sex demon) to exorcize in bad-faith; i.e., abjecting state victims (the monstrous-feminine) into the same shadow zone as fascists and other state thugs/black penitents. During their eternal battles (a morality argument’s discipline threatened by dark temptation and desire), the usual hyphenations arise; e.g., the fang as a mouth, a dick, a knife/Cupid-style arrow shaft, and carpenter’s nail, but also a feeding tool of terror and violence no one side can monopolize during state crisis and decay’s changing of the guard.

More to the point, the states of today use such persecution mania to aggrandize themselves and alienate, then penetrate (discipline and punish) the usual victims attacked by tokenized forces spying on them (for some quick examples, read “Back to the Necropolis” and my Castlevania close-read on black Nazi vampires): as damned and wrongly accused, first likened to older forms of elite hegemony and then hung out to dry during the Imperial Boomerang (crucifixion being a “good, Roman” form of impalement versus an “evil, Transylvanian” one).

Canon or camp, vampires are basically clown zombies that prefer “blood” (sanguine); i.e., known not just for their supernatural good looks (offset, again, by anti-Semitic qualities; e.g., a vampire’s widow’s peak, rodent buck teeth and goblin big noses), but their hypnotic, Pagan powers of seduction—chiefly their bedroom eyes, staring you down while their dummy mouth hangs hungrily open, anticipating penetration when the carnal hunt out-of-bed goes to bed: “We’re gonna do it!” When that happens, “Come hither!” becomes “What are you waiting for? Take me, you fool!” becomes sleep sex (fertilizing “sleeping victims” during somno). The vampire feeds, on the top or the bottom, crucifying themselves in rapturous martyrdom (a witch “riding her broom”)!

(artists: Cuwu and Persephone van der Waard)

As such, vampiric sex becomes increasingly charged, potent like a drug in controlled, calculated-risk environments that speak to larger things outside worker control; i.e., something to deliciously tease, spurt and indulge in, offered up by the body’s natural mechanisms and society’s larger persecution rituals and considerations spouting ejaculatory (fast, sudden and violent) obsessions about “happy endings” dressed up as paradoxically “bad.” It becomes like a carnival—a “Heaven in a wild flower” spectacle to witness, appreciate and behold; i.e., not as a Pale Horse bringer-of-doom, but as a survivor of the usual abuses capital promotes and affords in bad faith:

(exhibit 41f2a2: Artist: Cuwu. “Vampire, witch, or mermaid.” Call it what you want, but the female experience is an old and punished one under imperialism, feudalism, and capital’s early-to-modern forms. It is one that finds joy in broken, scarred vulnerability and exposure as much as covering up or turning away to hide this or that. Capital makes us sick, but also turns us into rare and beautiful things we can take back from the men that we learn to grow up and fear once we become “of age.” I have nightmares from “playing” with Jadis and Zeuhl, but not of Cuwu, in this respect. My dollish puppy and castle in the flesh—how they loved to play in ways that spoke to my own damage and confused, psychosexual prey mechanisms.)

Of course, it takes a carnival and a village; i.e., not just to heal, but survive profit as a structure preying on us while, at the same time, yielding such paradoxes (as Jadis did with me). Moon-sized, our subsequent lunacy conveys big feelings and multiple, dressed-to-bare and vast, immeasurable dimensions (a hellish Cubism Picasso postured at); i.e., felt in the vague-yet-awesome presence of such a structure: to feel pain and other things expressed as the Gothic does—holistically and repeatedly across generations felt in moments!

In turn, these account collectively and individually for the miracle of the human condition; i.e., through all the usual routes and pathways, but also unique poetic expressions you may (or may not) have heard before; e.g., mayhaps Pat Benatar’s “Anxiety” and a lady in a man’s world, the expression “bees inside a jar!” speaking to the multicultural, foot-in-both-worlds experience of Thin Lizzy’s black-and-Irish Lynott. The latter’s titular whiskey speaks to similar containers and feelings, but for hybrid joy and despair on dashing portraits of folklore. Told as well through the Jewish-penned KISS or Parsi in British lands, Freddy Mercury (crooning as only a bisexual man in the ’70s and ’80s trapped in the closet can), we’re left with a certain shrinking and expanding not unlike Radcliffe’s horror and terror for emotions; Lovecraft’s giant, ageless and citied Great Old Ones; “no moon, it’s a space station” reaching operatically towards you like Walpole’s giant armor (the Capitalocene): something to claim, like Lizzy’s glittering and sorrowful “Emerald” (1976) told in heavy metal, comic-book lingo (with all the usual sex, drugs and rollicking adventure thrown in).

All of the above might seem to be at odds—of different times, places and formats—but all speak to the same complicated, oxymoronic things that result; i.e., from living under something as awful as Capitalism and as vast as mighty as planet Earth. Anything else is inadequate, too small and too big—like Alice getting it backwards, out of joint, the white rabbit chasing its tail, trapped in a mirror, cell, or pane of glass:

(artists: Persephone van der Waard and Cuwu)

Camping such mise-en-abyme ravings, a pedagogy of the oppressed feels “wrong” and right; i.e., navigated and performed by superfreak baddies for whom comedy and comorbidity overlap (vulnerable parties—including women, witches and Pagans, neurodivergent people, the mentally ill, queer folk, employees and/or rape victims—being continually preyed upon by sexual predators the system protects and enables pursuant to profit unto medicalized victims). You don’t generally walk away from trauma unscathed, and it’s quite common for those affected (with minds like carnivals, having confused pleasure and pain responses) to reestablish some sense of control; i.e., over their lived trauma by turning recollections of it into a ludo-Gothic BDSM performance letting them recontextualize and control their condition during the rememory process: camping our holocausts and survivals thereof; e.g., a standup routine. In turn, the bedroom becomes an apocalypse to revel in, reckoning with delicious forms of “death,” rape play and ecstasy!

To this, there are no perfect victims, and no easy victories; trauma needn’t define us, but does often break and freeze us in ways that make us undead, trapped inside ourselves in ways that don’t age (like the vampire). The victory is learning to live with that, and to stand up to bullies who want us to know our place as conquered people: “We don’t have to defeat them. Just fight them.” Rome wasn’t burned in a day and Communism is something that will take centuries to develop; i.e., we won’t live to see it, but we can contribute towards its inception by shifting a cultural understanding of the imaginary past in a sex-positive direction!

As far as that goes, sex-positive BDSM helps people who have been abused, who themselves tend to gravitate towards, if not abuse, then the weirdness that abuse brings (“hair of the dog that bit me”) that is often adjacent to abuse (with abuse turning people into cops or victims, generally as soft-to-hard fragmented surfaces and personalities). Per these comorbidities, they do so not to put themselves in hot water once again, but to seek and find control through calculated risk; e.g., telling someone trustworthy to fuck you harder (“More, more, more!”), knowing you’ll be sore but finding that paradoxically sweet spot; i.e., an oxymoronic safe space to experience erogenous pleasure and non-harmful pain to the degree that you need to paradoxically feel safe, thus in control again. But that’s what bodies and friends are for! “Hurt, not harm,” my dudes! Find someone you like and build on connections of exchange—of give and take, like a vampire, founding new pedagogies of the oppressed.

In fact, such vampirism agrees with rape survivors (for which cops rape everyone in service to profit), but also argues back and forth, pulling us thirstily into the medieval, grave-like “openings” above ground (more “live burial” puns, vaginal and/or phallic): noisily[7] swallowing rich creamy fluids/moist essence (“cake” and other yummy euphemisms) and giving back fatal, hard-earned wisdom during various, almost-holy sex parties. In short, it’s fun, playful, and cathartic, but also ubiquitous, ace and educational unto victims normally blamed by those canonically starved of a good, healthy education!

As such, vampirism and witchcraft constitute an ambiguous charge as much as a voluntary act, and vampires in particular (whatever the performer) are constantly taking things into themselves whether they want to or not. For instance, the elite feed while alienated from life through a system that preys on life, trying to stay young by exsanguinating the lower classes; said classes feed because a) the elite incentivize them to betray their own class interests, and b) because victims must camp their own survival as something to reify and pass onto others (to transfuse, from one exchange to the next).

Such imbibing and insertions combine to form a heady charm offensive thoroughly at odds with someone’s skin-deep beauty and undead appearance, their gaudy wealth and/or rich appetites belying an addict’s compulsions, pauper’s appetites and fugitive’s outlaw status (not all vampires are monetarily sound, the classic vampire being unhoused and seeking invitation to commit crimes against goodly property owners): the Judgement-Day quality of Christian miracles directed at state targets inside the prison, ghetto or settler colony’s state of exception, deliberately unable to enjoy the luxurious side such implements normally afford; e.g., churchly blood magic married to in-group double standards, whereupon transubstantiation (exhibit 41i) speaks to “tolerable,” dogmatic forms of vampirism and cannibalism the elite co-opt and recuperate through canonical monsters (which they project onto anyone they want to persecute, thus profit from).

Denied the pleasures of the flesh/gratuitous wealth they’re commonly associated with (as Jewish-coded slaves and wealthy sodomites, either being enabled merely to prey on Christian men and their wives), such beings are always to some degree “outside, incorrect, alien, monstrous-feminine,” etc; i.e., must be investigated/turned inside-out as one moral panic climbs and intensifies to the next; e.g., from witches to homosexual men to trans people becoming their epochs’ disease of the day for conservatives—literally turning on themselves—to purify and cull the unsuspecting herd and shepherd alike (as the more faithfully blind apparently are doing with Andrew Tate[8], above). When society is a little sick, it will eat itself through quarantines/panopticons; when those are breached, the doctors will pivot to eating themselves, turning everyone into “patients” carrying the same “disease” (the real “mind virus” being fascism as “asleep,” not social justice and equal rights’ “woke” tendencies).

Despite their signature, corpse-like paleness, fash-adjacent cosmetic, and dollish affect/obvious serial-killer qualities (something to unmask and confirm, apocalypse-style, as predatory and duplicitous), vampires commonly occupy the “black” side of the settler colony argument. From Jews to witches to female sex workers (mistresses/women of the night) to gay men, etc, some such “darkness visible” (the cross-dressing aberrant) is always blamed regarding societal collapse; i.e., assigning guilt onto state victims (with similarity amid difference) instead of the elite on a systemic level. Abjecting predation, mid-witch-hunt, this includes fascists bastardizing such positions to police the same unhappy groups (which moderates then apologize for); i.e., “degeneracy” and extramarital sex blaming capital’s victims for its built-in boom-and-bust cycles: a return to tradition and greatness while surrendering everyone’s rights and closeting healthy apostatic impulses in favor of predatory systems torturing people and surveilling them on all registers!

Checking for vermin—e.g., the vampire’s bats, reptiles, rats and wolves—God knows how you fuck and how you want to fuck! Vanilla vs Satanic pell-mell, the former outshined by hell-bent-for-leather “hurly burly” (again, a marriage of war and peace, Heaven and Hell, and other such forbidden unions)! It’s an old advertiser’s trick: show food, but classify it as “sinful,” then sell it back to workers as double-stuffed, extra-smoky guilty pleasure (forbidden fruit during manufactured scarcity’s feast-or-famine[9] socio-material conditions)! Talk about sex; get hungry for sin (which one, the state polices to justify its own existence, and two, the middle class enjoys [through stagey “corporal punishment” as a kind of terrible in-joke] while punching unironically downwards as colonizers do by design: aping the colonized to better rape them with)! Free love, counterculture drug use and fucking to metal, Black-Sabbath-style, tragically become just another witch hunt, except it’s by the practitioners (re: “Young Goodman Brown”); i.e., more canon to camp (as Lossow does, below): flying high as witches so often do (vampires usually turn into bats to gain the power of flight, drinking blood to do so; witches make flying potions out of baby fat, a Christian rumor started from Hammer of Witches, constantly used to justify violence against Pagan women, but really any monstrous-feminine practitioners of “witchcraft,” “blood spells” and “sodomy”).

(artist: Heinrich Lossow)

Whatever the form, the forbidden fruit becomes superstitiously fatal; i.e., the vampire’s cacophonous/diaphanously messy and sectarian vaudeville typically abjects gluttony (and the other cardinal sins) onto the underclass as something to “finish off” ad infinitum (to ride hard and put away wet during “prison sex” violence). When turned on its head, these weighty accusations shake and wiggle to showcase the hypocritical, glittering appetites of the holier-than-thou middle class (which the state will weaponize against said gatekeepers all over again, policing the blood bank): “God” amounting to the bourgeoisie mobilizing class traitors with cheap trinkets and Judas-grade love spells, turning them into sexual predators sucking the lower classes dry and transferring most of it upwards! “The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak,” indeed!

There’s no way to prevent such police division and brutality (cops and victims, victims policing victims) without “eating the apple,” as it were; i.e., drinking “blood” serving as a dualistic metaphor useful to knowledge and power exchange in any form poetry can conjure up and transform into whatever workers need versus Capitalism and the state (whatever its forms, alliances, and proponents require); e.g., handling our own trauma while interrogating and negotiating it with others, all whilst wearing and removing masks to feed for different reasons (who the state will try to turn against us by having us feed on, and contribute towards, each other’s trauma: enabling it mid-relationship while refusing to endorse those non-toxic qualities of us that make workers more emotionally/Gothically intelligent and aware of such matters during the loss, grief and catharsis of class, culture and race warfare).

Dualities aside, the vampire is canonically demasked as a serial adulterer or assassin (with Christopher Lee, below, having worked undercover for the S.A.S., to kill Germans[10]), but also people conflated with such things who don’t commit adultery or murder/police violence of any sort—are merely trying to survive while kettled inside penitentiaries of reactive abuse and, under mandated cloaks of darkness, forced to wear such dubious mantles; i.e., calling them “hungry like the wolf” minus Duran Duran’s disco charm, the creatures of the night gnawing at their own legs to get away from cops. It speaks to our oppression expressed in liberatory forms in on the violence; i.e., of camp subverting dominion (and the unsustainable farming of abject parties) as an ongoing problem to play with; e.g., our vermin, hell-spawn status seeing red at the accusation, then scurrying to safety after a good threat display (and again, being framed as sodomites for getting pink eye while eating ass[11]): stink eye from Hell!

Again, the usual dualities, silly-serious theatrics, and criminal visual ambiguities/paradoxes (e.g., Nazi-Communist, gay-straight, teeth-mouth, blood-witch, lips-vulva, penis-vagina) abound, and we don’t have time to break the Fourth Wall and point all these immunocompromisations out (e.g., AIDs, but also venereal appetites). Instead, try to keep the holistic, tangential, interconnected, and non-granular principles unpacked during the zombie chapter in mind; they’ll come up repeatedly here when talking about vampires/witches and ghosts, but also demons and animals in their respective module/chapters (all which grow shorter than the “Bad Dreams” chapter[12] because of it! Generally I tend to write nonstop, then establish boundaries; i.e., placing a bubble around the dialog after the dialog is written. Here, though, things are previously laid out—first through the Poetry Module and then through the “Bad Dreams” chapter of the Undead Module—so I don’t feel the need to overstress the holistic variables; i.e., limits I’m imposing partway through, just to keep things moving towards the current module’s end point).

In any case, the line between zombies and vampires, witches and ghosts inside the state of exception is a thin one; all concern rape and war trauma as something to endorse mid-feeding ritual as embellished during state decay as something to face: the state eats people, who eat each other when the state dies, devolving into sex bandits, but also dated cartoons of such piracy enjoying police protection (stochastic terrorism) versus those who look the same throwing such shackles off.

To that, zombies eat brains to put “trauma” in quotes, but also express its unironic forms that communicate anisotropically by much the same means (re: slavery through “lobotomy” as dogmatic). Here, we want to humanize other classes of undead (or things made undead, like witches) through their own viral feeding mechanisms as cryptomimetically tokenized; i.e., the eating with, and of, the dead more broadly that vampires and ghosts also represent. When returning to plague the living in ways that aren’t quite alive or dead (and to some extent, composite bodies and animalized monsters, which we’ll examine more closely in the next module), vampires become something to canonically “slay” and enjoy per a given witch hunt’s nostalgic “stranger danger”; i.e., when the language of war combines with that of food, death, superstition, and love, etc, but also power and criminality as dualistically arbitrated between dialectical-material agents: as policing or defending nature-as-monstrous-feminine!

Saying nothing about homosexual cis men (more on them in “A Brief History of Queer love”) or queer-coded straight guys from non-English countries[13], many token vampires/marginalized targets are actually female, GNC and/or some Paganized degree of “non-white” (often by body type, next page). Continuing our crash course on vampires and witches, let’s quickly unpack that in popular media, including pornography and videogames (as these will come up later when looking at Red Hook’s Countess, from The Darkest Dungeon)!

From a classically female standpoint, such witches are nocturnal feeders, rogues, and “ladies” of the night (female or not; re: men in dresses) married to modern notions of sin linked to “non-white” bodies “of nature”; i.e., not just witches, but “Gothic(c)’ witches (again, next page) yielding a popular aesthetic, one whose dialogs can be canonized or camped to varying violent, sexual, terrorist and morphological degrees (re: the bourgeois monopolies): the chonky drinkers of blood, animalistic defilers of “modest” women, levitating eaters of children and babies (all anti-Semitic tropes) overlapping or separating witches, goblins and vampires (etc) as state DARVO/obscurantism calls for per cycle. Such predation becomes a witch hunt holiday that blames the usual victims (e.g., women, Pagans, Jewish people, immigrants, non-whites, Indigenous populations, etc) by the usual predators (the elite and their standardized/tokenized defenders) abjecting their prey throughout the year in pursuit of a good harvest over many years: village scapegoat rituals fencing the usual holocausts under capital. That’s what videogames canonically are, but also canonical Gothic novels and cinema, etc.

Per the queenly idea of vampirism, “the lady doth protest too much” becomes a matter of crossdress and performatively wearing out stigmas; i.e., to deliberately camp the police using them sans irony. All the same, such genderqueer cries for help have ambiguous, “predatory” elements that travel and feed transiently on others as a matter of worker revenge; i.e., in ways that manifest dualistically as either sex-positive or sex-coercive; e.g., knock-knock-knock-knocking on chamber doors and seeking invitations inside to drain that warm essence in reptilian, cold-blooded fashion (re: Judas Priest’s “Love Bites,” 1984)! Again, performative context—of the vampiric, witchy (of nature) double entendre as confusing on purpose, paradoxically both dead serious and a complete joke, tasteful and profane; e.g., Always Sunny‘s creampie skit—is what matters during ludo-Gothic BDSM; i.e., flow of power determining function through the arbitration and aesthetics of rape play and domination unto the destroyer’s would-be “victims” (the quotes determined by said theatre’s context).

To it, the stalwart policewoman/token dominatrix sex pirate shares the spotlight, but also the body with the rockstar Communist bugbear’s Jewish (Oriental, non-white, Satanic, queer) revenge. Mail-order bridal appearances and respective badassery aside, cops take for the elite, made to gaslight, gatekeep, girl boss the usual vermin, the latter forced to survive extermination while wearing the same witchy clothes (or lack of clothes, below); rebels redistribute power amongst workers in defense of nature (disguising the “ad unfriendly” character’s activism inside pornographic tolerances), using their sexually charged surfaces and hazardous thresholds to do so—i.e., the revenant’s hellish opera of fatal attraction and forbidden, criminal, problematic love (e.g., Near Dark, Dracula, Twilight, and a million other vampire stories): lust or love, “she wants what she’s never had, all the things that make a good girl bad!” (The Scorpions’ “Kicks after Six,” 1991). It’s not “slumming” if it speaks to one group’s oppression without appropriating and cannibalizing another’s out of pretty revenge. The proletariat needs to solidarize intersectionally but can still own the usual framings of power by reclaiming them:

(artist: Rushzilla)

My point, here, is that the undead make for odd contradictions marketed and sold under capital: classically horny, gay and angry, but also oddly pretty hot and tempting (the PAWG white girl that’s “too big” per a settler-colonial model, having the whore-like immodest body that’s seen as sexually aggressive and melon-like; i.e., “fat and sassy”). The virgin is seemingly the prize, but the monomyth hero is always out, “slaying” dark, queenly and utterly stacked whores; i.e., our resident castles in the flesh, quivering and groaning in psychosexual ecstasy (there’s also room for sex-positive interpretations; beware anyone who says otherwise)! It’s a mood.

To this, the pornographic qualities of Gothic hauntologies fetishize the alien as black-and-white simultaneously within an industry-grade body type: to oscillate towards the beautiful and repulsive as dogmatic, not factual, pimping the ghost of the counterfeit out in ways that harm all parties differently while pandering to all walks; e.g., white girls told to be skinny and fat to please different men in the same predatory scheme (the porn industry [and frankly Gothic canon at large] preying on female and GNC bodies any way it can, maximizing profit and minimizing [the value] of human labor as reprobate—suffering and exploitation made alien unto nature as such); i.e., devices to canonically trigger the usual incapacitating emotions (shame, guilt, impostor syndrome, etc) and infantilizing states of existence, mid-tokenization and assimilation (re: gas light, gatekeep, girl boss; repeat, but also oscillate as an abusive partner world to their victim):

(artist: Rushzilla)

There’s nothing wrong with being sexually descriptive, provided it’s sex-positive, thus challenges profit (and by extension, genocide). Per liminal expression, both exploitation and liberation, subversion and subjugation, salvation and sycophantism, retribution and resurrection, humility and hubris, agency and arrest, morality and mammon, etc, exist on the same vampire bodies and stages; the owners are like dolls, but also uncannily sympathetic (as vice characters often are) and repulsive (the latter fact something they disguise with tissue that cannot regenerate, thus must grow new flesh through addictive metaphors of psychosexual theft and revenge: stolen flesh, blood, brains, cum, whatever); i.e., carrots and sticks to pacify and scare workers, but also entice with various love language relayed as “meat” (e.g., sausage or fish).

To that, white witches are literally caregivers to men (and patriarchal forces); black witches start their service to Satan as young comely brides, only to grow old and withered, thus more invested in eating babies and castrating[14] men than cuckolding field hands and bridegrooms, or telling innocent Kansas farmgirls, “I’ll get you, and your little dog, too!” (re: hag horror).

(artist: Bayeuxman)

Remember that “undead” is a feeling tied to psychosexual exploitation: raping the Medusa as not having a set ethnicity or body shape, religion, or monster type, etc; e.g., witches and vampires; i.e, “black” as a binary half that merits the chasing and exploitation of dogmatically forbidden fruit; re: of nature-as-monstrous-feminine through capital dehumanizing the harvest while plumping its undead “melons” up (an Aphrodite’s fortress to fortify, storm and reclaim nature as “ripe for rape,” time and time again). Desperately wronged, it’s common for the vampire to aimlessly and furiously seek revenge (versus a more cheerful, positive-oriented sexual liberation, left); i.e., from beyond the graves of poorly contained holocausts betrayed by seemingly gentle-looking ladies (and other peaceful protestors) acting “uppity” in ways that will lead to them being policed. Except, settler colonialism marries racism and police violence to other tokenized bigotries in popular media at large, starting with gorgons and witches as comparable to vampires in function; i.e., women are space aliens to stare at, fear and fantasize about, but likewise tied to a territory and its population that can be dominated by scandal and stereotype (as all monstrous-feminine are): the aforementioned “cry of the carrots, and this is their holocaust!” Sooner or later, that castrates capital!

(exhibit 41f2a2: Source, top-left: The Art Fuse; bottom-left: Mubi. Witches are classically depicted in threes, like the Fates/Gorgons, pushed forwards into Shakespeare’s “three weird sisters” in Macbeth onto less numerically faithful versions like Roman Polanski’s baby-snatchers in Rosemary’s Baby onto that protracted mickey-the-chudwad bit from Midsommar having so much Rubenesque hag flesh [above, right] encouraging the young “couple” to fuck and further the cult’s infernal lifespan [“I am woman, hear me fuck!”].

Witches, like vampires, have youthful and aged visages that fluctuate based on their mood. Sometimes they’re younger and more attractive to those they hunt [often young, sexist, ageist, anti-Semitic dude bros]; sometimes they appear older [and not as attractive to the aforementioned group]. Just as often, though, a witch can—like a vampire—change her shape and wield familial power over nature in ways that terrify patriarchal rulers and their structures of patrilineal descent; i.e., their literal ability to reproduce; e.g., Midsommar‘s love spell made by the slutty redhead’s period blood[!] into a kind of sex potion that, as the film would have it, tells the future as a kind of code playing out, time and time again; re: the castration fantasy pointedly merged with cuckold fears, village persecution myth, forced parentage, and the vasovagal response.

Sexual predators commonly weaponize such Freudian dogma; i.e., hiding their own abuse behind monstrous stereotypes they can combine and splinter at will; e.g., while Shakespeare was a gay bigot who wrote Othello and The Merchant of Venice [neither story being especially kind to women, it must be said], Polanski is a literal pedophile who rapes underage women and fetishizes older women in the above witchy stereotypes.

To be fair to Shakespeare, though, his Lady Macbeth [Polanski adapted the film for Playboy in 1971, top-left] is at least a useful analog for female revenge aped by more recent feminist tokenisms; i.e., imploring the “phallic” desire for revenge, doing so in ways that speak to tokenization by emulating the men in charge:

Come, you spirits
That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here,

And fill me from the crown to the toe top-full

Of direst cruelty. Make thick my blood.

Stop up th’ access and passage to remorse,
That no compunctious visitings of nature
Shake my fell purpose [source].

Such myopic, unironically fascist feminism is best canonized in Angela Carter and Barbara Creed’s dated, singularly female, tokenized, Amazonian revenge fantasies and theories [exhibit 41g1a2]. To that, we have to do better than they and Shakespeare did; i.e., by both not treating [white cis] women as the universal victims of patriarchal systems, and simultaneously making sure the desire to not be a victim doesn’t lead oppressed peoples to triangulate, thus punch down against, themselves and those in the same proverbial boat!

 

Keeping with the witch-hunt framing, this extends to witches and vampires that corporations sell to potentially tokenized consumers, the latter devouring persecution for DARVO and obscurantist purposes; i.e., these shamelessly appropriative cartoons become co-opted and celebrated by women and other marginalized peoples for simply being female, of color and/or queer versions of “Caesar’s ghost”; e.g., Drolta Tzuentes from Castlevania: Nocturne [2023, above] as a black Nazi vampire [one we discussed previously, in “Back to the Necropolis,” 2024]. To it, former symbols of rebellion become Red Scare “Nazis” that righteous heroes can stand off against and put down; i.e., not Medusa or Dracula at all, but a witch cop who tokenizes to enjoy the brutalizer’s glove, then surrenders their neck as the script demands depleting “sodomy” of its proletarian energies. Unlike these Judas goats, liberation isn’t simply “to get mad,” but enrage in ways that constitute actual rebellion; re: fascism is a false rebellion, their revenge being to sell out, effectively betraying their own kind by playing into the elite’s most poisonous and pernicious stereotypes. It’s self-defeating and sad!

Frankly, the same goes for any token minority on a spectrum of relative privilege and punishment recuperating monstrous-feminine language for profit; i.e., the desire to fit in—to belong inside a prison-like environment—as gentrified and sold back to different oppressed groups orbiting Paganized cosmetics speaking to the very out-groups tempted with class betrayal. In the Gothic tradition since Radcliffe, usually this appeal is leveled at white middle-class girls [or those wearing white masks, above]. Furthermore, this recuperation of alien poetics as married to the middle class probably sounds like Harry Potter and the Hogwarts Wizarding School, but is actually as old as witch culture, itself. Except, you needn’t go back to Hammer of Witches to make that point; the 1980s will do just as well:

Stories like The Worst Witch sing, Elphaba-Thropp-style [“Growing up… isn’t easy!”], about the perils of growing up as a perceived outsider with some degree of actual insider status; i.e., in a world that is already ruled by powerful wizards, and where Halloween is everyday of the year among an established, settler-colonial system and its monomythic structure: a white, British, all-girls boarding school.

The whole point of the above example is for Margaret Hubble to uncover an internal conspiracy/foreign plot, save the school form said plot, and earn the respect of her teachers [Diana Rigg slaying it as Miss Constance, bottom-left, but most important of them being the Wizard, himself, played wonderfully by Tim Curry’s “Dracula,” top-left]. Sure, it’s campy and queer-coded to some extent, but goofy earworms like “Anything Can Happen on Halloween” [revisited by Mega64 in 2010] still relay the spirit of infinite possibility as commercialized; i.e., told from an exclusively white/tokenized, middle-class childhood sold back to fresh tweens [or regressing adults] in neoliberal fashion: false hope and personal responsibility rhetoric amid austerity politics and societal collapse! Blame Thatcher and Reagan for pimping Paganism, kids!

[artist Drew Struzan]

Furthermore, the made-for-TV movie is oddly faithful when installing a witch as the Dorothy-esque savior “rescuing Oz” from a “wicked” witch for a “good” witch and her male patriarch [the lead actress—the wonderfully incongruous Fairuza Balk—had already starred in Return to Oz from two years previous, and would be typecast to play different witches and social outcasts[15] throughout her career]. In turn, the language of rebellion and alienation have—like many older, pre-Western cultures—gone the way less of the dodo and more the Cherokee: “Kill the Indian, save the man.” In the end, these symbols become hollowed-out, thoroughly dead, sugary metaphors to sell to the middle class, who feel alienated inside Capitalism and the imperial, settler-colonial scheme.

Black, white, or somewhere in between, whatever the slave or out-group being targeted, conformity is the elite’s greatest weapon—the only way they keep holding onto power! To challenge that, we must take back Halloween [and vampires and witches, etc] in ways they can’t commodify/turn into a toothless, sing-song[16] holiday [which, as per tradition, will gentrify and decay as all capitalist territories and boundaries do, above—overshadowed by “Pagan” obscurantism and the Protestant ethic to go wild for the state and the state alone]! To it, the state splices various feelings and monstrous states to enlist them for its usual predation on workers and nature; e.g., witches and undeath through feelings of exclusive predation [white Indians, but also black skin, white masks, etc, playing at guerrillas during asymmetrical warfare (stochastic terrorism) for the state]. As such, we can’t let past trauma [ours or others] destroy us and turn us into gatekeepers; we must be able to laugh at our past while being honest about it in ways that don’t scare others off [regardless of their trauma]! Don’t fear the reaper; fear becoming the reaper for the state inside their prison-like systems and states of exception!

There’s no such thing as a perfect victim, though; all workers have some degree of trauma [and the elite and their charmed lives have been alienated and either don’t know it or lack the capacity to care]. Trauma attracts trauma; weird attracts weird as a matter of searching for kindred lost souls. The paradox of such liminality and entanglement, then, is feeling alien while in the closet, then coming out to feel more genuine according to destinies we make alongside those we feel privileged to lose ourselves around and inside; i.e., to go deep and last forever as we finish and come up for air—and gasping for breath, our “sex hair” a total mess—stinking with hot joy and delight, longing to dive desperately back through that underworldly membrane, plunging and raising up to heavenly delights! “Paradise” is a garden of paradoxes; the mind-body connection “its own place, [where one or more] can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.”

[artist: Bay]

My exes always treated me like a piece of meat, in that respect, all while acting more oppressed for it, themselves. It left me hating myself and searching for someone who wouldn’t prey on me, but rather take me to special worlds I’d heard about as a little girl, much little Dorothy did in black-and-white Kansas. For me, that’s Bay—someone I can play with and be myself without shame or fear of rejection or harm, but someone who labors alongside me to create this book series as it currently stands! They’re my witch, good and wicked, white and black, sweet and fierce, for workers one and all, sharing the perils of persecution and pleasure, hand-in-hand!

The paradox is, witches are wholly paramount to “colorizing our lives” [as Meatloaf puts it]: blood-red, vampires enacting Jewish revenge to “better the instruction”; i.e., as making workers more aware and less cruel, but still able to plea for witches and nature: “If you prick me, do I not bleed? If you wrong me, shall I not revenge?” Indeed, such muses and play are a constant, multi-staged and cross-media relationship that is vital to cultivate through praxis, taking all workers Over the Rainbow and into the magical land of Gothic Communism; i.e., as a world only waiting to be dreamt up and made real out of old dead things—as common as straw and stuffed into a scarecrow that sparked with the miracle of gay witchcraft, dances and springs to rare, precious life.)

Take this nature-is-a-witch problem to its logical conclusion regarding vampires, then: trauma warps us without changing how we look on the outside; i.e., some of the fiercest predators I’ve encountered having been originally preyed on for their looks, only to weaponize their profession (sex work) against future victims using said looks (re: Jadis, Jade, and various AFAB sex workers during my own brush with transmisogynistic sex workers). This reflects in stories concerned with apocalypse—of Imperialism coming home to empire.

To it, gore and carnage don’t stay inside during a grim harvest; they spill out everywhere, occupied by impostors for or against the state, the viewing of said offal freezing their victims helplessly in place (the vampire, ghost or composite feeding through disguises that, whether intentional, incidental or both, allow them to get close enough to feed on someone): raping the whore per the monomyth—and its phallic synonymizing of unironic sex and force (the gun/knife dick) to suit state aims—as something for us to camp to Hell and back inside the same ghastly spaces made available through popular media; i.e., maps of conquest; re: Tolkien and Cameron’s refrains.

Hell, as I’ve said, is always a place on Earth, generally in reference to neoliberal refrains (videogames) that attach to real-world places and witch-hunter politics linking back to said refrains; i.e., from “Transylvania” in quotes to Palestine and its neighboring territories of conquest defended by state forces even when the apocalypse denudes; e.g., the Rational National’s “Israel Strikes Sheltering Palestinians in Open Defiance of Recent ICJ Order” (2024). To this, the IDF bombs Rafah to the same degree as Gaza, disobeying the ICJ (no surprise, there) because that’s what the state does. American liberals and good-cop centrists elsewhere will ignore these realities until they can’t, then condemn them with meaningless lip service that “both sides” everything and sheds tears at the funerals of those presented as “undead,” hence doomed to die during state witch hunts: blaming black knights but calling their victims “terrorists,” too.

To that, witches and fags likewise decay into fascists! We cannot avoid or hide from state abuse and tokenization, then, but instead must go where power is to calculate and learn from it, mid-calculated risk, and prevent capital’s resurgence now and into the future; i.e., fucking with witches and vampires as our friends, but also speaking to state disguises posturing as such on shared stages. The fact remains, American Liberalism yields smiling cunts who rape Medusa (skinny or thicc) as violent pornography remediated through all kinds of power fantasies, including games (video other otherwise). Whatever the size, genre or shape, it’s all a dogmatic sham, pinning the blame on whomever the state requires during moral panics concerned with regression at home and overseas: “Ricky Butler says they’re nocturnal feeders!”

Jokes aside, this endless remediation quickly becomes a Whac-a-Mole game, targeting “Nazis”; i.e., campy forms thereof that are anything but fascist, and which practicing fascists dogwhistle with strawman arguments that encourage police violence against queer people (and other marginalized groups) reclaiming Gothic poetics—but especially the BDSM language known to vampires—from fascist Pax Americana forces: weird canonical nerds raised on such dreck as Puritanically nostalgic to them, playing videogames to defend the nuclear family (and maidens) from those pesky witches, whores and, yes, vampires!

Speaking of which, we’ve looked at zombies feeding horrifyingly in broad daylight; now let’s look at vampires of all shapes and sizes feeding as the undead commonly do—at night (sex with the lights off, in essence): “What a horrible night to have a curse!”

(source: Reddit)

While novels and cinema capture the sensation of a vampire (rape) epidemic, videogames like Castlevania III (1989) allow the player to embody the monomythic witch hunter hunting nature; i.e., by chasing the Medusa down and raping her to death (the hypermasculine, Jojo-style Belmonts commonly whipping Dracula—a male monstrous-feminine vamp—with their slavers’ whips during a bourgeois form of torture/demon BDSM: fascist leather daddies working for the state). In such cases, nature is still monstrous-feminine, witches and vampires treated as the devil’s cohort, thus needing to be collectively punished or cajoled into betraying nature for the Greater Good (the devil’s rejects, welcomed by the Church). To it, the good guys are war criminals posturing as the Greater Good under displaced American exceptionalism (that’s Japanese neoliberalism for you: exporting American xenophobia and Crusades-style violence back onto its own burgeoning youth).

Such argumentation, as a matter of playing things out onscreen, still constitutes witch hunter dogma in a half-real sense; i.e., its violent pornography plays out disproportionately offscreen, too. Plenty of super-dumb arguments have been made about videogames causing “actual violence,” but barring outright anti-videogame propaganda, the endorsement of canonical us-versus-them values in videogames historically translates to apathy by the colonizer group brutalizing the colonized by proxy through such stories; i.e., when literal genocides are going on, the usual benefactors of capital (white cis-het men and those aping them through Man Box attitudes) do their gold-star best to stay “apolitical”—all while grinding for their latest PB, tournament prize, dubious YouTube sponsorship, and having multiple, real-life Nazi friends; e.g., Karl Jobst; re: a literal pickup artist harassing flesh-and-blood women, then selling it in a now-discontinued grift he exchanged for speedrunner royalty status. Like all fascists, he’s a conman hiding in plain sight.

In turn, this historical-material apathy is encouraged by sexist, queerphobic and tokenized police violence bleeding into recent copaganda hauntologies—like videogames and Castlevania, of course, but also their offshoots borrowing from other stories ripped from Gothic canon centuries-old; i.e., police violence being committed by the good guys (who all happen to be straight or normative/tokenized to some degree) killing the bad guys as fash but also Communist-coded; re: a zombie apocalypse leveled at other forms of undead, including vampires, as victims to be returned to the Earth, post-invasion. Simply put, cop hearts don’t bleed for witches/gays because they’re raised from an early age to think we (their victims) aren’t human; we’re bugs to squash and push out of our homes, often by token neighbors turning a blind eye. Killing us is a mercy in their eyes, but also, distraction!

In other words, just like Gaza, Rwanda, Cambodia, the AIDS crisis, neoliberal shock therapy unto the former Soviet Union, CIA assassinations, and other such pro-American policies at home and abroad, their collective symptoms stem from the same problem: capital and copaganda; i.e., the sort celebrated in indie circuits chasing profit by selling canonical monster war (and its witch hunts’ anti-Semitic fatal nostalgia under Capitalism Realism) to kids yet again; e.g., with Red Hook’s Darkest Dungeon and Countess doing the same thing that Lovecraft did, a century ago! Nature is a whore, a vampire and witch all rolled into one:

(exhibit 41f2b1: Artist, left: Dieser Welt; right: Liyuw099. Per the anti-Semitic origins of vampire and witch myths, little vampires come abortively from big Numinous vampires as ravenous broodmares/sodomites; these vice characters [and the purity arguments used to enact blood libel against them by “good Christians”] merge with the pre-fascist elements to the Order of the Dragon’s great-warrior posturing covered in black and red; i.e., in ways seemingly removed from Catholic dogma, but still staking vampires as the game’s go-to witch.

This is classically gendered, like the Gothic. The Dragon Lord or Dracula is classically male under Western systems of oppression [the master/slave dynamic]. The female variation extends to nature-as-monstrous-feminine being furious in two basic forms[17]: a smaller “kawaii” disguise-type human form that belies a larger “kowai”/feral abject giantess [the Medusa] whose insectoid reproductive habits [fat like a termite queen] and paralytic BDSM elements [re: the wasp or spider’s poison] are recuperated to serve profit; e.g., Red Hook’s Countess another Red-Scare Alien Queen; i.e., Cameron and Tolkien’s refrains treating such reptilian, arachnid and/or wasp-like bug moms as Nazis bugbears to punch, but also Communists and any form of minority tokenizing to serve the role and dump it unironically onto others: the colonizer reinvading Indigenous lands to punch fresh state victims portrayed as invasive vermin to rape and exterminate by white Indians, mid-bug-hunt. Giant slaying/tower toppling [especially old giants; i.e., titans] makes for common neoliberal rites of passage; e.g., Bjorn the Bear’s “Can ANY Boss Survive 30 Level 1 Wretches? – Elden Ring” [2024]. The same goes for the Archaic Mother’s army of undead vermin slaves/offspring: the vampire hive/witch’s brew providing the state’s settler argument/false flag.

Again, this witch-hunter violence is fetishized in movies and videogames, such kayfabe-style Amazonomachia treating the poisonous, penetrative insect parasitoid [the xenomorph having acid blood (diseased fluids carrying AIDS) and an ovipositor] as something to—per Giger’s creation—stare at before ruthlessly killing it; i.e., as an abomination to Capitalism being male and good, the monstrous-feminine’s massive Archaic Mother a freak of nature-as-wild: a witch needing to be crushed during Goldilocks Imperialism abjecting parasitoids [and other stigma animals’ female-superior qualities] relative to patriarchal dogma attacking the monstrous-feminine with monstrous-feminine; e.g., Cameron’s Ripley but also Red Hook’s merry band of devil’s rejects: monster girls to pimp nature with its own, whores turning into waifu-style vampire cops!

[artist: The Maestro Noob]

Whatever the title, the name of the game remains unchanged: Red Scare, then exploit per extermination rhetoric as a settler-colonial project with neoliberal [videogame] extensions that reliably translate to stochastic, extratextual violence useful to state aims; i.e., profit as raw butchery and rape moving money through nature by abjecting and fetishizing vermin-class organisms both weak and strong while taking their big mythical powers by force. Thusly wronged, perceived Jewish, Pagan, non-white, female or otherwise marginalized revenge is common as a casus beli to maintain a cycle of reactive abuse, often by recruiting from the colonized [re: Zionism]: “kill the witch; bring peace to a land ‘fallen to darkness and ruin,’ breaking the curse like one might a fever.” It’s the euthanasia effect taken to its end-game conclusion.

[artist: Peter Paul Rubens]

As such, the Medusa cannot be tolerated or redeemed because she will always “castrate” men [a demonizing of monstrous-feminine liberation during the dialectic of the alien]. So state forces, faced with a rabid bitch, call for the headman’s axe: off with her head! Blood in, blood out.)

The proletarian point—in studying vampires’ being killed like any witch in videogames—is to learn from them in ways useful to workers employing the universal undead feeding mechanism against profit and witch hunter rhetoric; i.e., the latter inventing stupid but clearly deadly reasons to kill labor action after rolling different groups into one fearsome monolith the state can attack (a stake to thrust into different controlled populations by said populations).

Doing so, its proponents then divide and conquer us out of fear inside prison-like environments where they can triangulate at will, but also gaslight token enforcers with deliberately oscillating rhetoric during solitary confinement (a war crime) through cruel-and-unusual/collective punishment (also a war crime) during reactive abuse; i.e., jailors pushing and coercing victims with far less than them until they snap, thus merit execution inside a state of exception. Antagonize nature; put it to work and just as often, exhibit and showcase it in ways that ways that exotify and alienize the exploited all the more; e.g., Steve McCurry’s 1984 portrait of Sharbat Gula—an Afghan refugee during the Soviet-Afghan War—being used to sell issues of a magazine, National Geographic, that demonized Communism and exceptionalized America foreign policy, as usual:

(exhibit 41f2b1: McCurry’s famous photo was, at the time, simply called “Afghan girl,” used to pierce the viewer with a helpless foreigner’s mysterious gaze. It wasn’t used to enrich or aid Gula, the poor girl left nameless for decades by an expat photographer using poverty tourism to swoop in, safari-style, and espouse Cold-War platitudes. Don’t mistake me—it’s an exceptional photograph—but exploitation is exploitation, the class character plain enough in hindsight.)

What do you think these stories are canonically for? Someone all-too-young always pays the price to enrich someone all-too-old and powerful—not an accident, but a sacrifice the elder party gladly paid (and one for which the Salem witch trials’ Mayflower atrocities are but a footnote in a larger genocidal scheme): capital rapes not just strong manly adults, but women and children, taking their away power to intentionally cause them harm while treating them like unpaid slaves (as women and children historically are); i.e., capitalists are the cannibals—the cruel, overbearing and controlling bloodletters they accuse others of being!

They craft such dogma as persecution content and sell it to kids, much like a drug dealer would except the elite own the territories and medias at work! Racism (and other xenophobic elements of division) become a currency and bonding agent traded amongst, but also spliced with, weird culture; i.e., between owners those workers they condition and control pursuant to the raping and reaping of nature-as-monstrous-feminine. It becomes a bouquet of so many flowers—from homosexual men, trans women, young damsels, black and brown people working the fields, and kept brides—picked by enterprising patriarchs and their servants; i.e., the fall of one’s settler-colonial inheritance, Usher-style, haunted by ghostly male tyrants and pissed-off monstrous-feminine spirits; e.g., King Diamond’s Count and Seven Horsemen, from “Arrival,” but also the titular bastard baby herself that never fully was: the wandering womb/bicycle face by another name[18] speaking to too-young marriages and forced pregnancy through tokophobic cannibalism and the vampiric, at-times-hostile relationship between mother and child, woman and state, husband and bride, witches and nature, etc, leading to cops and victims!

Furthermore, excluding animals and young children, perfect victims are a myth. Under such absurd, predatory systems, vampires and witches present as one, both completely exposed and helpless before (and while) tied to the stake (or being staked in our sleep); and two, somehow such darkly powerful, undead practitioners of “witchcraft and blood magic” that we can suddenly transform into animals and fly over your heads to practice revenge (eating all the babies, of course)! While sadly the latter things aren’t true (wink-wink), there’s poetic license to them that isn’t completely useless to our counterterrorist aims: “Why yes, we can do those things! Buttsex can bring about the end of the world and destroy the nuclear family model (now tap your ruby slippers together three times, Dorothy Gale)!”

Except, it’s less about convincing useful idiots that we’ll turn them into newts (they already think that), and more about raising awareness towards state predation through bad-faith parties happy to brutalize us behind any Puritanical excuse (with Hawthorne’s Puritans thinking Hester Prynn’s daughter—the aptly dubbed Pearl—is a little demon). Through vampire and witch-like doubles, we can act out our own deaths by their callous hands; i.e., as linked to centuries of police abuse, including old-school DARVO arguments and home-grown obscurantism tokenizing our fellow persecuted, themselves martyred per Irigaray’s creation of sexual difference (the death of the mother to serve white, cis-het male individuation, treating women [and all monstrous-feminine, female or not] merely as sex objects to use and discard, over and over)! We want to short-circuit the dogmatic social networks that feed into hating us at the expense of all parties involved (“Satan” merely being a dogwhistle we challenge by reminding people of its Pagan, bastardized origins during Satanic Panic).

For all the humor and tongue-in-cheek, death-theatre functionality to the Gothic, on the other side of the fence (and inside your own houses), the violence, mania and rape are quite real. To it, we want to short-circuit the dogmatic social networks that feed into weaponizing scared stupid people hating us at the expense of all parties involved (“Satan” merely being a dogwhistle we challenge by reminding people of its Pagan, bastardized origins during Satanic Panic): to see us as human.

Sure, there’s a cottagecore, privileged, tits-out Burtonesque to such inklings/rising jouissance (with faeries/changelings being—you guessed it—another classic anti-Semitic symbol stealing children and replacing them with evil doubles). Except doing so isn’t simply to freeze our food, but specifically those with power who, paralyzed by Athena’s Aegis, allow us to transfer power away from the elite’s gigantic body and pass it out to all parties normally abused by state forces; re: in videogames like Castlevania or The Darkest Dungeon framing the vampire as a degenerate minion or boss to slay (through the usual ordering of power in monomythic stories, the smaller entity a military offshoot of the larger as its “castle” to besiege and raze during Gothic mise-en-abyme).

In doing so, we want to acknowledge past abuse (and present abuse dressed up as “past”) while preventing future abuse as something the elite can no longer foster and protect among vigilante class-traitor workers; i.e., cutting the giant down to size by gorging ourselves on things normally hoarded from us in reclaimed theatrical language; e.g., the teenage witch killing her whole insufferably Puritanical family before choosing to “live deliciously” (see: The Witch, 2014), or the vampire freezing their pray to suck blood and use it not for profit per the Protestant ethic, but ending Capitalist Realism by developing Gothic Communism (thus raising emotional/Gothic intelligence and class/cultural awareness during praxial synthesis and ultimately catharsis). Regardless of the subversive thread being pulled, the basic enemy isn’t sexy (old, white rich men and their power structures seldom are), so dressing it in somewhat abstract forms up can make our larger praxial goal a bit more relatable and fun! “Worship Satan, kids! Nature is gay as hell!”

This extends to characters like Red Hook’s Countess as dark and badass, but not exclusively fascist any more than Dracula is; i.e., the mouth and shaft hyphenate in bizarre, often biomechanical ways: abjecting nature to commodify its own butchery per reactive abuse conflating fascist TERFs with Communist ladies looking equally stylish, sexy and scary (the palliative Numinous, during calculated risk). These nuances mean nothing to the state, Medusa always a threat to the established order while integral to it per her routine summoning and butchering; i.e., as the whore wearing the dreaded Scarlet Letter! Until she dies, the fate of the world always hangs in the balance, and afterwards she’ll haunt the world again until she returns from the yawning toothy grave:

Thou detestable maw, thou womb of death,

Gorged with the dearest morsel of the earth,

Thus I enforce thy rotten jaws to open,

And in despite I’ll cram thee with more food (source: Romeo and Juliet).

“Don’t mind if I do!” Medusa replies, a Big Witch thoroughly used to the messiness of menstruation (re: period sex, what Jadis called “murder dick”), childbirth and stillbirths inside the same dark cradle (the secret burden and shame, but also perverse love of people who give birth). Atlas was a little bitch, especially when nature goes feral and euthanizes her would-be captors, cackling all the way to the blood bank. A witness to her own rape, she escapes to rape her captors by squealing on them (spilling her guts, as it were): an out-of-body embryonic attached paralytically by her umbilical proboscis inside a murderous womb space[18a] (a Westernized Quetzalcoatl, our de facto Whore of Babylon seeking out fresh blood to sate herself as giver of life and death)!

Per the neoliberal monomyth (videogames), it’s a cycle of war and rape meant to emotionally manipulate state soldiers (usually cis-het men) to kill for the state inside “dead embryonic cells.” By nostalgically raping nature (as a vampire does) before she rapes them, the witch hunters restore greatness through cyclical returns to a “better time” that repeatedly buries the kaiju-esque giantess during a liminal hauntology of war’s killing time/grim harvest; i.e., a canceled future’s strawman argument for us to invert through our Aegis humanizing the Archaic Mother’s paradoxical rape play as an “ancient” spectre of Marx—a xenomorphic “love letter” camping the Nazi (which exists onstage in unironic forms) through her wandering womb (a play on the wandering boss); e.g., the Countess’ hysterical, insect-witch biology belonging to a rape victim the state blames for the land’s darkness (not the Ancestor, exhibit 41f2c): a verminous blood witch, and a wealthy one, but locked up in solitary (no sunlight) waiting to die! Inside the infernal concentric pattern, the player is Ariadne’s executioner!

Another rape to camp, oxymorons abounded; i.e., confusions of pleasure and pain per the Gothic’s prey mechanisms told in queenly dominatrix: Mozart’s vengeful Night Queen, the operatically castled “fat lady” a dark mommy Medusa, singing her monstrous-feminine heart out, her salacious aria bringing the Man’s house orgasmically and incestuously down on his stupid head (and generally ravishing the maiden, Victoria-de-Loredani-style, too)!Singing for her supper (and blowing her own horn/magic flute), the Countess fills her glass the same way that capitalists do—except it’s cataclysmically with their blood! Scorched earth with a hint of strawberry, she’s the queen of the devils—Red Hook’s crooning and crowning achievement (taking much of the palimpsestuous backlog for granted, I think) and my all-time favorite boss encounter (re: Persephone van der Waard’s “The Countess,” 2019). War and sex told masturbatorily as operatic hard kink, Halford-style? Take me home, mommy!

(artist: pagong1)

Thus concludes our crash course on vampires (and to a lesser extent, witches)! Here’s a couple more pages’ food for thought (and time to digest) before we jump into “A Brief History of Queer Love“:

To that, it’s worth noting how the classic slave-like function between zombies, vampires, and ghosts is less immediately different than current Cartesian divisions would lead you to think. Simply put, they’re “dead,” usually pissed off to a wordless degree, and they eat, but this takes many forms even within one monster type. It can even apply to monsters that are treated like the dead without necessarily presenting as such; e.g., witches, the Medusa being someone who might eat you after they paralyze you and make you their slave (the draining of one’s essence serving both purposes)! Feeding always goes both ways, a vampire’s ability to feed and foist itself upon others a fascist fantasy and genderqueer apologia hogging the same operatic stage: the ability to play and perform trauma through feeding masquerades (the Countess’ human face being false, and her mosquito-like beak, despite resembling a traditional ball mask, actually being her true face).

Indeed, the constant puzzle of the undead (vampire or otherwise) lies in how they don’t just eat the living but resemble and act like them (as the Countess does, speaking to how women generally become predatory in Man-Box fashion to survive in a man’s world, which will scapegoat them to preserve the patriarchal status quo: map her home as “stolen,” then track her to the centre of the maze and kill her).

This liminality intimates dialectical-material relationships between opposing forces; i.e., compelled to attack one another under Capitalism, often in animalized ways; e.g., witches punching vampires, vampires punching werewolves, etc. The fascist refrain goes from “animals are brutal, uncivilized and cannibalistic” to “human degenerates are brutal, uncivilized and cannibalistic,” but who’s doing the eating for the state? The fascist, of course—the token queer or witch as often as the white cis-het man, either refusal to “be political” all but guaranteeing their mutual demise by state machinery: “What is life?” Hilter asked, after condemning General Paulus and the sixth army to die at Stalingrad rather than surrender. “Life is the nation. The individual must die anyway.” Don’t be another Roman fool, comrades! Either we all unite against the state, or it destroys us one by one (delegitimizing our cause when your TERF dumbasses sell out).

Luckily there isn’t a monopoly on these feeding mechanisms and their cannibalistic violence. Indeed, the inverse, mid-apocalypse, is literally “eat the rich” but also the middle class; i.e., as normally preying on the underclass and foreign victims through state dogma. What comes around goes around, suckers!

For example, Matteson’s hybridized zombie-vampires took a modularized, anti-Cartesian approach to the undead that inspired Romero’s infamous …of the Dead franchise. Lockhart’s “Braineaters“ thoroughly catalogues this nuts-and-bolts approach, arguing for how Romero stole readily from many different cultures and approaches to classic monsters that he might say something about America’s imperial feeding behaviors under Capitalism:

Romero openly admits that the earliest version of Night, a short story called “Night of Anubis,” “was basically a rip-off from Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend” (Dead Will Walk), and certainly Matheson’s vampire novel and its first film adaptation (the second, and better known, would be 1971’s Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega Man), 1964’s Italian-made Vincent Price thriller L’Ultimo uomo della Terra [The Last Man on Earth] can both be seen as major influences on the plot and style of Night of the Living Dead.

Night of the Living Dead was also influenced, explains Shawn Rider, “by the turbulent 1960s, events such as Vietnam, the civil rights movement, and rampant consumer culture” (3). Furthermore, Night of the Living Dead “is really concerned with looking at the monster within all of us. We watch as society turns in on itself in its bid to survive” (Engall 3). As Rider elaborates, “Night lays the groundwork for a series of cultural critiques. […] Romero takes on both the issues of his time, and larger issues, extrapolating the effects of capitalism and colonization of the mind” (3). It is this unflinching gaze towards the issues of its time that helps Night of the Living Dead remain a relevant and challenging piece of rhetoric some thirty-six years after its theatrical debut.

Night of the Living Dead “forever changed the face of fearfilm” (McCarty 117) by reinventing a staple of horror cinema, the lowly zombie. While previous film zombies typically relied upon the machinations of a diabolical Svengali such as Bela Lugosi’s “Murder” Legendre from 1932’s White Zombie (the first zombie horror film), the Romero zombie is “a cunning blend of elements from the classic Haitian zombie (returning from the grave, glassy-eyed and eerily silent), the vampire (its bite converts its victims to the undead), and the cannibal” (Horne 99).

So, whereas Castricano notes how Slavoj Zizek felt compelled to call the return of the living dead “the fundamental fantasy of contemporary mass culture,” the return of such monsters signifies state shift due to state collapse that harkens all the way back to Matthew Lewis’s pre-fascist, queer dialogs that Romero owes for his own proletarian necromancy!

As Steven Carver writes, “Hammer Films, EC Comics, Stephen King and George A. Romero would all be unthinkable without The Monk, and you can judge any scholar of the genre by what they have to say about both these Georgian pioneers of gothic fiction [re: Lewis and Radcliffe being famous rivals, the token cis-het housewife vs the gay revolutionary iconoclast]” (source: “The Rise of the Gothic Novel,” 2023). I would further argue this modularized, virus-style feeding is an undead staple intrinsic to their critical power—their “bite,” as it were, helping tell them apart amid the shameless chimerism.

This is because the undead can be scientifically produced, magically summoned, or otherwise symbolic of an escaping decay through an insectoid-parasitoid presence or suggestion of death, etc, as viral through its sheer feeder’s contagiousness. Vampires are undead, but so are witches burned at the stake and raped in their own homes, only to return from the murder site’s replica to plague the dreams of the living while they’re awake, eating them alive; e.g., like Sadako Yamamura does, or Dracula crawling out of the family portrait, etc. The motto for the Gothic might as well be, “Home sucks” (a trend that crystalized with Poe’s 1839 “The Fall of the House of Usher”):

(exhibit 41f2c: Artist: Chris Bourassa. Old homes, in Gothic stories, have old male tyrants that commonly abuse everything around them. Red Hook at least gets this right[19], their dickhead antagonist almost jeering as he writes a letter to his younger self: “Ruin has come to our family. You remember our venerable house, opulent and imperial, gazing proudly from its stoic perch above the moor?” Basically a capitalist metaphor in person, but told in true Lovecraftian fashion, the Ancestor is a Nazi vampire/wealthy backstabber retrojected to old, decayed worlds: a ruinous old codger arguing with himself and blaming a woman, just like Thanos [while recognizing the latter predator inside an adversarial equal he murders, and then feeds to his guests: Mother Nature having her deathly revenge by poisoning his land and peoples with hysteria showing them their own cannibalism on a global scale—again, topping from below]!

[artist: Thomas Holm]

In short, the Ancestor is a witch hunter and bourgeois vampire, eating his problematic lover only to have her—the ghost of the counterfeit—eat him back: by engorging his appetites until he quite literally chokes on them! From deathly lullabies bringing Imperialism home to empire, Medusa is well-and-truly at home with such things, herself; i.e., she is Galatea, the planetary Alpha and Omega getting the last laugh as counterterrorists [those of nature] so often do against Cartesian, Pygmalion know-it-alls: by burning “Rome” to the ground, the cruel tyrant’s bloodline doomed to eat itself until the very last! Payback’s a bitch; through calculated risk and schadenfreude punching up from the grave, how the mighty have fallen—a delicious vintage, indeed! The fatal portrait speaks to empire’s fleeting half-life, but also a warning as things spiral further and further out of elite control: Medusa—in her martyred throes of ecstasy and pain—will be fine; unless workers heed the Aegis’ dark reflections and promptly change the genocidal course the elite have chosen, though, she’ll simply eat all of us, go to sleep, and try again some other time [or not]! Remind abusers of their fallibility, mortality and lost, forgotten humanity before it’s too late!))

Onto “Understanding Vampires (opening and part zero: the vampire history primer)“!

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Footnotes

[1] With Frank Herbert, again, being a massive homophobe who abjects queerness onto a kind of Nazi vampire that’s somehow anti-Semitic (re: “Frank Herbert’s Dug-up Homophobia“); i.e., Nazis and Communists occupy the same theatrical shadow zone as BDSM and vampires, exploitation and liberation: the Harkonnens are basically a post-fascist regression to a cartoon, overly Freudian medieval. It’s tacky but par for the course, as far as the monomyth goes (which is heteronormative).

[2] Asexuality is something we will explore more fully in Volume Three.

[3] For example, the vampire-ghosts from King Diamond’s Them were tied to a physical location that is central to the ghost story as vampiric. However, while its author clearly has fun using non-corporeal blood magic as a kind of disembodied, ritualized vampire metaphor for child abuse (specifically by one’s matriarchal, witchy elders), its fixation on the larger space and lack of a personified feeding mechanism (re: the tea pot, Amon) makes it the kind we won’t be focusing on.

[4] Hence why the ghost subchapter is a bit of a one-off. Yes, ghosts are fun to think about—and I love the idea of the Numinous, especially when connected to physical scenarios; i.e., of people practicing ludo-Gothic BDSM—but I want to focus on more tangible and fleshy things, not cryptomimetic fragments and echoes that classically represents figments of the viewer’s fear-warped, vengeful imagination (re: Hamlet’s father’s ghost) as much as actual people!

[5] E.g., sucking and penetration as a mode of predatory vitality transfer but also general BDSM practices haunted by anti-Semitic and fascist bugbears; i.e., status-quo DARVO dreaming up the classical whorish temptresses/wealthy practitioners of sodomy (extramarital sex, Jewish hordes and blood libel, etc) to threaten modest virgins: with unknown, unsanctioned pleasures (moral panic), versus zombie revenge’s more raw, mutilative consumption of the colonizer group (re: slave revolts). It’s the same Red Scare DARVO as “Mars needs cheerleaders,” the real kidnappers being the status quo posturing as innocent, of the people, what-have-you, while blaming the usual suspects.

[6] “Premarital” suggesting that the marriage will eventually happen—a bit of a misnomer if it isn’t true!

[6a] A problem with so-called “leftist” spaces—being on platforms centered around profit like YouTube or Nebula—is that they are generally informed and shaped by profit and its usual pitfalls. As Kochinski and company demonstrate, people who aren’t left-leaning in praxis will ape various talking points and aesthetics in bad faith; i.e., doing so to be able to infiltrate leftist spaces to both prey on the people in those spaces and invalidate the movements and arguments of those persons, places, names, and communities, etc. Such predators generally posture as “progressive,” but function as moderate; i.e., insofar as they “debate” Nazis, but in reality function as fascist themselves.

A big clue is the falseness of rebellion, or inability to meaningfully challenge structures of oppression. Not only does moderacy decay into fascism, but it simply is fascism with more steps; re: “the white moderate problem,” as expressed by MLK, Malcolm X and their ilk. In the words of Gil Scott-Heron, “The revolution will not be televised“; but false leftists televise the appearance or façade of “the Left” without doing anything to function as such.

In short, it’s a grift, and a more hypocritical one than conservative con persons (who, to be clear, also suck—just, not as much insofar as they are openly bigoted and predatory versus bad-faith about it; re: Dr. Disrespect). Rape is endemic to platforms, regardless if they are open about it or not, because profit and rape are one in the same on a systemic level; i.e., access to fandoms of vulnerable young fans, abusing their trust on purpose; e.g., streamers, rockstars (e.g., Sting from The Police), cartoonists (re: John Kricfalusi), academic professors (re: Beauvoir’s “Lolita Syndrome“), etc. They are common because profit is common.

To this, Ian Kochinski is a sexual predator in open-secret fashion, but so is his community of fans and co-workers who, not only keep quiet about such things, they actively participate in them; e.g., Demonmama and her own group of friends preying on minors (Westside Tyler’s “Abuse, Exploitation, and Child Endangerment: @Demonmama’s Secrets Exposed,” 2024), but also Kochinski weaponizing a Zionist content creator (and various other members from Kochinski’s inner circle who likewise are Zionists) to defame Bad Empanada, a known postcolonialist, in the name of furthering Israeli, thus American settler-colonial hegemony (Bad Empanada’s “How a Zionist Defamed Me, How ‘Leftist’ Creators Helped Her Do It, and Why It Will Happen Again,” 2022).

These aren’t accidents or isolated incidents; both serve as charm offensives and false flags that engender the usual exploitations and arguments endemic to capital’s hateful etiology. Or, in other words, if someone says they’re a leftist and then does a bunch of shit that directly contradicts their advertised values and positions, they’re actually not on the Left; it’s a brand and they’re working for the state. This is more of a matter of ongoing praxis, hence will come up extensively in Volume Three, but I at least wanted to mention it here. Stay vigilante, comrades; murderers come to you with smiles, but blackmail, intimidate and coerce you well before the final blow is struck.

[6b] With JDPlaysMoth, for example, attacking me in bad faith after joining the project (source tweet, vanderWaardart: July 19th, 2024). However, they’re not the only one (re: “Transmisia Experience: 5/26/2023“); I’ve had other sex workers attack me in bad faith—i.e., after my completing of their respective piece per a given negotiated labor exchange, then telling me they had no interest in my work. Some cut and run; others accuse me of things I didn’t do; one even said they “only wanted my money and were trying to get it by lying to me.”

Abusers don’t like to be outed, nor associate with people who threaten their ability to harm others. For sex workers, often such behavior is a combination of desperation and convenience—with it admittedly being easier to attack people than systems—but that’s no excuse to be a shithead to me about it; i.e., sex workers (often trans sex workers in bad situations) punching down against a fellow sex worker and her work fighting for our mutual liberation. It’s sad and pathetic, but such is how class war often plays out.  Segregation is censorship and censorship is genocide. To that, appeasing and conceding your rights to the state won’t save you, comrades; they’ll closet you until capital decays, wherein they’ll throw you under the bus, rape you and eat your face.

[7] E.g., Zeuhl used to gulp down my cum during oral sex, in grad school. I didn’t normally like oral, but their constant eye contact while sucking my cock made it fun, as did them greedily gulping down my load. In short, they loved it, and I learned to love it, too, albeit receiving what is given in ways that remain genuine and eager for future similar encounters!

[8] The Humanist Report’s “Online Transvestigators Are Convinced Andrew Tate Is Secretly a Woman” (2024).

[9] A Malthusian class character that projects Capitalism into outer space; e.g., Thanos is a space Nazi who kills half the universe because he can’t imagine a world beyond Capitalism, thus defends capital and the elite through Capitalist Realism instead of exposing and challenging them by breaking said Realism (summarized neatly by TP Burrow’s “Brennan vs Thanos,” 2024): a purple people eater that eats his own kids. Scarcity and power imbalance reliably create such cartoons, but also the predatory systems of thought that bleed into real life’s weird-nerd culture; i.e., intellectually lazy white cis-het men writing really cringy stuff; e.g., fascist strongmen extinction bursts lusting after an Orientalist goth mom and basically monologuing to himself:

(source: Andrew Dyce’s “Thanos Finally DIES in His Last Comic Story,” 2018)

To that, the Marvel comics (originally pioneered by Jewish men) have a bit of a “Spielberg problem”; i.e., one that extends Red Scare; e.g., by having Thanos court Death as a literal female entity he’s sacrificing half the world for—and which she manipulates him to enact genocide and destabilize the world; re: blame Communism and nature-as-monstrous-feminine (the ultimate victim) for the fascist purge instead of Capitalism’s copaganda and unequal socio-material conditions (the ultimate abuser) that lead fascism to return, time and time again: a female Darth Vader conflating Communism with fascism per the horseshoe argument. Class betrayal is class betrayal, and one committed by its usual practitioners (and token elements; e.g., Zionism and Jewish Nazi vampires being literal monsters, but also industry sell-outs partitioning territory on and offstage).

[10] According to the man himself, “I was attached to the SAS from time to time but we are forbidden – former, present, or future – to discuss any specific operations. Let’s just say I was in Special Forces and leave it at that. People can read in to that what they like” (source: David Urban’s “From SAS and Gurkhas to Dracula and Saruman: The Unique Life of Sir* Christopher Lee,” 2024).

*Anyone who stresses the British “Sir” title unironically is an imperialist asshole.

[11] Generally not a thing. Just don’t fart in your partner’s face while they chow down.

[12] The “Bad Dreams” chapter was also longer to help me work through my own trauma; i.e., as something to play with and consume; re: “Per Zombie Capitalism, zombies (sexy or not) collectively speak to the problems of the system and its built-in predation-through-us-versus-them-trauma better than any other (vampires, while gay as fuck, tend to be gentrified, witches and Medusa tokenized, and ghosts a bit vague and diaphanous)! It’s baked into them.” For us. the zombie vein is well-and-truly done to death, but I’ll wanted to keep the remaining chapter on feeding somewhat abbreviated (so everything fits). Witches or vampires, we’ll sink our teeth into all the essential bits, I promise!

[13] While notable actors from the period were closeted, including James Whale and Boris Karloff (source IMDb post: imdb-25288’s “Classic Gays of the Universal Era,” 2018), Bela Lugosi does not—at least at a glance—appear to have been one of them. Born to a Catholic Hungarian family under the name Béla Ferenc Dezső Blaskó, he had many wives (several of them fans) and a drug addiction, but no mention, that I could find, of any whispered “sexual deviancy” normally taken for “homosexual activity” nowadays (there was certainly talk at the time about straight ladies thirsting after Lugosi—re: Gladys Hall’s 1931 interview with the actor—but generally because he excited them in ways that speak to queer love; i.e., the little death of straight bored housewives weak at the knees during funerals). In short, you can be straight and still be a queer icon!

As for Lugosi’s drug addiction, it was no joke. Mike Springer writes in “Bela Lugosi Discusses His Drug Habit as He Leaves the Hospital in 1955” (2012):

In 1955 Bela Lugosi was in a sad state. The once-handsome, Hungarian-born star of Dracula had seen his career degenerate over the previous two decades until at last he was reduced to playing a cruel parody of himself in some of the tackiest B horror films ever made. Along the way he picked up a drug habit. In late April of 1955 the 72-year-old actor, destitute and recently divorced from his fourth wife, checked himself into the psychopathic ward at Los Angeles General Hospital. A few days later, in a hearing held at the ward, Lugosi pleaded with a judge to commit him to a state hospital. A United Press article from April 23, 1955 describes the scene:

Although weighing only 125 pounds and only a shadow of his former self, Lugosi’s voice was clear and resonant as he told the court how shooting pains in his legs led him to start taking morphine injections in 1935. Without morphine, he couldn’t work, Lugosi said.

“I started using it under a doctor’s care,” he said. “I knew after a time it was getting out of control.”

“Seventeen years ago, on a trip to England, I heard of Methadone, a new drug. I brought a big box of it back home. I guess I brought a pound,” Lugosi said.

“Ever since I’ve used that, or Demerol. I just took the drugs. I didn’t eat. I got sicker and sicker.”

[…] Less than three weeks [after his release from the psych ward that August, Bela] married his fifth wife, an obsessed fan who reportedly sent him a letter every day he was in the hospital. The Ghoul Goes West never materialized, but Lugosi collaborated with Ed Wood on a couple of other projects, including a movie that some critics would eventually call “the worst film ever made,” Plan 9 From Outer Space. As his hope of a genuine comeback crumbled, Lugosi drank heavily. On August 16, 1956–barely over a year after his release from Metropolitan State Hospital–Lugosi died of a heart attack. He was buried in his Dracula costume. (source).

It might seem irrelevant to mention all that, here. However, such seemingly non-sexual things like drug use mirror symbols of decay not visually dissimilar to AIDs and other venereal diseases. Furthermore, they constitute a crisis of the wealthy as ignominiously fallen in ways that can be scapegoated; i.e., a crisis that would be blamed by the Straights on the Gays, going as far back as England’s homosexual pogroms unto Matthew Lewis (re: Broadmoor) and forwards unto post-Lugosi Hollywood men like Vincent Prince, Farley Granger and Roddy McDowall. As I write in Volume One (about different “Galatean queens of darkness” challenging Pygmalion forces):

It’s vital, then, to be unafraid to reexamine the past with fresh eyes and language that historical figures wouldn’t actually have used, but may have understood better than you might think. Oppression is oppression, and that certainly hasn’t changed much in the recent centuries. At the very least, we need recognize the cone of silence that then-and-now continues to linger over those who fear state punishment as not only refusing to die, but expanding horrifyingly in all directions.

Revolutionary cryptonymy offers a paradoxical means of challenging these monopolies (and subsequent brain drains). However, until the Internet Age—i.e., since Lewis wrote The Monk over two centuries ago—resisting the decay of fascism and moral panic was something few men of privilege actually tried to an extent that would threaten their established livelihoods; e.g., like Oscar Wilde. But revolution won’t work if we martyr ourselves en masse, and smaller efforts can add up over time (especially collectively during intersectional solidarity in the Internet Age).

While learning from past struggles bleeding into fresh ones, it’s [equally] vital to consider how—after more precise language cemented queerness as a cultural identity in the shadow of the state—such persons merely became a separate species, but also a social disease that was commonly recognized as male (rebellious women were generally cast as witches, Amazons or whores, but their method of disease-spreading was seen as whore-like; i.e., attached to prostitution and unruly merchandise [again, women] versus sodomy being a crime committed by persons under the law—men). As often was the case, such things were seldom discussed out in the open at all, but that certainly didn’t preclude political action being taken by those with privilege, generally those who waited until they were older and more secure; e.g., Vincent Price as someone who “didn’t broadcast his sexuality [or use the words that would have spelled it out, but still stood] up and was counted when it mattered—attacking Anita Bryant’s anti-gay crusade in the 1970s, joining PFLAG as an honorary board member, and shooting one of the first celebrity PSAs to allay public fears about AIDS” (source: Dan Avery’s “Vincent Price’s Daughter Confirms He Was Bisexual,” 2015).

It’s important to recognize these instances when they actually happened, but also to understand the class-based stigmas and cultural forces guiding these persons to behave how they did: our aforementioned trifectas and cultural stigmas tied to state monopolies during oppositional praxis as an uphill battle ringed with dreadful, often unseen struggles. This obviously extends to homonormativity and queer assimilation by embodying the very stereotypes that straight people expected once the queer community couldn’t be ignored, but it also preceded it through the actors whose behaviors shaped future generations. McDowall, for example, played many queer-coded characters, but not actual gay persons. But something of the closet continued to trap them even after gay people supposedly were “out.” Time and time again, queerness has become both highly legendary and as invisible as Dracula’s reflection. The sad joke is, Dracula wasn’t invisible; he felt that way as a queer-coded behavior reflected back at him that he was expected to carry forward by victimizing himself and others around him—i.e., the LGBA targeting trans people by making them invisible, preying on them exactly how the state wants (source).

Per Hammer of Witches, this applies to women, too (the same section also reads about Elvira actress, Cassandra Peterson, coming out of the closet in 2022*), but also queer intersectional solidarity at large; i.e., Galatea challenging Pygmalion visions of a divided, conquered world obsessed with profit and settler-colonial violence that automatically comes with it against nature-as-monstrous-feminine!

*Jazz Tangcay’s “Elvira, aka Cassandra Peterson, Opens Upon the Freedom of Coming Out” (2022).

[14] Such language is often, thanks to Freud, viewed literally. But castration can also mean AFAB parties (those forced to identify as women) refusing to have PIV sex with men to have their children. The effect, while not touching a man’s balls with a knife, has a similar outcome: no kids. To garner the most support, state DARVO will raise alarms through threats of rape defending male genitals from female witches (and GNC elements) by rally fascist feminists to their cause; re, from Porpentine’s “Hot Allostatic Load,” witch hunts rely on call-outs using “extremely vague and loaded with strong words designed to elicit vigilante justice” per “accusations of sexual menace” serving as “a key weapon used against marginalized people in feminist spaces, because it arouses people’s disgust like no other act”; i.e., “a way for the dominant people in the group to take us aside and say, you are not welcome here, or do this thing you don’t want to do or I’ll ruin your life. But frequently it happens without any particular thesis, just as a general tool to keep us destabilized and vulnerable. Don’t forget who you really are in the unspoken hierarchy” (source).

Furthermore, by playing cop as TERFs do, they sell out, only serving to erode the credibility and goodwill of genuine activism (a fascist tactic, generally capital in the process); re: Silvia Federici’s argument, “Witchcraft accusations, in fact, are the ultimate mechanism of alienation and estrangement as they turn the accused—still primarily women—into monstrous beings, dedicated to the destruction of their communities, therefore making them undeserving of any compassion and solidarity” (ibid.). Witches aren’t just AFAB, though, and worker solidarity needs to reflect that; re, as I write (earlier in this volume: In response to both authors, I would include that capital tokenizes all labor (not just female and non-white) as sexualized, fetish, alien; i.e., something to gentrify and decay inside of itself, moving money through nature to harvest nature-as-monstrous-feminine (thus having masculine elements; e.g., phallic women). Feminism decays for these purposes, as do genderqueer movements, sex work, and Gothic poetics.

[15] Including Nancy Downs, a mean-girl clique leader playing with magic in The Craft (1996), but also Edward Norton’s obedient, sexually feral Nazi girlfriend in American History X (next page, 1998).

Such performances generally bely an element of Radcliffean, white-girl artifice; i.e., Balk is an actress, one who—after buying an occult shop to preserve it, back in the ’90s (and to help her prepare for different acting roles)—sought to clear up rumors that she wasn’t a practicing witch:

Actress Fairuza Balk is undoubtedly most known for her show-stealing performance as Nancy Downs in 1996’s The Craft, a role that nabbed her a Saturn Award nomination for Best Actress. In fact, Balk was so good as the witchcraft-practicing teen that many still believe to this day that she actually is a witch in real life!

Balk set the record straight in a chat with EW, detailing her connection to an occult shop in the ’90s that furthered the rumors that she was practicing witchcraft at the time.

“The true story is I found this occult shop in L.A. and I used to go there to ask them questions and do my research,” Balk explained. “They were really lovely people. [The woman who owned it] wanted to retire. She couldn’t put the kind of money into it that it needed to keep it up and so it was going to be turned into a Chinese restaurant. I thought for the oldest occult shop in the country, that’s a tragedy. There was a man that used to work there and he had an encyclopedic knowledge of the subject and he was a sort of a teacher to me during [The Craft]. I thought, what a shame this is going to be turned into a Chinese restaurant. So I bought it and put some work into it and helped it survive.”

“But people of course were like, ‘She bought an occult shop and she’s fully into this and it’s all real.’ That has taken on its entire own mythology that’s essentially out of my hands,” Balk continued. “You can tell the truth and talk to people but they want to believe what they want to believe. What can you do? I’m not involved with that shop anymore. It was a very long time ago” (source: John Squire’s ” Fairuza Balk Wants You to Know That She Was Never Actually a Witch,” 2017)

Of course, the Gothic is classically a fake medium. And while it’s certainly good to be clear about what you practice versus what you perform, the confession highlights a clear divide concerning representation of witches and stories about them being a dead medium told by non-practicing persons; i.e., played by fakes who enjoy a bit of scandal and safety simultaneously as white middle-class women historically do: as privileged tokens with one foot in both worlds, but generally protected far more than other token elements are.

This betrayal’s “Harry Potter problem” isn’t exclusive to women; Iron Maiden made a career out of it (as did thousands of other white British and American male performers from the ’70s into the present, ripping off Jimi Hendrix like Elvis did to Chuck Berry, white American did to R&B, jazz and other genres in usual settler-colonial fashion). All the same, Satanic panic becomes a career that non-practicing “witches” can take on and off as one might a costume; i.e., they can pretend versus standing by anything they actually practice and believe, denying it when the water gets hot to dispel rumors: “And you are only a caricature of a witch,” indeed! Regardless, such persons have some oppression—e.g., domestic abuse, eating disorders, and persecution mania (which are no jokes, to clear)—but are generally in far less danger than their monopolies lead viewers to believe; i.e., during Rainbow Capitalism as enacted by those who benefit from the appearance of persecution, who then fall back on their relative class, culture and race privilege where convenient. It’s a luxury that plays into the same eating disorders letting white women reflexively gag and throw up the markers of oppression (a ladder of preferential mistreatment that extends to queer persecution networks; re: “Hot Allostatic Load“).

To it, acting goes into performing with Gothic poetics during oppositional praxis—actors of any age generally playing with dead things concerning colonized elements that can only be relayed in a half-real sense—but it’s not something that should be abandoned at, pardon the expression, the drop of a hat! Cryptonymy should serve raising an awareness towards ongoing societal issues, not feed into the very moral panics oppressing people merely to enrich the performers (and their bosses) in question!

[16] Not to discount the power of music(als), fantasy language, or Gothic camp, but blind camp is a thing. To that, we have to make sure our stories have critical bite without tumbling into the kinds of pitfalls and traps that adhere, conform to, and ultimately reinforce the harmful stereotypes normally leveled at queer people and other minorities; e.g., Tim Curry’s psychosexual frustration in Rocky Horror having historical validity but needing to update (similar to The Wizard of Oz) beyond the “bury your gays” gimmicks and Worst-Witch neoliberal staging.

[17] Aka “phases” of the Dark Souls sort. Shapeshifting is not unique to demons, but they generally can shapeshift in ways that don’t involve turning into something completely different (e.g., vampires and different stigma animals) as connected to their regular form and vice versa. In short, undead monsters constitute some limited degree of transformation, albeit to a decaying feeder body as having different stages that—the more radically these forms become—grow increasingly demonic and inhuman (usually from a lack or glut of food: an addiction where one’s humanity is threatened by alienation from lifeforce as something to hunt; re: blood libel against Jews, but also an accurate description of fascists). But again, these often cross and overlap in ways that portray the vampire as a lycanthrope and vice versa. The chimeric qualities, as such, external and internalize different stigmas and vices animalized inside the same creature.

[18] Abigail (1987) being written, like seemingly all Gothic stories, after the frontman had a nightmare:

King composed “75 percent of the storyline” after he was awoken one night by an unusually violent thunderstorm in Denmark. He says the creative spurt was “the only time that’s ever happened for me that so much was just done overnight.” He’d written down what he’d been dreaming about before the storm awoke him but, fearful he would forget the musical ideas the memories were inspiring, he brewed a pot of coffee and got back to work. Since his days in Mercyful Fate, King had repeatedly dreamed of 13 “cloak-dressed people” that surrounded a bed he was lying in, paralyzed and unable to scream for help. (The vision was so pervasive, in fact, that he turned it into the Mercyful Fate song “Nightmare.”) The figures reappeared in this dream, so for Abigail, he transformed them into the seven black horsemen. He also saw a horse-drawn coach and a child’s coffin in his dream — elements that worked their way into the story (source: Christa Titus’ “7 Things You Didn’t Know About King Diamond’s Landmark Abigail,” 2015).

As we shall see, such taboo, funerary conventions and theatrical clichés are commonly used to avenge nature and bury empire alive, but also come to grips with our own mortality amid such schemes!

[18a] From Creed’s Monstrous-Feminine (1993), but with us shucking off the dubious psychoanalytical side of things; i.e., to apply the psychosexual imagery of the Countess’ monstrous framework to a dialectical-material argument.

[19] Or did back in 2015; their sequel is much more optimistic, from a military standpoint.