Elisabeth Bronfen: "Historically, women are linked to infection"

WORLD:

Your latest book examines representations of pandemics from a cultural studies perspective.

There is also a lot about horror films, zombies and vampires.

Elisabeth Bronfen:

It was fascinating for me to see that since the outbreak of Corona many people have been watching vampire films again, with few explicitly referring to a pandemic.

by Friedrich Wilhelm Murnau is my prime example.

It came out in 1922 and alluded to the mass death during the Spanish flu, of course also to the mass death in the trenches of the First World War.

The hype about vampire films of the 1990s, on the other hand, could be understood as a reaction to the AIDS crisis.

WORLD:

What do vampires have to do with the pandemic?