Vampires: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film Book

While this expanded and revised edition of Jalal Toufic?s second book, (Vampires), is at one level an uneasy essay on the undead in film (the subtitle of the book), it is actually much more than that. Drawing on various altered states of consciousness he underwent, films and novels on the undead, psychiatric case studies and mystical reports, the author tackles many of the certainly dubious but also dubiously certain characteristics of the undeath state, for example: over-turns that undo the dead?s turn to answer an interpellation; doubles; frequent unworldly freezings still, ones that reveal the occasional worldly immobilization of the living as merely motion-less-ness, i.e. a variety of movement; the implicit indefinite fall of/in the cadaver; the turning of the metaphorical into the literal; and an unreality that sometimes behaves in a filmic manner (e.g., the lapses in hypnosis, schizophrenia, and undeath permit editing in reality), inducing the undead to wonder: "Am I in a film?" While the author?s first book, Distracted, was written for the living, (Vampires) was written about and for those who are "mortals to death" (the title of a special issue the author edited for the journal Discourse). It thus belongs?somewhat edgily as the author qualifies the validity of guidebooks for the dead?on the same shelf as the Bardo Thödol and the Egyptian Book of the Dead.Read More