Vampires of the Late 1950s and Early 1960s

Concerned with the political and socio-economic implications of Italian vampire cinema, the chapter identifies Italian vampires with enemies within (a specific group of people in the nation-state’s social body) and enemies without (scheming foreigners). The chapter focuses on the vampire movies made in the 1959-1965 period, which coincided with the 1958-1963 economic miracle that turned vastly backward, prevalently agricultural Italy into a modern, industrial country. Taking horror parody Tempi duri per i vampiri / Uncle Was a Vampire (Stefano Vanzina as Steno, 1959) as its main case study, the chapter describes a parable of class struggle pointing to the need of renegotiating ancestral class identities in order to survive the dramatic socio-economic changes brought about by the economic miracle. At the same time, a careful analysis of horror-tinged adventures reveals them to be a re-enactment of the Nazi occupation of Italy in the last years of World War Two and, possibly, an allusion to the neofascist resurgence of the early 1960s.