Vampires and Digital Mobile Media

The vampire looms large in a vast transmedia landscape. With each new iteration comes the potential to both reinforce and alter what have come to be our twenty-first-century understandings of the vampire: what it is, how it looks, and what it represents as a longstanding yet evolving cultural symbol. One of the most recent and continually evolving developments in media technology is the digital mobile device, encompassing both smartphones and tablets. Ubiquitous in the twenty-first century, digital mobile media offers the vampire new territory to infiltrate, influence, and evolve within. This chapter explores some of the most prevalent examples of the vampire in contemporary mobile media, ranging from digital adaptations of literary texts like Stoker’s Dracula and born-digital vampire literature and games, to the presence and function of vampires in visual communication from emojis to digital photo filters and social media. It concludes by considering the role of the vampire as a metaphor in criticisms of the “smartphone zombie.” In particular, it contends that the vampire thrives in this new digital media environment, simultaneously reverting to its most traditional incarnations and reinforcing well-trodden stereotypes and cultural understandings of the vampire, while at the same time continuing to function – as it has since its nineteenth-century literary incarnations – as a lens through which to explore contemporary desires and fears.