Strane storie per tempi strani.

The concept of “low intensity” mythologies defined in Il secolo dei media finds in this long essay an in-depth application: the literary, film, television productions centered on the figures of the so called undead are explored in search of the nuclei that tie them to their archaic roots, in folklore and in deep psychosocial traditions, and of the historical processes that have changed them particularly in the course of the Twentieth century. The essay explores the relations between the persisting success of figures such as the vampire, and more recent emergence of the zombie mythology, and the change in the representation of the death in popular culture, and also the decline of traditional death ceremonies. With the help of other works by the same author about the ways in which modern popular culture has both contributed to and tried to balance the progressive loss of strength of death rituals, this research focuses on how the changes of the narratives dedicated to the “undead” reflect on the one hand the progress of secularization on the other hand the need felt by some social strata, particularly the adolescents, sensible more than others to the great moments of passage in life. Coming more specifically to the vampire stories, whose emergence may be dated to Seventeenth Century Eastern Europe, in immediate succession to the exploson of the struggle against witchcraft, the essay emphasizes the intertwining, from Bram Stoker's Dracula on, of folklore and modern novel, of what in Bachtin's terms may be called the “absolute past” of the old mythologies with the urban environment typical of contemporary life. And studies the meaning of the radical change in vampire mythology starting in the 1970's with a new figure of the undead, sensible to moral imperatives and incarnating not the savage brutality of a timeless creature but the ambiguities (and the beauty) of the adolescent. Similarly the mythologies relating to ghosts, mummies, zombies, are analyzed in their modern developments but also in their roots, and in the ways they have been coopted into popular culture.