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Essay / The Phenomenon of American Xenophobia in Dracula
The economic instability that fueled radical political divisions in America during the 1920s more than set the stage for the rise of Universal Studios to a Hollywood powerhouse as a home of horror and monsters; he constructed this scene and defined the message the audience would receive. Between 1920 and the release of Tod Browning's version of Dracula in 1931, Americans witnessed both the most explosive growth of economic booms they had ever known and the disappearance of those booms. in the blink of an eye. Almost forgotten in the wake of the stock market crash of 1929 and the Great Depression that followed, already in full swing by the time Bela Lugosi's urban vampire appeared on screens across the country, the values of America during of this period were marked by the growing fear of a The Bolshevik Revolution and the demonization of Eastern European foreigners are considered responsible for introducing anti-capitalist ideas into the heads of Americans, either by taking advantage of good moments, or by fighting against bad moments so as not to notice them. The monsters of Universal Studios' horror films of the 1930s, led figuratively and literally by the character Count Dracula, are a metaphorical representation that reflects this fear and suspicion. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay David Skal calls this period in American history "the great abyss" and describes it as a time in which much of the population was overcome by bitterness. and fear coinciding with a desire for relief. It was this desire to be relieved of such oppressive emotional weight that fueled the search for some sort of scapegoat to take responsibility (114). The 1920s opened with government repression that gave the people exactly what they wanted, although the help came at a price. Americans were given the scapegoats they wanted if the price was ignoring that by "targeting people for deportation based on their beliefs, Palmer's raids violated the First Amendment" (Finan 4) . Palmer's raids had both responded to and stoked fears of foreign influence over American democracy and free enterprise by deporting immigrants deemed too dangerous to the American way of life. The raid had been preceded two years earlier by a letter from the chairman of the government's Joint Committee on Motion Picture Activities, David Niles, who threatened to impose censorship on any studio that did not meet with his office before beginning production on a movie. dealing with the subject of work or socialism (Nasaw, 1993, p. 219). If Universal Studios' 1931 horror landmark Dracula is any sort of reflection of the period in which the film was made as well as the period in which the novel was written, it is the a reflection (no pun intended) of xenophobia in its most corrosive form. The scapegoat that was very real in the person of socialists like Emma Goldman deported without good reason manifests itself in the fictional scapegoat of the aristocratic count of Transylvania with the power to transform men into inhuman zombies ready to do everything according to his orders and transform from innocent girls into suddenly sexualized women who demonstrate a new independence from their men and only have eyes for the guy with the exotic accent. Lugosi's performance is cultivated and controlled in such a way that even though he never says the words, his every nuance screams the quote from Lugosi's novel.., 1998.