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Drakul. Nosferatu. Upyr. Vampyre. There have been many names for what we know today as the vampire. For over a century, literature, television, cinema and many other areas in our daily lives cannot be imagined without the appearance of this fictional character. Almost everyone is familiar with the image of the walking undead that creeps out of its coffin at night and sucks the blood out of humans. The undead has always been appealing to its audience. It is the otherness of such monsters, their frightful darkness and exoticism that makes them so interesting.
This book deals with the figure of the vampire regarded as the unknown other and how it is fictionally represented in the American TV series True Blood (2008 - ). Considering both psychoanalytical concepts as well identity theory, the author depicts the literary and cinematographic development of the fictional figure of the vampire since the late nineteenth century, and analyzes different representations of the vampire and its otherness as well as their appeal to the audience in the True Blood.

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Felicitas Schott, M.A., studied English and American Studies at the University of Technology Chemnitz and at the University of Winnipeg in Canada. During her stay in Canada, she started studying the subject of identity search and its definition by the differentiation of the self and the other. She examined these notions academically in her Bachelor s Thesis Fictional Representation of Italian American Immigrants Search for Identity in ´The Sopranos´ . This work inspired her to a more intensive study of the concepts of the other and the unknown, as well as of the fascination of the reader and viewer with the horror genre and its fictional figures.

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