Nosferato in Brazil: Vampires, Military Dictatorship and Pop Culture

Abstract

This study investigates the vampires’ hideaway in the Brazilian movie fiction. We suggest that these monsters, after facing a myriad of obstacles in their adaptation to the Brazilian cinema, ended up finding shelter for their eternal bloody existence in the most fragile of the audiovisual media: the Super-8. The focus of our analysis is on Nosferato no Brasil (Ivan Cardoso, 1971), one of the most famous films of the Brazilian Super-8 era in the 1970s. We aim to describe how Nosferato was created out of a repertoire consisting of several references to the pop culture of the 1950s and 1960s.