The War on Terror (and Werewolves):

Post-9/11 Horror and the Gothic Clash of Civilisations

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr University of Loyola Marymount

Abstract
Twentieth century cinema involving monster conflict featured solitary monsters
in combat (Frankenstein Meets the Wolf Man, for example). The writing of
Anne Rice and the RPG Vampire: The Masquerade by White Wolf Games in-
troduced the idea of Gothic communities and civilisations in conflict. It was
not until after the terror attacks of 11 September that the idea of a ‘clash of civ-
ilisations’ between supernatural societies fully emerged into the mainstream of
popular culture. This essay explores the construction of a ‘clash of civilisations’
between supernatural communities as a form of using the Gothic as a metaphor
for contemporary terrorism in film and television series such as Underworld,
Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire Diaries. Inevitably, it is the lycanthropes
that are the disempowered and disenfranchised society and are alternately
exploited by and rebel against the dominant vampire civilisation grown deca-
dent and on the verge of collapse. Post-9/11 Gothic posits a world in which
vampire society is the new normal, and werewolves represent a hidden danger
within. Lycanthropes must be controlled, profiled and/or fought and defeated.
Through close readings of the cinematic and televisual texts, I explore the
vampire/werewolf clash as metaphor and metonym for the war on terror.

Keywords: werewolf, vampire, clash of civilisations, terrorism, war on terror,

Twilight, Underworld, True Blood

Until the late twentieth century, Gothic monsters, most notably vampires and
werewolves, were solitary creatures. Even when cinema brought them together
– as in Universal’s House of Frankenstein (1944) and House of Dracula (1945)
– in addition to a single creation of Dr Frankenstein or his progeny there was
one regulation vampire (Dracula) and one regulation werewolf (‘The Wolf
Man’, whose definite article implies one alone) at times working together and

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at times in combat. Even more recent tributes, such as The Monster Squad
(1987), feature one of each of the Universal monsters working in communion
with or opposition to each other. Although others had suggested it, it was Anne
Rice’s Interview with the Vampire (1976, with multiple novels and films follow-
ing) that popularised the idea of a secret vampire civilisation hidden beneath
the human one. Subsequently, other narratives presented communities of were-
wolves, although the two types of monster did not ever seem to meet – these
narratives all involved vampires OR werewolves moving through the human
world.1 Multiple franchises and narratives followed in the four decades since,
with the idea of a vampire community now commonplace.
1991 saw the release of Vampire: The Masquerade by White Wolf Games,
which posited not only a vampire society hidden within human society, but also
a lycanthrope society that was often at odds with the vampire society.2 Were-
wolf: The Apocalypse followed, expanding this world so that gamers could play
both werewolves and vampires in this conflict.3 The entire collection of inter-
connected games was called World of Darkness. The games appeared at a time
of radical global transition.
Samuel P. Huntington argues that post 1990 ‘global politics became multipo-
lar and multicivilisational’, and that conflicts would be waged less between na-
tion states and more between ‘cultures’ or civilisations.4 In the absence of the
Cold War ideological spectrum, new conceptualisations of the world emerged
and for Huntington the result would be not wars between nation states or blocs
of nation states but clashes of civilisations, by which he meant, ‘people [who]
define themselves in terms of ancestry, religion, language, history, values, cus-
toms and institutions’ rather than traditional national political organisations.5
Civilisations, he concludes, are ‘the ultimate human tribes’.6
Presciently, he predicted in 1996 that a ‘civilisational cold war’ would develop
between Islam and the West, and that the 1990 first Gulf War in Kuwait and
Iraq was the first battle of that war.7 This prediction was fully realised in the
wake of 9/11 and the terror attacks in London, Spain and Africa, as well as the
subsequent wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also predicted that the twenty-
first century would witness the collapsing of the West, a decadent culture whose
own indulgences and failure to live up to its own proclaimed ideals would lead
to a fall.8
It was not surprising that the discourse of a Gothic clash of civilisations
which emerged during the early nineties reflected this change in world para-
digms. Rather than a conflict of single, equal and opposite ideologies, the world
would develop, asserted Huntington, ‘fault line conflicts’, in which neighboring
states from different civilisations would fight and in which the civilisations
themselves, independent of the nations in which they existed, would wage war.9
This paradigm was the model for the games that comprised Worlds of Darkness.
No more was conflict between a vampire and a werewolf, or much more com-
monly before 1990, humans versus supernatural creatures in a supernatural cold
war. Anne Rice showed a vampire civilisation in conflict with itself, but also a

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 The War on Terror (and Werewolves) 59

world in which humans and vampires fought against one another. Worlds of
Darkness presented a world in which vampires attempted to live within human
nations (hence the ‘masquerade’ part of Vampire: The Masquerade – they live
among humans, attempting to pass), but were in a fault line conflict with a were-
wolf civilisation also attempting to hide within human society. The rise in popu-
lar culture of vampires corresponded to the rise in the clash of civilisations mode
of understanding the relationship between different groups within the world.
It was not until after 9/11, however, that the idea of a ‘clash of civilisations’
between supernatural societies fully emerged into the mainstream of popular
culture. Beginning with Underworld (four films: 2003, 2006, 2009 and 2012),
moving through the Twilight Saga (four novels, beginning in 2005 and five
films, beginning in 2008), True Blood (HBO series beginning in 2008, now in
its seventh season, based on the Sookie Stackhouse novels of Charlaine Harris,
first published in 2001), and arriving most recently (as of this writing) at The
Vampire Diaries, a television series (2009–) based on the series of novels by
L. J. Smith (1991–2014), and thus straddling the two periods of Gothic clash of
civilisations, this essay explores the construction of a ‘clash of civilisations’ be-
tween supernatural communities as a form of using the Gothic as a metaphor
for contemporary terrorism. In all of these series, the ‘monsters’ are not out-
siders, but members of their own communities, sometimes blending with
humans, sometimes not. Inevitably, it is the lycanthropes that are the disem-
powered and disenfranchised society that are alternately exploited by and rebel
against the dominant vampire civilisation grown decadent and on the verge of
collapse. While most of these texts present werewolves as a form of ‘terrorist’ or
at least members of a primitive, violent civilisation, the vampires embody the
decadent West – a privileged, imperialistic, aristocratic society teetering on the
verge of collapse and existing now as a parasitic state, attempting to maintain
dominance over the rest of the world while the clash of civilisations threatens
to undermine and destroy it.
As Jules Zanger argues in 1997, popular culture has made ‘vampire’ an eth-
nicity, and a form of hyphenated American (vampire-American?).10 Zanger ar-
gues that the ‘new vampire’ is ‘communal, rather than solitary’, more human,
and ‘resolutely American’.11 They are no longer the monstrous that must be
defeated, they are the new neighbors who must be tolerated and accepted. ‘As a
result of this shift’, he concludes, ‘the role of human beings as victims becomes
increasingly trivialised and marginal’.12 In other words, the Cold War between
humans and vampires has ended. Instead, audiences find themselves identifying
with the vampires more and more. Zanger observes, ‘Lacking a Van Helsing for
whom to root, or a Mina for whom to fear, the contemporary audience must
identify with the lesser of evils provided for it’.13 Although Zanger writes about
the protagonist and antagonist of such narratives both emerging from the vampire
community itself (Rice’s narratives, for example, the model for all which have
followed, have ‘good’ vampires and ‘bad’ vampires), after the terror attacks of
11 September, werewolves become the greater evil in many Gothic narratives.

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Ironically, however, the change in focus to werewolves as antagonists is often

employed in conjunction with the machinations of vampires who seek to use
werewolves in order to maintain their own domination, as will be observed
below. In short, the vampire elite manipulate the clash of civilisation with
werewolves in order to further their own agenda, but that does not remove
the Cold War between werewolf and vampire – it only serves to make the ‘bad’
vampires more insidious and echoes the real world concerns about the United
States manipulating global situations to its advantage, even to the point of fears
that the U.S. government was somehow ‘behind’ 9/11.
After 9/11, rather than outsiders, vampires are posited as the ultimate in-
siders: they know the true reality behind human society, they manipulate other
species and are often symbols of a corrupt system. Werewolves are the enemy,
in particular because they can pass as human, but are capable of transforma-
tion into violent beings seeking the overthrow of the vampire’s system. Vam-
pires embody (literally) the not-so-dead past; werewolves the dangerous
present and the violent other already hiding within society. As a result, post-
9/11 Gothic posits a world in which vampire society is the new normal, and
werewolves represent a hidden danger within. Lycanthropes must be controlled,
profiled and/or fought and defeated, serving as a larger metaphor for the war
on terror. In this essay, through close readings of the cinematic and televisual
texts, I explore the vampire/werewolf clash as metaphor and metonym for the
war on terror.
From the franchises of Underworld, Twilight, True Blood and The Vampire
Diaries, a series of tropes for post-9/11 Gothic clashes of civilisation are manifested:
First, there are classes in supernatural society. Without exception, vampires
are ruling class, aristocratic, and imperialistic. They control the means of pro-
duction throughout the world. Werewolves are working class. In virtually all of
these narratives, while individual vampires may be poor, or working class, or
prefer low culture, vampire civilisation is aristocratic. Almost always the stated
reason is that while vampire’s superior senses and abilities allow them to suc-
ceed and exceed in human society, their immortality allows them the time to
accumulate capital. Werewolves, whether the Cajun bikers of True Blood or the
Native American Quileute shapeshifters of Twilight, are working class, prone to
common and low-class entertainments, and display animalistic tendencies.
While the reason for this is obvious (and always given in the narrative: they’re
part animal!), it allows for werewolf characters to fall into the stereotypes of
noble savage (literalised in the case of Jacob in Twilight) or terrorist (such as
Lucian in Underworld, who seeks to use his insider knowledge of vampire society
to bring it down from within).
In addition, vampire civilisation is organised as a vertical hierarchy, from lo-
cal authorities (such as sheriffs in True Blood), to a world-governing body (such
as the Volturi in the Twilight series). Werewolves, on the other hand, are work-
ing class, primal. Reflective of their animal nature, there is no social organisa-
tion beyond the local pack level.

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Second, vampires are organised on a global level. They have a presence every-
where – Blade, Twilight, Underworld, and True Blood all demonstrate that vam-
pire civilisation is international and organised. Werewolves have allegiance only
to the local pack. From the packmasters of True Blood to the ‘Alphas’ of Twilight,
werewolves have a local leader, no national or international organisation. Under-
world might seem to be the exception here, as Lucian organises the werewolves to
bring down the vampires, but the organisations with which he works all appear to
be local packs or a pack that he himself has organised.
Third, vampires both use and despise werewolves, driven to kill them all
when werewolves outlive their usefulness or become a threat.14 In Underworld
vampires, despite being related to werewolves, having descended, respectively,
from two brothers attacked by a wolf and a bat, enslave werewolves and then
carry out an attempted genocide against them. Viktor, ruler of the vampires,
clearly despises werewolves. His reason is personal: his daughter fell in love
with and was impregnated by a werewolf. He killed her himself and began the
clash of civilisations. Until the war, however, werewolves were the servants and
daytime guardians of the vampires. In Rise of the Lycans (2009), a prequel to
the series, detailing the rebellion of the werewolves and the rise of their postco-
lonial struggles against the vampires, Viktor tells Lucian, ‘You’re a credit to
your race. Do you know how to remain so? Keep your eyes on the ground!’
The first line echoes the paternalistic and pejorative racism of American whites
throughout much of history. The command is for Lucian to keep in his place
and even avoid looking at vampires.
When werewolves outside the vampire city walls begin attacking the vam-
pires, Viktor proposes creating a comprador class within the city: ‘We can cre-
ate a privileged class of Lycans: greater rations, finer quarters and put them
under the hand of one we trust’. Having colonised the werewolves, Viktor sees
the future as a neo-colonial one in which a small group of werewolves control
the majority on behalf of the vampires. When Lucian escapes the city, he joins
the ‘pure bloods’ out in the desert and begins planning a campaign of terror
against the vampires. The vampires of Underworld have contempt for Lycans,
but they enslave them until the werewolves rebel and begin to fight back. Then
the vampires go on a campaign of genocide.
A werewolf genocide is also featured in The Vampire Diaries. Werewolves
were driven to near-extinction in the distant past. In this series of novels and
television episodes based on same, werewolf bites are fatal to vampires. To pro-
tect themselves, vampires decide to purge all lycanthropes from the earth. While
small numbers survive here and there in the present, there are so few werewolves
remaining that many vampires believe they no longer exist.15 The Twilight Saga
features its own werewolf genocide by vampires as well. While the Quileute sha-
peshifters live in relative peace with the Cullens, another werewolf type, the
‘Children of the Moon’, were systematically wiped out by other vampires.
Werewolves are introduced as characters in season three of True Blood, but
are first mentioned in season one. Sam (himself a shape-shifter who can become

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any animal), tells Sookie, ‘Werewolves are dangerous, nasty creatures’, to which
she responds, ‘Wait! Werewolves exist?’16 That she is incredulous that werewolves
exist in a world where vampires are an active presence is odd, but we should note
that despite having seen vampires kill, torture and carry out all manners of
horrors, it is the werewolves that are ‘dangerous, nasty creatures’.
When werewolves are introduced into the series in the third season, the vam-
pire’s contempt for them is obvious. ‘Here’s what I know about werewolves’, Eric
tells Sookie, ‘There’s a reason why their existence has remained a myth to humans.
They are terrible, vicious, and pathologically secretive [. . .] They don’t want you
to know they exist’.17 This description could also have applied to vampires half a
decade before the events of the series began, when vampires were also a ‘myth’ be-
fore the invention of TruBlood, a synthetic blood substitute. Later in the season,
Eric tells Russell Edgerton, the vampire king, ‘They are base, primitive creatures
and I will freely admit I despise them’.18 The vampires of True Blood have not
had a werewolf genocide, but they enslave and use werewolves.
Fourth, and final, the real threat to the world is not the werewolves (which
are, after all, only a local threat), but the machinations of the elite among the
vampires, whose sole purpose seems to be preserving their own power and priv-
ilege. Kendall R. Philips writes, ‘Contemporary filmmakers [. . .] have reconcep-
tualised the crumbling castles of traditional gothic stories and refocused
attention on the hidden crimes and secrets lurking in contemporary American
architecture’.19 In other words, as with traditional Gothic, in which crumbling
architecture hides secrets of past wrongdoing, the post-9/11 Gothic concerns
the hidden machinations in the clash of civilisations. The threatened violence
between werewolf and vampire masks a deeper conspiracy of vampire malfea-
sance behind it.
Between 2005 and the present, director Dylan Avery has continually
reworked his fluid internet documentary Loose Change 9/11: An American
Coup, in which Avery, employing stills and footage from the terror attacks with
‘expert’ and eyewitness testimony, posits that 9/11 was an inside job, the towers
destroyed by controlled explosions planned by the Bush administration. In
other words, the elite rulers of the United States were actually behind the great-
est terror attack on American soil. In post-9/11 Gothic culture, this idea of the
truth behind the terror manifests as a conspiracy by vampires to control and
use werewolves to further their own ends. The most obvious example of this is
the first Underworld film.
Underworld begins in a dark and brooding Gothic landscape, observed by
protagonist Selene, in medias res, whose voiceover gives the backstory to this
clash of civilisations:

The war had all but ground to a halt in the blink of an eye. Lucian, the most feared
and ruthless leader ever to rule the Lycan clan [. . .] had finally been killed. The
Lycan horde scattered to the wind in a single evening of flame and retribution. Vic-
tory, it seemed, was in our grasp, the very birthright of the vampires.

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Within the first minute of the film, the conflict between vampires and were-
wolves (Lycans) has been established, as has the apparent victory of the vam-
pires, who believe dominance is their ‘birthright’. As the film progresses,
vampires are shown to live in castles and mansions in decadent luxury, whereas
the werewolves live in tunnels beneath the city, plotting their revenge.
Kraven, a leader of the vampire community, has been tasked with wiping out
the remaining werewolves. The audience learns, however, that he is actually the
one behind Lucian’s plan to fake his own demise and then carry out a series of at-
tacks on the vampire community that will leave Kraven in command. Kraven or-
ders and facilitates the death of Amelia, one of the three supreme vampire leaders.
Selene, however, is revealed as an ethical ‘death dealer’, a vampire trained to hunt
and kill werewolves. She spends much of the film stalking Michael, an innocent
human bitten by a werewolf and destined to become a Lycan.
As the plot unfolds, Selene learns that the vampire leadership have manipu-
lated history and her. She believes her family was killed by werewolves, and her
mentor, Viktor, the leader of the vampires, ‘the oldest and strongest of us’,
made her a vampire so she might seek revenge on the wolves. She learns that
Viktor was the one who killed her family. When Michael asks, ‘Who started the
war?’, Selene responds, ‘They did . . . or at least that’s what we have been led to
believe. Digging in the past is forbidden’. While Selene begins to question her
government, she still remains a ‘death dealer’, fighting and killing Lycans where
she finds them.
When Selene finally encounters Lucian, he tells her the true story of their
conflict: ‘We were slaves. Once, the daylight guardians of the vampires. I was
born in servitude to the vampires’. The vampires, despite being related to were-
wolves, colonised, enslaved and ruled over the werewolves, who then began to
rebel. The clash of civilisations posited in the opening voiceover is revealed to
be a much more complex dynamic of oppression and resistance in which
humans are irrelevant.
I am not arguing that werewolves should be read as Muslims, or any ethnicity
or religion in general, nor am I arguing for an exact allegory in this film (or any
of these films).20 Instead, I posit that these films use the paradigm of the clash of
civilisations that 9/11 has cemented in the popular imagination as a means to
reconceptualise the Gothic in order to reflect contemporary geopolitical reality.
It also allows the audience to access genuine fears. A single aristocrat asking to
be admitted to one’s bedchamber is not particularly terrifying in a world in
which hundreds of unknown strangers (some already living amongst us) plot
the painful and public death of as many Westerners as possible. The Wolfman
cannot compete with al Qaeda, so we reinvent the Wolfman as al Qaeda.
Annalee Newitz sees Viktor as ‘a classic dead white male whose patriarchal,
imperialist wrath knows no bounds’.21 Viktor, we learn, is the reason why were-
wolves were enslaved in the first place, and killed his own child rather than al-
low her to marry Lucian. Viktor caused the clash of civilisations in the first
place, but then used it as an excuse to fight and destroy werewolves, who then

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rely on terrorist-like attacks on vampires. It is not coincidental that the two ma-
jor werewolf attacks in the film occur in a subway station and on a train. Just
as real-world terrorists attack transportation targets, so, too, do the werewolves.
Interestingly, in the final Underworld film (to date), Awakening (2012),
humans have learned of the existence of both vampires and werewolves and
hunt them down. Selene’s opening voice over acknowledges that the leaders of
both the vampires and the werewolves, who conspired to continue the war in
order to remain in power have been killed, but ‘a new darkness has arisen’. In
the opening sequence of the film, news footage of a group of vampires and
werewolves being killed simultaneously by humans is called ‘a mass cleansing’,
and both species are identified as ‘the infected’. They are both formerly human
creatures that through a virus passed through a bite have become monstrous.
Lycans have gone into hiding since the purge, but still fight against vampires.
Awakening is a Gothic film for a decade after 9/11, in which wars have been
fought, a homeland security apparatus has been created and the fight has been
taken from terror attacks on ‘us’ to purging the world of ‘them’. The menda-
cious leaders who lied us into war may be gone, but there are still great dangers
in what has become an expanded clash of civilisations: human on vampire on
werewolf. Detective Sebastian, a veteran of the war against ‘the infected’, tells a
captured Selene, ‘A few years ago, the government declared “Mission Accom-
plished” on all Lycans. The feds announced that we were only to focus on your
kind [vampires] now’. The phrase ‘Mission Accomplished’ immediately calls to
mind the aircraft-carrier speech of then President George W. Bush on 1 May
2003, called the ‘Mission Accomplished Speech’ for the banner hanging behind
the president as he spoke.
President Bush announced in the speech that, ‘Major combat operations in
Iraq have ended. In the battle of Iraq, the United States and our allies have pre-
vailed. And now our coalition is engaged in securing and reconstructing that
country’.22 The United States then remained in Iraq until December 2011, com-
batting an ongoing insurgency. The phrase ‘Mission Accomplished’ has come
to be a cynical shorthand for unrealistic perceptions, declaring victory when no
victory has been attained, and self-glorifying mendacity. In the context of
Underworld: Awakening, its use directly links the clash of civilisations in that
film to the war in Iraq. Selene discovers from Sebastian that the Lycans have not
been wiped out, but rather that they now are allied with the humans against the
vampires. ‘Two hundred suspected Lycans’ were captured and then set free as a
blood test proved them human. Selene notes, however, despite the government’s
choice of supporting Lycans over vampires, while still publicly calling for both
to be eliminated, she will continue to kill Lycans and fight to ‘reclaim the world’.
This last statement’s terminology is also significant. The clash of civilisations
in the Underworld series is not merely a fight between vampires and werewolves
due to ancient animosity. The leaders who brought that about are dead by the
beginning of Awakening. Instead, the series sees the battle between the two as a
genuine clash of civilisations in which they are fighting for dominance. Both

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seek to ‘reclaim’ a world they believe they have lost due to the other. This rhe-
toric easily corresponds to the language of the clash of civilisations between Islam
and the West, in which both claim to be reclaiming something the other has
taken. Again, the metaphor is not exact, nor are the vampires and werewolves
meant to be read as real-world equivalents.
Twilight, in all its high school Gothic glory, also presents a complex clash of
civilisations in which ‘primitive’ werewolf fights ‘aristocratic’ vampire, although
as with Underworld, the real dangers come from within the communities them-
selves, when the leadership chooses to use the clash of civilisations in order to
preserve its own power. In the world of Twilight, vampires are organised by co-
vens, and the largest, oldest and most powerful coven is the Volturi. They en-
force the rules of the vampire world and serve as patrons of the arts and
keepers of vampire law. The Volturi also instigated the clash with werewolves
when Caius, one of the leaders of the Volturi, was attacked by a werewolf two
thousand years ago. In response, the Volturi instituted a policy of werewolf
genocide and the near extinction of shapeshifters in Asia and Europe. In Break-
ing Dawn, Part II, Caius refers to werewolves as ‘our natural enemies’ and looks
forward to extinguishing the Quileutes.
As a result, Twilight has unique werewolves. The Quileute shapeshifters are
Native Americans who reached an agreement with the Cullens, the vampire co-
ven that settled on their lands in colonial times. These are post-colonial, multi-
cultural vampires and werewolves that respect each other’s cultures and learn
to live in uneasy harmony. Yet, the clash of civilisations is still present, as
Stephanie Meyer states in The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide, ‘The
Quileute werewolves consider themselves the designated protectors of their hu-
man tribe [. . .] They see vampires as enemies of themselves and all humans’.23 In
this series, Meyer posits vampires and werewolves as historic enemies. Indeed, the
werewolf can only become a werewolf if exposed to a vampire: between the onset
of puberty and the age of 25, ‘If the potential werewolf is not exposed to vampires
within this window of time, transformation will never occur’.24 In other words, ly-
canthropy is an allergic reaction in the Quileute to vampires. When exposed to a
vampire, a Native American with the potential becomes a werewolf and subse-
quently a protector of humans and werewolf against vampires.
When Bella is discovered to be pregnant with a vampire child in Breaking
Dawn (both the novel and Part I of the film), despite their pledge to protect her,
Sam the Alpha werewolf and his pack decide they will kill Bella, her unborn
child and all of the Cullens if need be. It is only because of the greater threat of
the Volturi that the pack works with the Cullens to protect Bella and Renesmee,
her daughter, from the machinations of the vampires. Unlike Underworld, the
climatic bloodbath in the saga is revealed to be imaginary, a projection of what
would happen if the battle were to occur. The Volturi agree to return to Europe,
but the enmity between vampire and werewolf remains.
In the third season of True Blood, as noted above, werewolves are introduced.
As in Underworld, they are under the control of the vampires. In particular they

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are used by Russell Edgington, the vampire king of Mississippi, who uses them
as part of his quest to rule the entire vampire nation. When Alcide, a werewolf
assigned by Eric Northman, sheriff of Louisiana, to protect Sookie, confronts
his packmaster, Colonel Flood, the packmaster responds, ‘Edgington is ancient.
He’s had a pack of weres serving him for centuries, all over the world. Now
he’s on our doorstep’. Flood argues he is protecting the pack by putting them
at Edgington’s service. ‘I’d rather be extinct than slave to a dead man’, Alcide
responds.25 The implication being, of course, that the two choices are to serve
the vampires or be killed by them.
While the vampires of True Blood are happy to use werewolves to do their
bidding, historically the audience is shown this has not always been so. When
werewolves kidnap Bill (on orders from Edgington, unbeknownst to him and
the viewer at the time), he assumes the ancient rivalry is the reason and kills all
but one of them.26 In a flashback the audience is shown Eric with his Maker
Godric, during the Second World War. Werewolves served the Nazis, killing
American soldiers. Eric and Godric find and kill a werewolf. As a result, Eric
does not trust the werewolves at all.27 They are shown throughout the season
and the series as dangerous, unreliable, animalistic monsters.
In all of these narratives, what is on display are militarised monsters – orga-
nised against the world in order to protect their own capital and interests. I ar-
gue in Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema that two streams of vampire
emerge after 9/11.28 The first is the continuation of the Gothic, romantic anti-
hero, but one who struggles to survive in a world in which he is suspect. They
drink blood and have superhuman abilities, but otherwise look and act like the
rest of us. This is vampire as metaphor for outsider. The second stream is
found in films such as Blade II, Priest and 30 Days of Night – vampire as truly
Other. These vampires are inhuman monsters that feed on our terror and on
our blood. The only logical response is to slaughter them.29 To these two
streams, I hope this article has added a third: the vampire as metaphor for
America in a clash of civilisations. We are the ‘lesser evil’ – decadent, grown
corrupt – but the best among us fight the forces of irrationality, primal violence
and perpetual danger in the form of werewolves. There are ‘good’ werewolves
and ‘bad’ vampires, but humans (the true innocents in all this) are irrelevant
and collateral damage at best. Instead we find ourselves in a clash of civilisa-
tions in which the enemy is already among us and plans to harm any and all
through horrific, terroristic violence. In the face of such atrocities, these narra-
tives argue, we must fight back as hard and with as much violence to preserve
our civilisation while not ignoring the culpability and malfeasance of our own
leaders and government in creating the situation in the first place. As Selene in
Underworld: Awakening asserts, now that the situation has been created, we will
fight to the end. These neo-Gothic narratives give us an echo of our own world
and the rhetoric we hear from our own leaders.
The result of this reconceptualisation of the Gothic are narratives that are no
longer ‘horror’ but might be termed ‘Gothic action’ or ‘Gothic thriller’, to

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 The War on Terror (and Werewolves) 67

employ the language of contemporary cinema genres. Mystery and atrocity set
the plots of both Underworld and Rendition into motion, for example. The only
difference, apart from the obvious, surface ones, is that the torture of the Other
in the former is meant to entertain and in the latter to genuinely horrify. The
post-9/11 Gothic world is involved in a clash of civilisations in which we (hu-
man beings, standing for the West) are collateral damage at best, reflecting a
world that the West has created. Instead we need to fear the terror that is cre-
ated when these civilisations not our own begin to pursue their agendas
through violence within our civilisation. We are vampires fighting werewolves.
In the end, as always, we are our own monsters.

Notes
1 As with vampires, werewolf communities began in literature, and cinema followed. A
year after Anne Rice’s novel appeared, Gary Bradner’s The Howling (New York, Fawcett,
1977) posited a community of werewolves in Los Angeles and in rural northern Califor-
nia. Joe Dante’s 1981 film based on the novel dramatised this idea. Likewise, in the UK,
Angela Carter’s short story ‘The Company of Wolves’ (in The Bloody Chamber and
Other Stories (London, Gollancz, 1979), filmed by Neil Jordan in 1984, presents a wed-
ding party of werewolves. What perhaps makes werewolf communities more unique
than vampires is that the Gothic history of the vampire since Dracula has been a history
of small communities: Dracula has his brides and then Lucy Westenra. The first Univer-
sal sequel to Dracula was Dracula’s Daughter. The role of the vampire is to create more
vampires. Larry Talbot, however, became a werewolf after being bitten by one who was
subsequently killed. In early twentieth century Gothic cinema, vampires appear in small
groups, werewolves are always alone.
2 M. Rein-Hagen, et al., Vampire: The Masquerade Rulebook (Stone Mountain, GA,
White Wolf Publishing, 1991); and J. Achilli, Vampire: The Masquerade, rev. ed.
(Stone Mountain, GA, White Wolf Game Studio, 1998).
3 B. Campbell, et al., Werewolf: The Apocalypse, rev. ed. (Stone Mountain, GA, White
Wolf Publishing, 2000).
4 S. P. Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New
York, Simon and Shuster, 1996), p. 21.
5 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 21.
6 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 207.
7 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 208.
8 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 208.
9 Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order, p. 208.
10 J. Zanger, ‘Metaphor into Metonymy: The Vampire Next Door’, in J. Gordon and
V. Hollinger (eds), Blood Read: The Vampire as Metaphor in Contemporary Culture
(Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), p. 19.
11 Zanger, ‘Metaphor into Metonymy’, pp. 18–19.
12 Zanger, ‘Metaphor into Metonymy’, p. 21.
13 Zanger, ‘Metaphor into Metonymy’, p. 21.
14 This trope may have emerged earlier. In previous mashups such as Fred Dekker’s
The Monster Squad and the children’s television special The Halloween That Almost
Wasn’t, Dracula is always presented as the leader of the monsters. All other supernatural

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68 Gothic Studies 17/2

creatures must do Dracula’s bidding. The same premise is at the root of Stephen
Sommers’ Van Helsing (2004), in which Dracula has enslaved a werewolf in order to
secure Frankenstein’s monster in order to give life to his thousands of progeny. As
in the other films, it is the vampire’s plan for world domination that humans must fight
against. In this film, Van Helsing himself becomes a werewolf in order to fight Dracula.
15 Season two, episode three, ‘Bad Moon Rising’; and Season two, episode four, ‘Memory Lane’.
16 Season one, episode ten, ‘I Don’t Want to Know’.
17 Season three, episode two, ‘Beautifully Broken’.
18 Season three, episode six, ‘I Got a Right to Sing the Blues’.
19 K. R. Philips, Dark Directions: Romero, Craven, Carpenter, and the Modern Horror
Film (Carbondale, Southern Illinois University Press, 2012).
20 It should be noted that the vampires in most of these narratives are predominantly
white, of European descent, whereas werewolves tend to be depicted as ethnically
Other as well. In Twilight, the werewolves are all Native American, whereas the vam-
pires are literally almost all European. In the Underworld series, although the leader-
ship of both civilisations is white, the vampires are predominantly European, except
for Kahn, and the majority of werewolves read as ‘ethnic’, most notably Raze – a
large African-American. The pack fighting in the sewer at the beginning of the first
film are all non-western. Again, I do not argue that werewolves should be read as be-
ing a metaphor for any particular group or ethnicity, but the fact remains they are
presented as ethnic Other compared with vampire European in these films.
21 A. Newitz, Pretend We’re Dead: Capitalist Monsters in American Pop Culture (Durham,
Duke University Press, 2006), p. 120.
22 http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/news/releases/2003/05/20030501-15.html
(accessed 31 October 2015).
23 S. Meyer, The Twilight Saga: The Official Illustrated Guide (New York, Little, Brown
and Company, 2011), p. 302.
24 Meyer, The Twilight Saga, p. 302.
25 Season three, episode five, ‘Trouble’.
26 Season three, episode two, ‘Beautifully Broken’.
27 Season three, episode two, ‘Beautifully Broken’.
28 K. Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema (New York, Continuum, 2012),
p. 164.
29 Wetmore, Post-9/11 Horror in American Cinema, p. 165.

Notes on contributor
Kevin Wetmore is Professor of Theatre Arts at Loyola Marymount University, as well as
a professional actor and director. He is the author of several books, including Post-9/11
Horror in American Cinema, Back from the Dead: Reading Remakes of Romero’s Zombie
Films as Markers of Their Times, The Empire Triumphant: Race, Religion and Rebellion
in the Star Wars Films and The Theology of Battlestar Galactica.

Address for correspondence

Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr, Department of Theatre Arts, Loyola Marymount University, 1 LMU
Drive, MS 8210, Los Angeles, CA 90045, USA. Email: Kevin.Wetmore@lmu.edu

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