Expository spirits: media and the material occult in J.R. Planché’s The Vampire

There is a long tradition of aligning vampires with media, dating back to Dracula's defeat by humans using modern communication technologies. This article examines an earlier, more elemental vampire in J.R. Planché's 1820 stage melodrama The Vampire. Planché's play was staged during a period when the definition of media was shifting from the natural elements toward human communication technologies. Building on John Durham Peters' expanded notion of media as encompassing bodies and environments as well as minds and communication technologies, this article reads Planché's nonhuman characters – spirits of the air and water and a vampire who disappears into the stage – as somewhere between characters and scenery. By showing how these nonhuman characters align with the melodrama's pictorial renderings of environment in its 'vision' scene, the article suggests how the elemental both orders and complicates modes of signification grounded in the social world. Over the course of the nineteenth century, vision scenes became less elemental and more psychological in later melodramas such as David Leopold Lewis's The Bells (1871). The Vampire's vision scene thus suggests the elemental underpinnings of later melodramatic conventions for representing inner life.