That's your call, but we briedly discussed the new movie in one of the classes yesrterday. Then I stumbled across this story which claims that slaves were concerned that southern slave masters were cannibals and - yes - vampires.
Slaves in the colonial era created a complex folklore about the southern master class, worrying that slave traders were cannibals. My research uncovered at least one case in Louisiana which newly imported slaves became convinced that the masters were witches and vampires (after watching them drink red wine).
These tales of terror illuminate rather than obscure important truths. Slavery did represent a kind of dark magic in which legal fictions transmogrified the bodies of human beings into property. The institution of slavery did become a kind of cannibalism, swallowing millions from the African continent, digesting them in the rice and cotton fields in the relentless pursuit of wealth that characterized the alleged southern "aristocrats."
America needed a vampire hunter in 1860.
