Flesh and Blood

On Adam Khalil's Nosferasta, Interview With The Vampire, and what vampires can teach us about racism and the lasting impacts of colonization

Author’s Note: This essay contains descriptions of racial and domestic violence.

From Nosferasta: First Bite (2021)

“Modernity’s endless technoscientific entanglements of blood and race are the zenith of vampire culture. It’s a history of blood spilt in the name of bloodlines…Modernity is the Age of Vampires—as much as it’s an age of undead empires.” - Sabel Gavaldon, ‘Bad Blood: Or, the Impure Origins of Vampire Culture,’ Nosferasta: The Book

Known by many names over the centuries—adze, peuchen, vrykolakas, soucouyant, mandurugo, asanbosam, penanggalan, jiāngshī, strigoi—we recognize vampires by their sharp teeth and mouths red with blood. They tend to live forever. Sometimes they look you and I. Sometimes they can only hide parts of their monstrosity, inadvertently revealing their strangeness through long fingernails, hypnotic gazes, or skin fizzles and smokes in the sun. Sometimes they don’t look human at all. 

Much to the chagrin of my Romanian ancestors, vampires have always been my favorite supernatural monster. Besides the fact that vampires usually appear as impeccably dressed creatures of the night, the vampire embodies destructive greed and power through its fanged anatomy. They are ever-hungry hunters both blessed and cursed by immortality. Long passages of time are etched into the way they speak, dress, the wealth they have, the way they see the world. They are perpetually displaced in time, cursed to outlive (or murder) every mortal they encounter.

From Nosferasta (2021)

In the weeks between Indigenous Peoples’ Day and Halloween, I went to Someday to see Nosferasta: First Bite. Directed by Adam Khalil and Bayley Sweitzer, the 2021 short film stars artist and musician Oba (whose sculptures are also included in the gallery’s multimedia installation) as his alter ego, an enslaved man who is bitten and turned by a vampiric Christopher Columbus. Yes, you read that right. In this vampire story, Christopher Columbus himself is the supernatural villain.

Khalil, an Ojibwe filmmaker, approaches this 500-year legacy of exploitation, and dehumanization with a biting sense of humor (pun intended). He repeatedly shows us how absurd these colonizers are as they assert their ideas of white supremacy. Before he discovers Oba washed up on the shore after escaping from a slave ship, Columbus already has an Indigenous man under his control who carries him on his back and out of the sun. We see Columbus clumsily stumble through tangled seaweed in bloodthirsty desperation before awkwardly throwing himself at Oba’s throat. He expresses his frustration at not reaching the Indies, and ponders how he’ll turn this mistake into profit. At one point, he swipes mud across his face in a mocking gesture of blackface. Columbus is a carrier, infecting victims as he makes his way into the Americas with both very real diseases and systemic violences of colonial expansion.

Under Columbus’s control, Oba is sent to infiltrate Indigenous groups (and later does the same to abolitionist and racial justice groups). He’s now a pawn in the European colonial project. For all that Columbus calls him ‘family,’ Oba is never taught how to read or write despite Columbus’s promises that he’ll give Oba a “second life.” Columbus keeps him “two races apart” from the rest of the world, an outsider both as a Black man in the West’s racist socioeconomic hierarchy and as an undead man among mortals. While Columbus, despite the atrocities he committed, is still celebrated as a heroic figure in America, Columbus himself notes that he “came here as a pirate,” more concerned with genocidal destruction and domination. 

When we meet Oba again, he returns New York and now has to navigate the unjust systems Columbus created. Despite his supernatural powers, Oba has to go through racist bureaucracies, such as meeting with a lawyer to renew his green card and doing a stint on Rikers Island for weed possession. Even as an immortal vampire, he’s still subjected to criminalization and racist judgment. As we follow him around, Khalil draws our attention to the use of Columbus’s name on city landmarks from the Columbus Circle subway stop to other statues and monuments dedicated to the colonizer. It’s worth noting that Indigenous Peoples’ Day is still not recognized by most states as a replacement for Columbus Day and that many governments will sometimes celebrate both. In New York City, the removal of the Columbus Circle statue was proposed back in 2020 because of the racist legacy his figure represents, yet the statue remained. The specters of colonization still haunt us.

Khalil invites us to wonder: “How can you decolonize yourself, if it’s in your blood?” Oba, now a Rastafarian, wrestles with this question in the present day. As he hunts down Columbus to kill him and end his pursuit of world domination, Oba decides he also wants his life story recorded, separating his own identity from Columbus’s control. In the centuries that passed since he first bite, Oba has begun to reconnect with humans. He no longer sees his fellow man as prey in his quest for self and collective liberation.