Original sin: Frontier horror, gothic anxiety and colonial monsters in The Vampire Diaries

Abstract

Abstract This article focuses on the CW television series The Vampire Diaries (TVD) (2009–17) and explores how the show uses literary tropes from the early American period commonly used to represent Native Americans. The television series reimagines colonial contact in a way that allows for a range of critical interpretations. The show at turns reproduces colonial rationalizations and rhetoric of land claim and discovery that disenfranchise Native peoples but also allows for ambivalent critiques of the colonial project. More particularly, this article asserts that the Mikaelson vampires (also referred to in the series as ‘The Originals’) replace Native Americans through their assumption of a proto-American identity, then displace actual Native American peoples to occupy the position of surrogate Indian, and finally erase what Native Studies scholars term the tribal real by reproducing fakelore that helps legitimize their American roots. The vampire characters in TVD see themselves as both elite and oppressed and position themselves as ‘surrogate Indians’, a characterization that harks back to some of the earliest depictions and records of historical Virginia as a royal colony filled with displaced elite supporters of the English monarchy.