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In the world, due to different social, ideological, cultural factors and religious beliefs, each nation has different ghost cultures in its history. The most representative examples are Chinese ghost culture and western vampire culture. With the development of modern economy, all sorts of cultures and the consequent entertainments are gradually increasing. From the perspective of ghost culture, in China, people have a keen interest in literature, film and television works of ghosts and gods. Such as The Legend of Deification written by Xu Zhonglin and the film and television programs arranged according to it are very popular among the audience. The vampire movie is a common subject in western countries, such as the movie Twilight series, which not only use a variety of means to attract a large number of audience, but also make the multilayer processing in shaping vampires, so that they can provide movies for highly ornamental and evaluation value.
The paper is written to find out the similarities and differences between Chinese ghost culture and western vampire culture by means of the analysis of the two cultures. By using the methods of correlation and analysis, this paper analyzes the causes of differences between Chinese ghost culture and western vampire culture from several aspects, in order to make people have a further understanding for Chinese ghost culture and know more about mysterious western vampire culture. Meanwhile, it is beneficial for us to treat the differences between Chinese and western culture right from different views, so as to avoid some misunderstandings on the cultural knowledge and promote the international cross-cultural communication.
II. Ghost Culture
According to Oxford Advanced Learner’s English-Chinese Dictionary, “ghost” is defined as “The spirit of a dead person that a living person believes they can see or hear”. For the word “ghost”, there are a lot of discussion and debate about it in history. Almost every dynasty has the resulting theory of ghost. Artists create various artistic images of ghost, for example, art works, dramas works, literary works related the ghost, and so on. In the folk, there are more customs in talking about ghosts and gods so that all of these things put together form the ghost culture today.
2.1 Concept of Ghost Culture
Ghost culture is a new concept, a new word which is put forward by people in new society. It contains a lot of contents, such as the works of fine art, drama, literature, film and television works related to ghost. These all kinds of works not only are the reflection of ghost culture in people’s daily life, but also have the extremely close relation with the human society.
The most common type of ghost culture is the “ghost”. “Ghost” is a fictitious monster in people’s thoughts but exists everywhere permanently. From totem worship in the primitive society to personal beliefs in modern society, “ghost” is developed from a fear of natural phenomena to a more important cultural symbol. It not only becomes an important part of culture in contemporary society, but also occupies a pivotal position in cultural development of all ethnic groups in the world. In China, for example, the earliest text Oracle has the word of “ghost”. When it comes to the ghost culture, it contains not only the word “ghost” but also the word “soul”. The world is made up of matter, including time and soul. Soul is just a form of material we do not fully know. Ghost is associated with the soul, and the soul is closely related to dreams. In The Ludwig Feuerbach and the End of the German Classical Philosophy, Engels pointed out, “In ancient times, people still don't fully know their body structure and is affected by the dream scenes, hence to produce a concept: the soul of their bodies is activates. Since that time, people have had to think about the relationship between the soul and the outside world. Since the souls of the dead leave the bodies and continue to live, there is no reason to suppose that the soul will die on its own. Then there is the concept of the immortality of the soul.” So the people in ancient times concluded that the man comprises of “body” and “soul” two parts. The body can die, 源Z自+751=文-论(文+网[www.751com.cn but the soul is immortal. And when people died, the soul is out of the human body and becomes the ghost. “Ghost” and “soul” combine with other material of ghosts and gods to form a set of unique ghost culture.