Hollywood vampire films take a digital turn, moving from heritage cinema, like Bram Stoker's Dracula, which augmented Stoker's novel with “missing” historical detail, to alternative-reality mashup of Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter (USA 2012; dir. Timur Bakmambetov), which imagined a US president as a vampire hunter. Before the latter's release, Google image-searches with keywords “vampire” and “president” returned memes that layer text, such as “I vant to suck your blood,” and images, such as fangs, over images of Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, and Barack Obama. Nonprofessional media-makers remix Hollywood conventions to express political views and contest copyright through unauthorized use. Often originating on anonymous imageboards, such as 4chan's /b/ (random content), memes replicate and spread through social networks. They range from apolitical (if anthropo¬centric) entertainment, such as LOLcats, to incendiary political statements. Comparably, video mashups recombine commercial media, allowing “canons” or “parent products” (i.e., commercial media) to give birth to new media. Video mashups transform meaning by speculating alternative scenarios. They extend classical Hollywood's monster mashes, which imagined encounters between Count Dracula, Wolfman, and Frankenstein's Monster, but they use found footage, more in the traditions of compilation films, such as Joseph Cornell's Rose Hobart (1936), Bruce Conner's A Movie (1958), and Kenneth Anger's Scorpio Rising (1964) that foreground creativity through editing, not writing or filming. Originality in recombination overshadows originality of content.

Memes and mashups are part of a broader transformation of media. Do-it-yourself (DIY) aesthetics and peer-to-peer (P2P) file sharing are possible on laptops equipped with preinstalled internet browsers and nonlinear editing and imaging software. Consumer-grade programs allow images to be manipulated. Fans rip files from DVDs or download them via BitTorrents. “Fan culture,” explains Henry Jenkins, “stands as an open challenge to the ‘naturalness’ and desirability of dominant cultural hierarchies, a refusal of authorial author¬ity and a violation of intellectual property” (1992: 18). Memes on /b/ are automatically deleted within weeks, as imageboards accumulate new content, though they often migrate to social-media platforms and blogs, where they remain. They are part of new media ecologies defined by “spreadability” of potential dispersal rather than “stickiness” of centralized aggregation (Jenkins et al. 2013).