Researching popular culture with academic methods leads to a situation in which the traditional division of serious and popular culture can no longer be maintained. The contributions in this collection also take the manifestations of pop culture as serious objects of academic study, and investigate, among other things, the origin of the vampire as medial phenomenon with ethnological and sociological methods, or test the ubiquitous scenes of apocalypse in film and TV with material and philosophic analyses. It becomes clear that quality and popularity need not necessarily run contrary to one another.