1) Romantic vampires annoy traditional horror fans. Aside from taking cheap shots at Twilight, purists like their monsters pure. I was listening to the Scream Queenz Dracula podcast and they nailed the classical definition of a vampire: their sexuality is predatory. They're seducing you in order to eat you alive. There's nothing underneath the charm. That kind of vampire is fine, but I really like Interview with the Vampire, the book/movie that is often accused of being the forerunner of the sad-puppy vampire.
2) IwtV is the first major work that features the vampire as the protagonist, and it creates a compelling one. I get that a lot of people find Louis Hamlet-like waffling frustrating, but I like the fact that he fundamentally doesn't want to be a murderer. The big different between Anne Rice's vampires and Stephanie Meyers' vampires is that Louis has to take human life to survive. Most people don't want to die, but the question is how willing they are to kill innocent people in order to preserve their own life, especially when their instincts compel them to do so.
3) As I mentioned in the Addams Family post, there are two things that always appeal to Goths: antiquity and romanticism. IwtV is a very romantic movie. Lestat loves Louis, Louis cares for Claudia, Claudia loves Louis, Armand loves Armand. They all pull apart and crash into each other, goading their paramours to be what they want them to be, and occasionally trying to kill each other. It's all a bunch of grand passions mixed with homicide, set against a backdrop of European cities at night.
4) Speaking of, let's talk about Lestat for a second. When I saw the movie as a kid, I thought that Lestat was the villain. He killed people without remorse. He was Gentleman Death, dressed for a night out. "It's your coffin, my dear." I was a good-hearted kid, I didn't want my heroes to hurt anybody. As I got older, I began to share Lestat's frustration with Louis. Louis' problem isn't that he doesn't want to hurt people, it's that he refuses to accept what he is. It's why that "still whining, Louis" line still gets a laugh every time. Plus being Lestat just looks like more fun.
5) The big tragedy of the film is Claudia. She's turned as part of a misguided act of mercy, then forced to mature into an adult while keeping a child's body. Despite loving Louis, he will always view her as a child. And, of course, her attempt to free the pair from Lestat's clutches has horrific consequences.
6) The idea of immortality has a lot of appeal. For one thing, you can live long enough to see future cars. You also get to live a life unfettered by death. I'd love to imagine what experiences would be open to me, what sights I could see. I think I'd give up the sun for that.
Conclusion: Vampires endure because they walk the line between monster and wish fulfillment. There's a lot of perks to their condition, but it comes with some intense personal costs. Interview with the Vampire was the first time I was ever able to vicariously step into a vampire's lace cuffs. It's romantic treatment of vampirism and angst saturation did encourage a trend I don't necessarily love, but I really like this story. It takes the romanticism of vampires without sanding down the fangs.
1) Ravenloft is the only way I can play Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not a high fantasy guy. I don't care all that much about elves and dwarves. Give me vampires staring out over lonely battlements any day.
2) Ravenloft takes place in a fantasy world called the Domain of Dread, dominated by every trope of gothic horror you can imagine. Frankenstein's monster roams the countryside looking for his creator. Werewolves prowl the forests. Ghosts creep through ruined castles. The few heroes who attempt to fight against the darkness must act with great care, lest the corruption consume their own souls.
3) The world of Ravenloft is ruled by the Dark Powers, a mysterious consciousness that often takes the form of the mists that constantly shrouds the Domain of Dread. We never get a clear sense of what the Dark Powers are, but they seem to be focused on subjecting the inhabitants of the domain to moral tests and punishing those who fail.
4) Ravenloft is built around grand gothic tragedy. The doomed warlords of tiny fiefdoms in the realm--darklords, in the game's parlance--are trapped to forever reenact the dramas that lead to their downfalls. The tyrant's armies will always fail in conquest, the mad wizard will never be able to learn any new magic, the vampire will always find and lose the reincarnation of his first love.
5) Unlike most of Dungeons and Dragons, Ravenloft heavily emphasizes the story. Most of the powers that Dungeons and Dragons players rely on are corrupted by the Dark Powers. Gods are inaccessible, scrying and divination spells don't work the way they're supposed to, and traditional routes to power often come at horrible cost.
6) Because the Doman of Dread acts as a moral test of character, and because the Dark Powers seem to favor evil (or at least attempt to put the forces of good through the toughest gauntlet imaginable), the players' actions often draw them down the path of corruption. Hiding behind alignment no longer works, as selfish or evil actions can condemn a character just as thoroughly as any darklord.
7) The Domain of Dread works for pretty much any kind of gothic horror adventure, from Van Helsing's lethal crusade to quieter works of spirits in lonely manors. The emphasis on atmosphere and narrative versatility make Ravenloft one of my favorite creations in all horror fiction.
Conclusion: I like to think of Ravenloft as the land where all horror stories come from. Almost every classic monster is represented in one form or another, tied into a cohesive whole. It hits the right mix of tragedy and dread that makes for great gaming and storytelling.
1) The cinematography, costumes, and set design. Bram Stoker's Dracula is an absolutely gorgeous film. It's as highly-stylized and colorful as a European graphic novel.
2) The opening scenes in Dracula's castle. Shadows creep along the walls, cold stone drips with secrets, and torchlight illuminates shadowed corners.
3) Keanu Reeves' amazingly fallible British accent. "Music? Those animals?"
4) The vampire brides in general and Monica Bellucci in particular. They're all dripping with satin and repressed Victorian sexuality.
5) Winona Ryder. My go-to celebrity crush during my tween years was Winona Ryder, thanks in no small part to this movie and Beetlejuice. This movie made her into the perfect Victorian romantic lead; at once uptight and naive. Plus she made a really cute almost-vampire.
6) Gary Oldman as Dracula. As the years have gone by and I've taken the movie less seriously, I've come to appreciate the high camp in his performance. He glowers, he cackles, he hisses, and he professes his love with operatic glee.
7) Anthony Hopkins as Van Helsing. Speaking of over-the-top performances, I've never seen Van Helsing performed with the same mix of dispassionate scholarship and lunatic enthusiasm. Sometimes it goes too broad, like when humps Quincey before they go hunting Lucy, but most of the time he makes for a fun over-the-top vampire hunter.
8) The final chase to Dracula's castle, with the gunfights and galloping horses and Mina flipping out and calling to her lover. It's the way I imagine most Ravenloft games ending.
9) The opening sequence, with all the shadow puppetry and fairy tale voice-overs. I like that Dracula's armor looks like a cross between a bat and bloody musculature, and the soaring music that roars when he drinks the blood from the stabbed crucifix sets up our expectation for a truly operatic take on the Dracula myth.
10) "Would you care for some hors d'oeuvres, Doctor Seward?"
11) Lucy's funeral ruff. Who knew Victorian death rituals involved so many ruffles?
12) The soundtrack is the best vampire score of all time.
Conclusion: My feelings towards Bram Stoker's Dracula have changed significantly over the years. When I was younger, I deeply believed in the love story between Dracula and Mina. Hell, I thought it was the most romantic thing in the world. Now I find that the campy performances and broad melodrama undercut the romantic moments too much for me to really take the heart of the movie seriously. Now I enjoy it mostly as an exercise in style, with added bonus of cringing at my past self's tastes in melodrama.
Only Lovers Left Alive did two things for me: it created three of my favorite vampires of the last few years, and it taught me how to listen to music again.
I've had a hard time connecting to music lately. I usually have to listen to a song a few times to know whether I like it or not. Plus in the age of Pandora, Spotify, and the taste-predicting algorithm, I'm usually either sticking to the stuff I've been listening to for twenty years or listening to new stuff that sounds the exact same.
Part of the problem is that music has always been in the background of whatever I'm already doing. I put it on when I'm writing or commuting or riding roller coasters (try playing Schubert's Ave Maria when you're just about to drop), but I never just sit down and listen to music. Music is meditative, and my brain hungers for activity and never shuts up. It's why mediation never works for me. My thoughts speed up when they're asked to slow down. The notion of simply listening to music as its own activity is alien to me. It's why I don't go to live shows. Just watching someone play music bores me.
Most of Only Lovers Left Alive is taken up by people listening to music.
There are a lot of shots filmed from overhead, looking down on the characters as they recline on antique furniture or pitch-black sheets as music washes over them. Adam in particular, the musician of the pair, has an infectious love for all things musical. The only time he ever shows excitement or affection for anything other than his wife is when he encounters a new performer or storied instrument. His dilapidated apartment (one of my favorite touches of the film. His shitty old Victorian in a dead stretch of Detroit is as much a crumbling Gothic refuge as any Transylvanian castle) is packed full of records, books, recording equipment, soundproof padding, and lovingly-tended musical instruments procured by an oblivious rocker boy.
It's the home of someone very much engaged in the world. The movie is about the longevity and restorative power of creative expression.
Both Adam and Kit, who turns out to be Christopher Marlowe, the actual writer of Shakespeare's work (at least according to the film) have released their work anonymously over the centuries, more for creative fulfillment than personal gain. It's a movie about the passion of creation, not the narcissistic need for fame. Vampires are often cast as charismatic rock stars, but watching a sad dude noodling around with lovingly-tended musical instruments creates an image of a creator that reverses the idea of vampire as glamorous parasite.
I love the way the movie deals with drinking blood.
Adam and Eve don't get their regular sustenance from biting randos. Regular blood often carries impurities that leads to the death of one of the secondary vampire characters. Instead, they get quality-controlled blood from human confederates working in the medical industry. There's a lot of familiar vampire-as-junkie imagery, but the feeding process works well for conveying Adam's depressed and desexualized vibe.
I've seen a lot of feeding scenes in movies and they're all pretty much the same. The camera positions itself behind the victim's bare neck and focuses on the vampire. The vampire hisses, bears it's fangs, and bites down on the joint between the neck and shoulder. The camera switches to a close-up on the victim, the victim looks pained and frightened, then they melt into orgasmic bliss. It's rare to find a movie where the vampire attack looks painful (Let The Right One In springs to mind) and it enforces the idea that you want to get bitten by a vampire because it will give you a mind-shattering orgasm.
The blood drinking in Only Lovers Left Alive is filmed the way drug use often is. The vampires drink from tidy crystal glasses, a throbbing down tempo guitar plays, and the camera follows the character's face as they recline backwards onto the furniture in ecstasy.
The experience looks sensuous.
Like most drug movies, there comes a scene later in the movie where they're cut off from their supply, and they roam an alien cityscape looking for a fix. By the time that happens, it's the first real crisis of the film. We feel their pain and hunger in a real and meaningful way. The choices they make ultimately bind them together, and provides the chilling meaning to the title.
The movie keeps threatening to have a plot, but I'm grateful that it never does. It starts with Adam contemplating his own suicide, arranging for his rocker buddy to get a bullet made with a hard wooden tip. As Eve rushes from Tangiers to be with him, following a particularly morose phone call, we get the sense that Adam has done this before. Her presence seems to reinvigorate him, and we see that Eve is the perfect respite from Adam's gloom. The bullet remains in the revolver, violating Chekov's rule about guns and third acts.
The hospital employee that Adam procures his blood from always seems to be on the verge of blackmailing the vampire, but that never comes to anything either.
The one moment of dangerous chaos comes midway through the movie when Ava, a hedonistic idiot vampire kin of Eve's, breezes into their lives like a junkie hurricane. She quickly throws their cozy nest into chaos and does real damage, but she's evacuated from the narrative a short time later by having her bags thrown out into the street and a door slammed in her face. What would have been a film-length conflict between the angsty humane vampire and the cheerful sociopath, is resolved like a surprise visit from a clueless relative.
The artificial structures of plot, which would have turned Only Lovers Left Alive into just another vampire genre flick, never take hold. Instead, we just get to hang out with these creatures and get to know what their unlives are like. Because of this, they're defined as characters first, vampires second.
Vampire angst is seldom handled well in vampire movies. It's usually someone brooding theatrically, with other people around them commenting on how much the vampire is brooding. Adam actually seems depressed. He mopes around, avoids company, speaks skittishly to people, and has to be physically dragged out his shell. He seems less effected by the Inherent Tragedy of Unlife. Instead, Adam comes off as a depressed musician who happens to be a vampire. That kind of unselfconsciousness, mixed with actual talent and class, make Adam and Eve the two coolest vampires I've seen in a long time.
Take the scene where Eve and Ava finally drag him out of his cave and to a concert in some shitty bar. They recline against the back wall, shades on to avoid the light, and simply take in the scene. I've seen so many movies where the vampires walk into the club all slow-mo, Chappelle-style, and glower at everyone. All the Kubrick stares and thudding background music might look sexy on film, but it comes off as an unbearably pretentious affectation in real life. Instead, Adam and Eve are just there, feeding off the passion of the music. It takes a lot of life experience and class to project that level of not-give-a-fuckitude, and the big laugh comes when Adam's rocker buddy puts on a pair of sunglasses in order to emulate them.
Plus, it's sweet to see Adam and Eve's love story. Most romances are told during the early infatuation stage, when people are love drunk and promising forever. Adam and Eve have been into each other forever, and it's the kind of well-worn, knowing affection of people who've been into each other long enough to know one another's quirks while still keeping the base passion lit. Eve starts the movie in Tangiers, and you get the sense that their affection works because of tremendous personal space. As a person who lived with a partner and didn't like it, the lifestyle seems appealing. Familiarity breeds contempt, after all.
I've had a real hard time pitching film to my friends.
Jim Jarmusch is usually the stopping point. Not a lot of stuff happens in his movies and, while most of my friends are as pretentious as I am, it's hard to sell them on "it's a vampire film where they just sort of hang out, reaffirm their love, and listen to music."
I doubt I'm going to get a lot of sales from the actual appeal of the movie to me: "these are the kinds of vampires I imagine myself being."
During barroom conversations about supernatural longevity, I say that I'd take them up on it because I can't wait to see what form of self-expression humanity comes up with next. My life is a sort of happy clutter of things I hold dear, and creativity invigorates me.
So it's nice to see a movie about love without all the hysterics and heavy breathing. It's nice to see a vampire film created by someone who isn't subconsciously emulating every other fucking vampire film. It's nice to see a laid-back film that makes darkness and mystery sexy again. And it's nice to see the work of someone who can make midnight cityscapes beautiful. I really loved Only Lovers Left Alive. I've already purchased the soundtrack and look forward to long evenings lounging on the couch and listening to it with my shirt open.
Since I reported my completion of Nos4a2 on my GoodReads account, people have been asking me what I thought about. It's natural: Hill is probably the most interesting mainstream up-and-coming horror writer working right now and Nos4a2 has been treated like his breakout novel. I picked up the book in an airport bookstore in Pittsburgh. It was in the recommended reads section and had prominent placement. When was the last time you've seen a horror novel get that much attention?
Nos4a2 is about a vampire named is Charlie Manx. He's a little bit of a rube and a little bit deadly, slightly too comical but also cunningly lethal. He drives a bad ass Rolls Royce Wraith around, picking up little children to take back to his imaginary Christmas kingdom. Once there, he steals their youth and their humanity in order to keep himself young.
If any parent objects, Manx feeds them to his Renfield, an emotionally stunted little misanthrope named the Gasmask Man.
The only person who can oppose him is a damaged young woman named Vic McQueen. The product of a broken home, she has discovered a way to magically travel anywhere she needs to be almost instantly, but the process has done severe damage to her psyche. Now, with the life of a loved one hanging in the balance, she must find the courage to ride across the covered bridge and confront Manx in his nightmarish inscape of Christmasland.
The more I read Joe Hill's stuff, the more I'm starting to see patterns and repeat motifs emerge. Hill writes brilliantly wounded young adults. Hill doesn't do happy romances. Hill's work straddles a line between fantasy and horror. Hill is already creating his own mythos, where everyday objects bestowing incredible powers on people at horrible cost. Characters strive for either redemption or validation.
The damaged character thing is probably my favorite aspect of his work. Horror fiction has its fair share of wounded heroes but most of them are inelegantly handled. Dark pasts are window dressing for stern figures to brood over or psychos to have a justification. Hill's characters actually feel like damaged human beings. They're barely keeping it together, mired with regret, prone to wishful thinking, and possessed of fearsome self-destructive anger.
One of the things that drew me to horror fiction over, say, science fiction or fantasy is that horror is an examination of human frailty. Both sci-fi and fantasy are full of powerful heroes and humans elevated to godhood. Horror characters don't triumph, they don't win and they're mostly lucky to get through in one piece.
I like that. I play video games to feel powerful. I watch horror movies to feel vulnerable. You can't make an invincible character feel vulnerable. Joe Hill does human weakness very well. I can imagine some people might think he goes too far and his characters are too far gone, but I sympathize with them.
As much as I liked the characterization of this book, I think I preferred Horns more.
Part of the reason I like the horror genre over the science fiction or fantasy genre is I have an admittedly limited imagination. When I real a sci-fi/fantasy novel, I have to have the world explained to me. Not only do I have to become emotionally invested in the characters and their journey, now I have to spend pages on descriptions of stuff I don't actually care about.
Sorry, y'all. New worlds belong in visual media. So does Christmasland.
Hill does have the advantage of everyone being at least passingly familiar with Christmas tradition, and it's not hard to invert Christmas stuff and make it creepy ("Happy children with knives! Christmas ornaments made from severed heads!") but it felt more like a dangerous fantasy setting than a horror story. This is more a preference than a complaint and I'm sure a lot of people will love that aspect of Nos4a2 but it only kinda-sorta worked for me. I liked the eerie lonely echo of the House of Sleep more. It didn't help that the book downshifted toward the end. The kid gets kidnapped slightly more than halfway through the book and the ensuing chase, which should have been a breathless and tense rush, turns into two separate side quests and a meander.
I did like fact that magic came at tremendous cost. The Wraith provides Charlie Manx with eternal life and access to a tiny pocket dimension, but it also means that he is stuck in perpetual, petulant childhood. Vic McQueen can travel anywhere that she needs to, but the price has been a lifetime of self-destructive behavior and struggles to keep her sanity. I have always liked the idea that there would be a hard cost to disrupting the fabric of reality. It's done well in the book. If I had Vic McQueen's bike, I'd probably leave that covered bridge alone.
Nos4a2 feels like a later effort from a punk rock band. Some of the appealing raw energy is gone, but the voice is more solid and confident. He's figured out what he does well and he mostly sticks to it. I liked the monster Charlie Manx quite a bit, I felt for Vic McQueen, and I love the way their stories played out. The book did feel a little overlong at parts and the second half could have easily been condensed, but it's a fine story all the same. I'm really digging Hill's work. I can't wait for his next one.
Cartoon strips were the first stories I fell in love with. As a very small child my folks read picture books to me and it was a natural transition into the Calvin and Hobbes books that I still love and revere to this day.
One fine day, I was out grocery shopping with my mom and I saw and Archie's Digest on one of the spinner racks between the thing and the other thing. I loved the stories and will defend them to this day, and when my father came home from work that night I asked him if he would pick up another issue from the comic store next door.
He bought me an entire box of 70s-era Archie comics. My dad was that kind of guy.
When I hit age nine, give or take, Marvel released trading cards of their heroes. The images on the cards were crisp and vibrant and the character bios on the back were fascinating. Plus you got little sport-stat assessments of the character' intelligence and fighting ability. I left the clean, sexless, halcyon fields of Riverdale for the elaborate costume dramas of 616 Manhattan.
I kept reading comics throughout my childhood. I was not particularly bullied as a kid, but I had to eat shit a fair amount of shit for it. I like to think that the little bastards who teased me for loving Jim Lee-era X-Men books loved all the movies that came over the last ten years.
I've been going to comic book conventions ever since they were shady affairs held in church basements full of Comic Book Guys and pedophiles. Now they're somewhere between nerd Mardi Gras and heartless corporate marketing machines. Still, I love the medium. My pull list is about ten bucks a week, give or take.
I love them so much, I want to write comic books for a living.
Shhhh. It's a seeeeeecret.
Comic books have to be judged by a slightly different standard than prose. They are primarily a visual medium, they're often serialized so the story construction tends to be both longer form and paced in fits and starts.
They can be deep. Watchmen is deep. But Watchmen is probably the best American comic ever made. Most of the rest of the mainstream books are fight books between characters that have been teenagers and young adults for over fifty years.
The horror genre has a shaky history in the medium. It nearly killed comics during the panic in the fifties, the seventies saw the birth of the horror-themed superheroes, and the eighties saw the creation of the DC offshoot Vertigo and books like Alan Moore's Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman's Sandman, both of which are classics by any standard. Horror, however, is not a mainstream thing. Comics in America mean superheroes and savage cyber-killers, not monsters skulking in the dark.
I've seen it all. I've read it all. And I never got around to reading 30 Days of Night.
The reason I've never picked up 30 Days of Night is that I don't care for the art of Ben Templesmith.
I don't think it's bad art. It's definitely unique. It reminds me a lot of the fluid styles of David Mack, which borrows more from the fine art world than from the hidebound styles of comic draftspeople.
Experimentation is fine. Hell, I have a David Mack piece tattooed on my body. But I am not a particularly visual person and it's easy to lose me to overly clever artwork. Templesmith's style is too fluid. Frankly, I have no idea what the hell is going on most of the time. And it's also somewhat of a bad fit for Steve Niles, one of the only purely horror writers in the medium.
30 Days of Night is a fairly straightforward vampire yarn. There's a town in the arctic circle that stays dark for a month, so a bunch of vampires decide to throw a celebratory massacre and invite some of their big leaders. The rest of the story becomes a struggle between frightened survivors and the squabbling vampires.
It's....a'ight. A bit character-lite, not a lot of surprises, pretty to look at. Some of the vampires are nifty. Nice bittersweet ending but it ultimately feels a little bit hollow.
The one interesting thing that stood out was the conflict between the vampires. The younger vampires organized the whole party. The older vampires they invited to impress are furious with them for drawing attention to their existence and because the whole event is, by elitist snooty vampire standards, tacky. I love that stuff.
I've discussed in the blog how I learned my storytelling chops from running role playing games and the very first game I picked up was Vampire: the Masquerade. Long and the short, the Masquerade is the law in vampire society prohibiting its members from revealing their existence to humanity.
I love this stuff. It's the only way vampires work in modern society and I'm pretty sure that White Wolf Games' product line helped kick start the whole urban fantasy thing.
So, there ya go. It was pretty good for what it was. It was worth the four bucks I spent but I don't really see it shaking any new ground in my vision of vampires.
"Hey, vampires can't be out in daylight. Let's set it some place where night never comes."
I started writing this drunk and finished it hung over. Welcome back, Seton Hill.
What am I talking about? Zombies? Vampires? A'ight.
So I was talking to one of my asshole hipster friends and we were lamenting the fact that nobody who is into pop culture seems to look at the roots of the things that they love. Nobody watches Casablanca or Citizen Kane or Gentlemen Prefer Blondes or The Searchers unless they're forced to for film class.
Reading I Am Legend felt like going back to the roots of the whole zombie thing.
Okay, yeah, they're vampires. But the narrative is the same as a zombie story. Lone survivor, desperate circumstances, scrounging for what he needs to get by, and surviving on good old libertarian work ethics (he can maintain generators AND grow garlic AND fix cars AND fight monsters? Man, my ass would be dead in a minute.) Almost all zombie books are siege books and Robert Neville is clearly a man living under constant threat. The book opens with him checking the damage from the night before, repairing busted generator parts, and harvesting garlic from his greenhouse. We don't get the sense that the creatures hounding him are human, but Matheson is coy with the details. Rereading the book, I'm struck how Matheson did himself a disservice by sticking too close to the whole vampire thing. He seems like he's on the verge of creating a brand new monster, but he loses traction trying to fit all the classic vampire details into his narrative. When Romero took this story and made Night of the Living Dead, he was taking the story to the next natural level.
Where Matheson stumbles on the monsters, the construction of the story is brilliant. Zombie stories are actually really hard to pull off. They're siege stories, they're nihilistic, and they only end one of two ways: the heroes either find sanctuary or they get got. The situation isn't helped by the fact that modern creators have eschewed post-apocalyptic survivalist stories for rugged American high-octane machine gun power fantasies. The real threat in old school zombies stories isn't necessarily the zombies. The threat is the isolation, the paranoia, the inability to work together, and fact that our structures collapse in the face of the zombie threat.
Robert Neville is not necessarily an easy character to follow around. The isolation and constant threat has made him weird. He spends his days in a routine: fix, scrounge, and slay. He's tormented by the memory of his dead family, he's got weird sexual hang ups (shades of the dissatisfaction I felt reading Matheson's Hell House) and he's staying alive mostly out of habit. The narrative is fixed on his point of view and we feel trapped along with him. The first time he really opens up to us is when he tries to befriend and stray dog. Frankly, I think the story would have been better if it started with this interaction. It shows how far Neville has fallen from his humanity, especially when you stack it up with the more theatrical scenes of him beating his breast at his wife's grave.
The quibbles I have with the book are mostly minor. The dog scenes should have been first, the vampire stuff is ultimately superfluous, the "science" he comes up to explain the vampire condition is pretty half-baked and takes up too much time, and survival stories ultimately lose narrative flow in favor of the minutia of day-to-day getting by. But Matheson not only creates and nails the zombie genre, he proceeds to end the story in the only logical place it could go.
I keep harping on the idea that the reason zombie stories are unique among the horror genre is that most horror is about the monster invading the normal world. It causes damage, we defeat it, the status quo is saved. Zombie stories are about the monster becoming the status quo. Simply by surviving in our world, the remaining humans become the monsters. Monsterism, therefore, is simply a question of context. In the new world being build by the mutants, Neville is the monster. He's the wild-eyed beast slaying creatures in the daylight. He is a thing to be feared and destroyed. It's a much deeper idea than survival stories, and Matheson created it at the beginning of the modern zombie myth.
Castlevania was less a video game and more of an epic quest.
I've spent over a month playing through the game. I've ascended the peaks of Heaven, I've battled demons and vampires, I've unlocked ancient mechanisms, and I've done battle with the devil himself. At times, the game felt endless and I felt that poor Gabriel Belmont would never see the end of his journey.
Two days ago I finally saw the end of the game. And I'm really sad to see it go.
Zero Punctuation is pretty harsh on the game. Sure, Castlevania is basically a God of War rip-off, but originality was never the video game industry's strong point. At this point, GoW has been ripped off a dozen times, but never with this much style.
You take control of Gabriel Belmont, the (likely) progenitor of the legendary vampire hunting clan. We meet him as he's on the quest to rid the world of three darklords and avenge the death of his beloved wife. His journey takes him through many dark and exotic landscapes, from the spires of Castle Frankenstein to the very gates of hell itself. As your quest leads you deeper and deeper into damnation, you discover the terrible secrets linking the House of Belmont to their age-old adversary, the vampire lord Dracula.
I tend to approach most media, whether films, games, or comic books, from a slightly different angle than most people. I'm not a particularly visually-oriented person and I pay very close attention to the strength of the writing, but for Castlevania my standards were completely reversed. The writing is fairly pedestrian, which the level intro narration being florid and melodramatic, but the visuals of the game were absolutely captivating. From the opening scene of the werewolves attacking the Bavarian town to the wintery climb to the summit of the vampire citadel, I was completely entranced. Every environment, every enemy, and every weapon looks gorgeous. The game does a great job of immersing you in a foreboding gothic universe and I loved the sheer aesthetic joy of following Gabriel on his quest. There are tons of unlockables in the game but I made absolutely sure that I got all the concept art.
God of War-style play tends to fall under two camps: the people who can be measured and precise in their fast-paced combat, and guys like me who mash buttons frantically and hope for the best. Yet despite my utter lack of skill, I felt that the game kept pace with me. One of my big issues with most GoW games is that after awhile it becomes boring butchering enemies who seem to only exist to make you look cool, but Castlevania has enough variety in their enemies to make the game engaging. They attack differently, defend differently, and if you get cocky they can eat you alive. You gotta be paying attention and have fast hands to make it through, but it makes the victories all the more sweet.
As I mentioned earlier, I've been working on this game awhile. As I've become used to games you can knock out in ten or twenty hours, spending thirty-plus hours immersed in the haunted battlefields of Transylvania became much more of an undertaking. After awhile, I stopped feeling like I was playing a game and more like I was undertaking an epic adventure. Sure, Gabriel's angsty revenge drama is pretty generic, but it's played against such a mythic backdrop that I was completely sucked into the world.
I would recommend this game for people who like quest-themed stories with a darker age, avenging anto-hero types, and fans of good Gothic adventure. I've always had a soft spot for the Castlevania franchise but I enjoyed the hell out of this game from start to finish.
Life Sucks is a graphic novel about an unassertive emo loser vampire who works in a convenience store and impotently pines for the hot goth chick who regularly comes in.
I loved it.
I guess I'm not supposed to. It belongs to that whole vampire romance thing that's been running roughshod over the genre for the last few years. Our poor protagonist, convenience store drone Dave, suffers from Nice Guy Syndrome, and he often degenerates into self doubt and inaction. Both of these things would normally have me running for the hills, but I was completely engrossed in Life Sucks' story. The writing is strong enough to overcome the conventions of the genre, the characters are constantly engaging, and the story takes some surprising turns toward the end.
Life Sucks is the story of a vampire who gets a crush on a goth girl. The goth girl has a fascination with vampires, imagining them to be majestic lords of the night. Instead, they're bossy franchise owners, directionless slackers, or entitled douchebags. Both characters are longing for something, both are approaching it from different angles, and both have to deal with frustration and disappointment along the way.
There seems to be a basic framework for emo-guy-wants-girl stories: Emo pines for good-hearted, impossibly beautiful Girl. After much prodding from friends/co-workers/parole officers, Emo makes introduction to Girl. Girl opens up to Emo but constantly refers to Emo as a "true friend" or some such. Girl hooks up with Douchebag, who likely bullied Emo earlier. Emo mourns from afar. Girl complains to Emo about Douchebag and Emo lashes out. Girl is confused at Emo's reaction until it slowly dawns on her that Emo is carrying a torch. Life Sucks follows the framework pretty faithfully. It's got enough surprises to lift it out of the realm of cliche.
I liked Dave, the passive convenience-clerk vampire. Yeah, he spends the entire story being everyone's doormat but he never quite tilts over into entitled rage. Underneath the shitty job and constant capitulation to his vampire lord, we know that Dave is a decent guy.
The story does a lot with the seldom-explored relationship between a young vampire and his/her creator. Dave becomes a vampire after his Transylvanian boss decides he needs a night manager for his 24 hour convenience store. The vampires of Life Sucks are completely subservient to their masters, which dovetails nicely into Dave's hellish existence as a retail drone. Dave's master Radu, a former Transylvanian lord turned franchise owner, is a great character. I like the little expatriate vampire community he belongs to, a group of immigrants with old-world customs, huddled away in their little social clubs, trying to figure out how to navigate the new world.
The Girl in the tale is Rosa, the beautiful Latina goth girl. In romance stories told from a Emo guy's perspective, the women are often completely idealized and placed on a pedestal, their only personality traits being their unearthly beauty. Life Sucks made Rosa into an actual character. She's fiery and foolish, impatient and rash, charming and kind-hearted. The plot doesn't simply happen around her. Not all of her decisions are wise and some of the things she does is downright catastrophic, but she is a real, believable character. I also like the fact that they made her heritage and culture part of her character. Goths in most stories tend to be lily-white, modestly affluent kids. It's refreshing to see a new perspective on the community.
The story doesn't have a lot of actual horror elements to it. Most of the blood drinking is done off-stage and the vampire condition is portrayed as being fairly similar to humanity. The one really unsettling moment is when the Douchebag character, whose name currently escapes me, is hanging around in the surf with his vampire brides. As he's talking about his pursuit of Rosa, one of his brides becomes violently jealous. The Douchebag, impatient and bored with his bride, tears the woman's head off. It's a shocking moment and it grinds home the danger involved with vampire life. I especially liked that the other dude-bride has to applaud the Douchebag's behavior, lest he lose his own head to the Douchebag's rage.
Finally, I dug the fact that the story didn't end the way I expected it to. Not everyone gets what they want, some people wind up surprised when the things they wished for don't exactly turn out as expected, and there's a lot of real adult compromise in the story. It's not necessarily a bad thing and Life Sucks isn't a downer story, but I was pleasantly surprised by how far the creators were willing to turn my expectations on their head.
I really dug reading this. If you have a soft spot for vampire romance and you want something a little more quirky, go check out this graphic novel. It doesn't....um...suck.
Back in the halcyon days of my youth, before vampires had all these rules governing their creation, it used to be that if you were killed by a vampire you'd rise as one of the undead. I probably thought waaaay too hard about it because the notion terrified me. If vampires need to feed and feeding creates more vampires, what happens when the world gets taken over? What happens when vampires run out of people to feed on? What happens when they turn on each other?
Apparently I wasn't alone in these thoughts. Someone made Daybreakers. It gets points for doing something vaguely, kinda-sorta newish with vampires. In an era of darkly romantic love interests, the vampires of Daybreakers are unapologetically predatory and cruel.
Well, that's not exactly true. The vampires of Daybreakers don't actually think about the cruelty they inflict on the human race. They get their blood from coffee shops and grocery stores, mixed in with commuter beverages as they move around in underground walkways. Sure, Sam Neill's sleazy vampire CEO stares at his dwindling farm of humans in the same sad way Depression-era fat cats look at dwindling stock portfolios, but the bulk of vampire society is guilty by consumerist demand. I pass very harsh judgment on their consumerist society, all the while wearing cheap clothes made by overseas slave labor.
But I'm wandering. I digress.
The movie is pretty amusing. Ethan Hawke is a vampire hematologist who doesn't feel good about himself. He joins up with some humans, they figure out a cure for vampirism and do a bit of running around. Stuff happens, other stuff happens, and there's something vaguely resembling an optimistic ending. I like Ethan Hawke for reasons I can't quite fathom, but the movie never quite jelled with me until the last 45 minutes or so. Fuck it, I enjoyed Daybreakers more as a travelogue of the vampire society and less as a story.
There's so much cool stuff in this flick. I loved the blacked out cars that allow vampires to drive in the day. I like the chime-y warnings in the suburbs that warn the locals of dawn's approach. I liked the crazy shiny look of all the buildings and the subwalks. I liked the weird, Blade-esque lighting. I liked the retro-50s vampire chicks working at the coffee shops. I liked the fascist, predatory vampire soldiers. I liked the slow degeneration of vampire society as hunger overtakes them and a starving desperation begins creeping in their eyes.
I also dug how absolutely, horribly violent the movie was. The vampires play by pretty traditional rules and I was probably expecting a bit of Twilight-style romance but the actual feedings were brutal and disgusting. There's a scene where one of the vampires changes a human and it's an extremely nasty, unromantic moment. Later, when the starving vampire soldiers get ahold of a human being, they rip him apart like in a zombie movie. It ain't pretty, but it made vampires scary again. Underneath all the restraint and melodrama vampires are addicts and whether or not a movie is a supernatural romance or a horror movie depends on how much the creators play up that angle.
I mentioned that the story really didn't come alive for me until the end, and most of that is due to Michael Dorman's portrayal of Frankie Dalton, the soldier brother of Ethan Hawke's character. He's set up to be an antagonist, a weary soldier impatient with his brother's idealism and discomfort with his vampire nature. He's got that Iraq-era fictional soldier personality, impatient and constantly on the verge of snapping, with an unshakable faith in his mission beyond the scope of morality. He turns his back on his brother and sides with the eeeeevil corporation trying to bring him in and spends most of the movie as a villain.
The movie could have easily let the character run his course to his inevitable annihilation, but as the situation worsens and society falls apart, Frankie begins losing faith. His former rock-solid beliefs are shaken and he returns to his brother. What could have been a simple story of good brother vs. jerky brother turns into something with depth, complexity, and value. As the story was structured it wouldn't have been enough to carry the whole film, but I really liked him.
Now, one thing that REALLY pissed me off about Daybreakers was the over reliance on the soundtrack-spike jump scare. It was one of those movies that relied heavily on things suddenly popping up on-screen accompanied by a sudden scream. It's a fine trick every once in awhile, but I really can't stand horror flicks that rely on that effect. It's a cheap shot and it rattles my nerves.
Anyway, I can't say I regret seeing the movie. If you like vampires and want to see something new done with their mythos, I'd say check it out.
Every Halloween, and probably now after every Twilight movie, damn near every entertainment website publishes a list of their favorite vampires. As a complete...um...sucker for these kind of light articles, I always wind up a bit disappointed afterward. The lists are basically the same. It's the guy from Near Dark, the guy from Lost Boys, Edward, the kid from Let The Right One In, and a bone thrown to Count Orlock from Nosferatu as the scariest vampire ever captured on screen. By and large, these vampires tend to fall into two categories: the tormented creature of the night and the overenthusiastic predatory date rapist.
Don't get me wrong, the lists are usually pretty good. But there are a lot of great vampires out there that don't get a lot of recognition. So, without further ado, here's my favorite vampires:
Dracula
My elementary school had a deal with Scholastic books where they sold tons of young adult books at discount. I'd bring their catalogue home and my parents, indulgent creatures that they were, bought me everything I wanted. Among the little treasures I picked up were kid-friendly versions of classic novels like Sherlock Holmes, Frankenstein, The Invisible Man, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Dracula.
I loved those books. They introduced me to the fog-swept streets of Victorian England and the monsters that lurked among the cobblestone streets and tastefully-appointed drawing rooms. The books were wonderful gateways to imaginative fiction and classic literature. My favorite was, of course, Bram Stoker's immortal Dracula.
I loved the creepy Transylvanian Count, the decaying old keep on the mountainside, the sexy vampire women that inadvertently ushered me into puberty, the polite first meetings with the Count, Lucy wasting away, the chase across the mountains, and the exciting final battle between hero and monster. That shit was FUN.
The Count was cool. He was elegant and predatory and threatening. He hadn't been shellacked with that layer of romantic angst that vampires would pick up in the following years. Reading that book was a wonderful introduction to the character and it left a lasting impression on me. I have a copy of Dracula I picked up from my trip to Transylvania, I have a piece of masonry from Vlad Dracul's actual castle a few inches from me as I write this, and I've collected a bunch of goofy memorabilia. Dracula always was and will be the man.
Louis and Lestat
The whole romantic vampire thing started here. After Interview got published, vampires became less about monsters and more about power fantasies. Still, I have a lot of fondness for the silly, soppy little vampires of Anne Rice's tales.
I first encountered Lestat and Louis during my freshman year in high school, when I was all Gothic and susceptible to flowery prose. Until that point, vampires were undead soulless things, but getting to see history and morality from a vampire's point of view was fascinating.
I empathized more with Louis when I was younger. While all the superpowers and glamor sounds fun, I would have shared his distaste with hurting people. As time went on and my morality crumbled like a sand castle in a tsunami I came to love Lestat's "gentleman death" vibe. I didn't stick with the series long enough for him to become a Jesus allegory and I have come to understand that Anne Rice has since renounced her earlier work after her return to Catholicism. But I still greatly enjoyed both Interview and The Vampire Lestat.
Morbius The Living Vampire
Among my many nerdy obsessions, I was a huge comic book geek. I started reading during the late eighties, when dark-tinged supernatural heroes like Ghost Rider were big. Marvel, seizing on the popularity of the character, created a crossover series called Midnight Sons, reintroducing classic horror heroes into their own series. The best of all these books focused on Spider-Man's former vampiric nemesis Morbius The Living Vampire.
Morbius was unique in that he was not a supernatural vampire. The product of a botched medical experiment aimed at saving him from a life-threatening disease, Morbius developed powers and limitations suspiciously similar to a traditional vampires. While compelled to kill by a near-overpowering thirst, he was horrified by his actions.
One of the things I liked about Morbius was how intensely he struggled with his need for blood. Vampires are often a metaphor for addiction, though many romantic vampires jettison this aspect of the mythos. Morbius was a good man brought down by his curse, and the only way he reconciles himself with his needs is to prey on killers and other urban scum. He straddled the line between morality and damnation, and was pretty damn entertaining because of it.
Alucard
Do you guys remember the third Castlevania game? In it, you could pick up one of three allies in your quest to take down Count Dracula. The most useful one was undoubtedly the wall-climbing pirate guy, but if you were willing to to cross the map you could enlist the assistance of Alucard, Dracula's estranged vampire son.
I loved the notion of playing a vampire. Sure, he didn't really do much beside change into a bat, but it was still a cool idea. Konami later expanded Alucard's role into a full game, the cult favorite Castlevania: Symphony of the Night. Alucard was elegant and cool, and the notion of a son slaying his father for the greater good made for some interesting drama.
Drusilla
I'm not the world's biggest fan of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but they did get some things right. One of them was Drusilla, the mad seer vampire.
I loved Drusilla. She was gorgeous, she wore clothes and hairstyles from a different age, she spoke in delusion-fuelled poetry, and unlike most of the Whedonverse's vampires she never stopped being a nasty piece of work. Many of Whedon's vampire antagonists eventually came over to the light and often became diluted and boring but Drusilla remained a monster. She's one of those characters I'd like to transport into other horror stories because she shines a dark little light whenever she appears.
Cassidy
Garth Ennis's Preacher series, a cross-genre Vertigo series about a supernaturally-gifted preacher's search for God, gave us Proinsias Cassidy, Irish uprising volunteer turned vampire. He was one of the richest characters in comic history. Cassidy avoided the classical tropes of vampire. He didn't have fangs, he wasn't particularly elegant, and he was selfish and irresponsible. Unlike ninety percent of vampires-both good and bad-he was defined by who he was rather than the rules he had to live by.
I really liked Cassidy's backstory, particularly his involvement in the 1916 Easter uprising and his chance meetings with several historical and literary figures of Ireland and America. Vampires have the advantage of immortality and have the opportunity to witness history in the making. Most writers treat this aspect of vampirism in a very glib, shallow manner, but Cassidy's experiences are all cleverly filtered through his hard drinking, party-boy lifestyle. His wry observation on Brendan Behan's drinking and social habits are worth the price of admission alone.
Cassidy's lifestyle of overindulgence, fuelled by his body's ability to take whatever punishment life can throw at it, made him into a selfish, immature, weak person. He betrays his friends, sinks into drug addiction, hurts the people who care about him, and leaves a trail of ruined friendships in his wake. After burning every bridge and pissing away any shot at redemption, he reaches out to his last friend, trying to dig his way out of a very human damnation. Cassidy was a shit, but he's one of the best characters I've ever spent time with.
Bunnicula
Hm. I was a little kid. I like vampires. I like bunnies. Just ask Professor Demon Bunny.
Therefore, I loved Bunnicula.
Blade
Remember that scene where the guy winds up in a strange dance club underneath a meat warehouse? He's in a weird crowd, enticed by a mysterious girl, and suddenly blood pours from the sprinklers. He screams, everyone cheers, and he realized they're all vampires. He runs away in terror, stumbles to the floor, crawls to safety, and just when all hope is lost...
Blade.
Another one of Marvel's Midnight Sons characters, Blade really came into his own after he got into the movies. His world was dark and exotic, full of hedonistic vampires and the trappings of extreme wealth. Blade and his blue-collar operation wreck havoc on the vampire's ordered little world. It's all muscle cars and shotguns and harsh language, a far cry from Van Helsing's genteel efforts.
Invincible super-killers tend not to interest me, but Blade has some depth to him. As the series goes on we get the sense that Blade's quest borders on the fanatical He's at war with his predatory nature, he hates the vampire community yet he doesn't seem to like humans all that much. He exists in a terrible outsider state, orphaned and alone, turned cruel by his quest. Even when he's reunited with his supposedly dead father figure, the coldness Blade shows to the man while trying to figure out if he's turned reveals just how disconnected he is. It's a lonely life and Blade struggles to get by. He's just plain cool, and he is the obvious inspiration for Blacula Hunter Jefferson Twilight from The Venture Bros.
Eli
I have covered Let The Right One In at length before, in one of my better articles. The same stuff still holds true. I loved Eli's relationship with Oskar, I loved the weird combination of regret and viciousness that characterized Eli's personality. I loved the savage brutality of Eli's feeding, which is about a million miles away from any sexy neck nibbling. Like Cassidy, Eli works primarily because he/she is a great character. I am absolutely terrified about how bad the upcoming American remake will be.
Vampire: The Masquerade
There are two articles sitting on my blog dashboard that I haven't figured out a way to complete yet. One is on chilling Slave Labor Graphic mini-series Johnny the Homicidal Maniac and one on the now-defunct White Wolf RPG Vampire: The Masquerade. Both works had a tremendous impact on my adolescence.
V:tM is a game about secret societies of vampires operating beyond human awareness. You create a vampire and attempt to negotiate the Byzantinian politics of supernatural society, committing evil deeds while attempting to hang on to their last shreds of humanity.
V:tM worked because it covered every possible variation on vampirism. There were elegant vampires, thuggish vampires, exotic vampires, saintly vampires, devil vampires, and everything else in between. You could have a lot of fun creating an alternate persona for yourself. The system wasn't perfect and the mythology crumbled under its own weight, but it was a fun world to game in.
Nothing
Back in the harsh and angst-ridden years of my mid-adolescence, I got involved in the Goth scene. My entire wardrobe went black, my music became much more down-tempo, and my hair got longer and very multi-colored.
I went to a small-town high school without much access to a counter culture, so me and my few "babybats" had nothing but the internet, some CDs, and old copies of Propaganda and Carpe Noctem magazine. We passed these little items back-and-forth between us and they lead us to the work of Gothling writer Poppy Z. Brite.
At the time, Poppy Z. Brite was famous in the Goth scene for writing Lost Souls, a vampire novel full of Goths, violence, New Orleans, and gay sex. Lots and lots of gay sex.
Seriously. Lots.
Obviously, this isn't a bad thing. Reading Poppy Z. Brite definitely broadened my mind. Once my frail little Catholic boy brain recovered from the shock, I found a really great story. Nothing, the moody protagonist, mirrored the isolation and impatience I felt from being a little odd in a square community. His slow awakening into his vampire heritage is fascinating to watch, and Brite is very good at painting Southern Gothic decay. It's a great book and writing this blog post has compelled me to re-read it.
Anyway, those are some of my favorite vampires. I hope you dug this list, and I'm sure I'll come up with a few more right after I publish this. In the meantime, enjoy the deluge of vampire romance.
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