Shadow of the Vampire was a good take on the vampire story.
The 2000 film starred John Malkovich as F W Murnau, director of Nosferatu. He’s hired a real vampire to play the lead. Enter Willem Dafoe, not at all like the debonair Count–but a scarier monster, indeed.
The movie’s lots of fun in a horrible sort of way.
I actually liked the fast zombies as I felt they represented more modern fears. In the 60’s and 70’s maybe we felt as though danger was slowly creeping our way. These days we’re more scared of the swift and sudden forms of violence that affect our lives.
Any way, if zombie movies are expected to simply rehash the same old monster they’ll just become as bad as vampire movies.
Marc
I would argue that the fundamental horror of zombies is that they never stop. They are slow; you can outrun them, yes. But they never stop, and you will eventually. And then they will come. The relentless bit is why they will keep you up at night.
I think that there’s so much variation one can take with that premise that making zombies fast and OMG so scary is worthless. That having been said, I have to admit I loved “Return of the Living Dead,” but that was for entirely different reasons. “Brains? More brains!”
There was a kick ass vampire story on The New Twilight Zone back in the late 1980s which had a whole “everything you know about vampires is wrong” theme to it. In it, vampires age, but very slowly, they’re not afraid of daylight, and can eat normal food. They also move around a lot because if they stay in one place too long, the people around them transform into werewolves and other standard horror creatures and go after the vampire. Why the author never developed the story beyond that episode, I don’t know.
That’s one reason why I like Nosferatu so much. Count Orlock obviously doesn’t sit around in his drafty castle worrying about what to wear. It’s understandable when a young human puts a lot of effort into looking cool, but if I were an ancient undead bloodsucker then impressing club-hoppers would not be at the top of my to-do list. I can’t see putting more effort into my appearance than it would take to blend in on the street, and maybe not even that.
I thought Whitley Streiber’s vampire novels were pretty bad, but there was a funny scene in The Last Vampire where Miriam shows up at a fancy hotel in what she thinks is a very smart designer outfit. The clerk doesn’t treat her with the respect she thinks she should command. She later realizes that her very smart designer outfit is decades out of style, and probably looks like something she dug out of grandma’s attic. When you’re thousands of years old, it must be hard to keep up with how quickly fashions change!
My dear mother, after seeing Interview with the Vampire: “Okay, he’s supposed to be a moral vampire who feels bad about having to murder people all the time. Why doesn’t he just go out in the sun and get it over with?”
Initially the vampire-as-protagonist must have seemed like an original twist on the genre, like making a crime movie from the POV of the serial killer instead of the detective. Good movies have been made that way. But too many filmmakers have gotten caught up in the idea of the cool vampire hero and apparently forgotten that a vampire is, in fact, a supernatural serial killer. And if you forget that, why make the character a vampire at all? Just make a movie about a Really Cool Guy with a black leather jacket and a motorcycle who stays up all night.
Bela Lugosi didn’t even need fangs!
*I tend to think that this is the reason why there have been relatively few werewolf movies and even fewer good ones: unlike vampires and zombies, it’s difficult and expensive to make a decent-looking werewolf. Well, okay, you can do the “now he’s a man, now he’s a wolf (or large dog)” thing pretty easily, but part man/part wolf takes more work. And usually looks terrible anyway. An ex of mine loved werewolf flicks so I’ve seen plenty, and in most the monster’s appearance was laughable.
There are plenty of variations and that’s what keeps things fun. I just don’t want to see the same type of zombie in every single movie. I like the slow zombies just as much as the fast zombies. One thing I like about fast zombies is that all it takes is one to pose a threat to life and limb. I also like different types of “zombies” like Dawn of the Dead, 28 Days Later, Night of the Living Dead, Dead Alive, etc.
I liked his reasons for feeling sorry for Dracula from the book.
Good point, I wonder when fangs became the standard for vampires. The only other vampire movie without fangs I can think of was Near Dark. Of course they didn’t even use the word vampire in that movie.
I think American Werewolf in London was the first movie to show a transformation in real time. I mean they edited but instead of hiding under a table or suddenly being hairy they showed his limbs extending, his hair growing, his muzzle forming. Pretty good for the 80’s though.
I suspect we’ll continue to see crappy vampire movies simply because they are so easy to make. Once in a while we get gems like Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Nosferatu.
Marc
There’s also The Hunger - they used little knives.
As to when it became standard, with Dracula (which informed most vampires who followed), at the latest. I’m having a bitch of a time tracing myths from back before the end of the 18th century to see if it’s traditional in any form of vampire, but both Dracula and Varney have fangs (or fanglike teeth).
One of the very best of all vampire movies is George Romero’s Martin, in which the title character has no fangs. And don’t the vampires in Abel Ferrara’s take on the genre use hypodermics?
A good zombie movie has zombies that are completely mechanical. That is, they aren’t even animals: Animals, after all, need to rest and need to eat. Animals will eventually die. Zombies have none of those handicaps. They can keep coming, wave after wave, until you are so worn down from the constant struggle that you become a zombie yourself. Zombies are, in some symbolic sense, life itself: You struggle each day to keep yourself going, knowing that in the end you will enter the ranks of the dead and your individuality will be forgotten.
A good vampire movie has vampires that are almost human. They should be us, but stripped of any kind of compassion or sense of restraint. A vampire, after all, is feeding. It enjoys its gruesome repast, and it simply does not care that it is destroying humans and causing them pain. Some vampires, indeed, feed on pain (Hannibal Lecter is one of this type). Vampires represent a facet that’s present in all humans, the most infantile urges unrestrained by any learned emotional responses.
Look beyond the rotting meat and see what is really effective about these films.
Regarding the OP, I’d just like to point out that by far most vampire movies are not remakes of Dracula, even if they’re nominally about Dracula, or have a character named Dracula. There has been a slew of movies nominally based on Sheridan le Fanu’s “Carmilla” (which predates Stoker’s book by several years) and a couple based on a countess said to have drunk bloood. Most others are based on books by others (especially Anne Rice), or are original screenplays. there are a lot of vampire stories that, to my knowledge, have never been adapted, including the very early stories “The Vampire” by John Polidori (that arguably set off the string of literary vampires of the 19th century), the peeny dreadful “Varney the Vampire” (from which Stoker liberally borrowed) and H.P. Lovecraft’s lone vampire story (that came out the same year the play Dracula by Dean opened).
One Halloween I gathered as many versions of “Dracula” together as I could and watched them, one after another. My impressions:
– Nosferatu is probably the most original and has the weirdest looking vampire, but it gets pretty poetic and dreamlike. Not exactly my cup of tea, for the most part.
— Bela Lugosi is, overall, the best Dracula. He really does convince you that he’s a foreign, suave menace. On the other hand, Tod Browning should have been shot. Despite some good setups and touches, he can’t help the film from getting dull at points. He puts armadillos in Transylvania(!), underuses Dracula’s wives. And they should have written an original screenplay and not tried to film the play. They did intoduce the whole Transylvania sequence, but why would you use such stage conventions as having a character say “Look at the giant dog!” when the whole point of the movies is that you can actually show that dog?
– The Spanish version of “Dracula” corrects a lot of flaws of Browning’s version, giving the same sets more dramatic lighting, tracking the camera around, not using armadillos, and making the wives look menacing. But it’s still a filmed play.
– Christopher Lee’s first version of the story, “Horror of Dracula”, gives us a colorful, in-color, and athletic count. But it doesn’t feel like Stoker’s story.
–Lee’s second version “Count Dracula”, diredcted by Jess Franco, blew me away when I caught it unexpected on TV. It’s amazingly faithful to the book, at least at the beginning. Lee looks like the description of Dracula, right down to the white hair and moustache. If they’d kept it up to the end, this would be the best.
– Jack Palance’s TV-movie version is surprisingly good. The Richard Matheson script introduces, for the first time, the “Mina is my wife re-incarnated” idea, but I can libve with it.
– Louis Jordan’s PBS version is hailed by David Skal as the most faithful. It is the first to show the count crawlinmg headfirst down the castle wall (as described in the book), and Jordan is a suave, foreignb-accented count. But the damned film has too many solarized artsy shots. I usually stop watching it out of boredom.
– The 1979 Frank Langella version is like Lugost redux, in that it’s basically just refilming the Broadway play. Langella was great on Broadway in the way he re-interpreted Dracula for a new generation, and he made a sexy count. But the movie is too full of itself. Olivier as van Helsing?
After Michael Crawford in “Dance of the Vampires” (it ran 186 shows, which was 185 too many) and the Frank Wildhorn’s “Dracula,” I’m amazed that anyone has big enough cajones and a small enough brain to put a Dracula musical on Broadway.
Yeah, I know. As I said in my OP, I have yet to see even one movie with “Dracula” in the title that was actually a straightforward adaptation of the novel of that name. They range from “altered but still identifiable” to “well, okay, it’s got a vampire in it”. But for good or ill, when it comes to the movies “Dracula” and “vampire” are nearly synonymous. Even movies with very un-Dracula-like vampires will inevitably be described as having “un-Dracula-like vampires”.
Then go rent Dark Prince: The True Story of Dracula
To be fair, Stoker’s all-over-the-map novel is pretty damned hard to adapt into a concise, consistent narrative that is dramatically satisfying. I’m not surprised that even the closest adaptations veer off into weird tangents, combining characters and incidents.
The three closest versions, for my money, are the 1970 Count Dracula, the PBS version with Louis Jordan, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula. If you haven’t seen these, try to get hold of them. As I said, the 1970 versuion is, at least in the first half, pretty damned close.
I’d like to point out that the same problem exists with regard to adaptations of “Frankenstein”. As with Dracula, there’s a recent big-budget version that is often pretty close, but takes some odd liberties; and there’s an older, independent, low-budget faithful version. These are, respectively, the Kenneth Branaugh Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and the indy Terror of Frankenstein. Like the Jess Franco Dracula, this latter version captivated me with its faithfulness.
A movie that deserves to be much better known. I caught it on the sci-fi channel and was impressed. Not the best movie ever, but worth more recognition than it got. You guys should check it out.
two things:
The guy who played Dracula in Dark Prince also played him in the BtVS episode Buffy vs. Dracula
also
He does become a Vampire at the very end of the movie
You forgot “cool motorcycles that become vampires” - I Bought A Vampire Motorcycle starring Anthony Daniels (voice of C3PO). 
If that ain’t done to death then Og help us :rolleyes:
Related to the werewolf comment above, I think the main reason werewolves never became the equal of vampires in fiction and film is because there has never been “the” definitive werewolf novel. Kind of a shame really.
Bram Stoker sat down and wrote “Dracula” for vampires, not werewolves, and that is what I believe lies at the core of the vampire mythos. Regardless of what the Anne Rice zombies think, there never would’ve been a vampire genre without Dracula. Until someone comes along and gives werewolves that one great novel they need to hit the big-time, they’ll remain eternal second-stringers.
I really liked Poppy Z. Brite’s take on vamps in “Lost Souls”. Sure, her bloodsuckers are gorgeous, gothy, hedonists of ambiguous sexuality, but this was a lot fresher back in 1993 when she wrote the book than it is now. Her vampires are all vicious and have no problem riping hitchhiker’s throats out, beating people with baseball bats, or slashing attackers with straight razors. These vampires will freaking eat you. One of two of 'em might feel bad about it, though. Maybe.
She also has a neat take on vampires as a race. Instead of being the supernaturally ressurrected undead, Brite’s vamps are a separate race from humanity. Just close enough to breed, just distant enough to feed. There’s a great scene where the youngest vampire, 14-year-old Nothing, is talking to a much older vampire named Christian, who’s almost 400 years old. Christian shows him his fangs, which Nothing envies briefly (having only regular canines he has to sharpen) until he realizes that Christian’s purer bloodline makes him unable to survive sunlight, or drink anything other than blood. Centuries of interbreeding with humans has rendered Nothing immune to weaknesses that would do in older, more delicate vampires like Christian.
Btw, new Dracula siting – he’s appearing later this year in “Blade: Trinity” as the new big bad. He’ll be played by Dominic Procell, TV’s “John Doe”. Merry XMas.