I was a rabid horror movie fan and even I could never muster any interest in vampire stuff, it just seemed completely irrelevant.
Not following the vampire trend now but I’m reminded of Anne Rice fans from the 1990s who mixed it up with all kinds of “pagan” imagery and insisted on spelling it “vampyre” and had vampire themed weddings and were extremely serious and self-righteous about it all.
In my opinion the only good vampire movies are:
Nosferatu - both the German original and German remake
Vampyr - another German one from the 1930s
The Hunger - with David Bowie, surprisingly enough
They say Salem’s Lot was good too but I never saw it.
I never found vampires particularly scary or interesting.
But I recently started watching the Buffy series and love it.
It doesn’t make me suddenly passionate about all things vampire-y. I don’t get the hype either. Vampires are the most boring villain there is. Maybe that’s why they made them into ‘‘good guys.’’ Because as bad guys they aren’t very scary.
Ironically, vampires are a tiny part of the Buffy series - from Season 2 onwards, they’re pretty much relegated to off-screen dusting, at best nameless mooks effortlessly dealt with to provide banter opportunities for *actual *characters.
And don’t get me started on Spike’s decay. Fuckin’ Whedon…
We also should keep in mind that, in the particular case of Twilight, (how I got to be taken to the theater to watch that I don’t know) Edward, the sexy hot vampire also happens to be a hundred or so year old creep that dates a high school teenager.
God, I hated Twilight. I read them just to see what the fuss was about. I don’t know how anyone can stomach that bullshit. And vampires do NOT sparkle, goddammit!!! (Although I still want to know if their poop sparkles)
There’s an urban fantasy series where the vampires are just as disgusting as I would imagine them to be. (The Kate Daniels “Magic” series by Ilona Andrews.) In them, vampires are mindless eating machines controlled by necromancers. They are creepy and disgusting.
Christ does this drive me crazy too. Especially around here, because whenever you point this out a whole posse of people stop jizzing on their Angel posters to point out that the Twilights vamps aren’t real vamps.
So, “Care-Vampires”, or “My Little Vampires”?
I think the later would be somewhat sparklier.
“Sponge Bob Vampire Pants” is probably too far round the twist for teenieboppers, but maybe the 16 year old male demographic?
But the commonly accepted vampires in popular fiction before Twilight weren’t like the vampires people actually believed in, either. The Dracula-format vampires, were more or less a modern invention as well - specifically, invented by John Polidori in 1819 - and became popular in modern fiction largely because Dracula went into public domain in the USA shortly after it was written.
The vampire myth as we currently understand it really isn’t that old, all things considered. Shakespeare would not have heard of such a thing.
I wasn’t referring to Dracula-type vampires, either. I am referring exactly to the folkloric beliefs regarding vampires that pre-date the relatively modern literary and cinematic vampires. It isn’t a case of preferring one delusion over another, either, since I don’t believe in vampires at all. What it is, is vampires as I studied them were scary, supernatural creatures. People were genuinely afraid of them. This is what I want to read about or see on the screen if a vampire story is supposedly what I am going to be told. The emo Eurotrash Anne Rice sparklepyre romantic versions produced by the entertainment industry do not entertain or scare me. They, in fact, make my ass itch to get up and go do something else every time I try to read a book or watch a movie featuring such creatures.
