They actually shot an alternate ending for the Will Smith version that’s much, much closer to the original. It’s on the DVD, and it’s a shame it wasn’t released in theaters - this ending works, and Smith’s character is visibly broken at the end. Which is as it should be.
I hate Buffy the Vampire Slayer, so I’ll take your word for it. It’s not clear from this description whether the vampire character actually derived nourishment from ordinary food though, or if he just enjoyed the taste/texture. I can think of at least one other vampire (a minor character in The Hunger) who ate human food for fun, but he derived no nutritional benefit from it.
Spike probably just liked the taste. And the image–he didn’t want to be like all the other vamps. Whedon’s vampire lore does lack a certain seriousness.
What do you think of Twilight?
I think it is, if not the worst book ever to be published, unquestionably the worst book I’ve ever read. Why do you ask?
I certainly wouldn’t consider Twilight a good example of realistic vampires – that business about their eyes changing colors depending on how much blood they’ve had and whether it was human or animal, or how their skin sparkles brilliantly in direct sunlight but not under any other lighting conditions, doesn’t work at all as even pseudo-science. It would be rather strained even as magic.
On the subject of food, IIRC the Twilight vampires could chew and swallow regular food but they couldn’t digest it and would just have to throw it up again later. (To be fair to the book, this actually makes decent sense.) So they usually just sat in the cafeteria at lunch not eating anything.
Brooding in a corner, no doubt.
If I wanted to explain vampires and how they procreate in terms of a virus, I might assume that the virus is specifically blood-borne, rather than saliva-borne, much like HIV. You’d have to come in contact with the vampire’s blood (I’m going to stick with solely blood borne viruses, for modesty’s sake) in order to contract the virus. As to why vampires don’t like to create more vampires, maybe they tend to hemophilia? Opening cuts could be dangerous. Or maybe they don’t like competition, or the act of creating a human is physically or socially distasteful.
Check out the movie “Near Dark”, a vampire movie that never uses the word vampire. The vamps in this movie drink blood, are burned by sunlight, have superhuman strength and are immortal, but have none of the religious connotations (crosses, holy water) of traditional vampires. Vampirism is treated much more like a blood disease than a curse, and the psychological effect of having to kill shapes the attitudes of the vampires in different ways depending on how long they have been doing it, worse if they were bad people to begin with.
The most interesting thing about the story to me is the setting in rural Oklahoma. Instead of slick, sophisticated, “sexy” vampires, it’s a group of redneck hillbillies roaming the southwest in whatever vehicle they can steal, raising hell and trying to teach a new, reluctant inductee how to survive. It’s a unique take on the genre, directed by Katherine Bigelow of “Hurt Locker” fame that’s worth checking out just for a scene where the vampires stake out a lonely roadhouse for a meal, and the following daylight raid on the vampires trapped in a hotel bungelow after their massacre at the bar. The cops riddle the building with bullets, which of course don’t hurt the vampires, but each bullet hole coming in or going out allows a beam of sunlight to enter like lasers that the “heroes” have to dodge. Good stuff!
They were brooding like crazy!
Bit of a hijack, but one of many things that bothered me about Twilight was that the school administration wasn’t more concerned about the well-being of these “foster children”. The vampires weren’t doing a good job of keeping a low profile or seeming like healthy humans. The “teens”, including a very image conscious girl, sit in the cafeteria at lunch every day refusing to eat anything. They avoid interaction with other students. Although they are living in the same household as siblings (as far as the outside world was concerned) it’s common knowledge that four of them were romantically involved with each other and that this was encouraged by the “foster parents”. These same foster parents pull them out of school with little notice (whenever it was sunny) to go on mysterious “camping trips”. Yet despite the time they’ve supposedly been spending outdoors in the sun, they return from these trips as pale as ever. This all points to a pretty messed up home situation, possibly involving sexual abuse, and I’d expect someone from the school to be checking up on things.
*In The Hunger “vampirizing” a human requires a blood transfusion rather than just having them consume vampire blood, and it’s indicated that the human’s blood type matters. (I’m referring to the book here, in the movie it looks like humans do just have to drink vampire blood.) The vampire Miriam kills a number of humans through her experiments before she successfully vampirizes anyone. She’s the only member of the vampire species who engages in this practice, all the other vampires think she’s something of a mad scientist. In The Last Vampire it’s made clear that Miriam is considered a pervert as well for having sex with her vampirized human companions. The vampires and humans are separate species in this series, and other vampires consider humans to be basically cattle.