There damn well should be.
Not quite on point, but in the chapter “Of Beren and Luthien” in The Silmarillion, which J.R.R. Tolkien began writing in the 1910s, Huan, a great and good hound, fights the evil lord Sauron while the latter is in the form of a werewolf. When Sauron is badly injured, he transforms himself into the shape of a vampire and flees. Later, the lovers Beren and Luthien take the forms of a werewolf and a vampire, respectively, to infiltrate Angband, the fortress of Sauron’s master Morgoth.
If we’re talking vamp/werewolf societies only, I would say that like every other vampire movie in the past 50 years the source would be Matheson’s “I am Legend.” He only introduces the idea of a vampire society, but it’s not a big jump to imagine werewolf societies as well.
Did you even read the rest of this thread (or anything else concerning the Underworld lawsuit)? White Wolf had no grounds to expect a victory in their lawsuit and while the settlement was kept secret, I imagine it was more along the lines of “Go away or we’ll crush your little company” than any kind of monetary deal.
Is that a movie, or just something that’s happening in your neighbourhood?
It’s a movie.
:dubious: I did read the rest of the thread and afaics, mine is the first mention of the World of Darkness games, which to anyone at all familiar with them, are the obviously the direct sources from which Underworld stole. I followed the suit carefully. You are probably right that Sony’s big money lawyers would have used everything in their power to try to thwart the suit and that White Wolf was wise to settle because of that. But the suit definitely had all kinds of merit. White Wolf was able to point to 80 different elements that were present in their games that were also present in the film, and not just big established themes either, but very specific details.
In other news, this website has some very useful features.
I’d heard about the lawsuit but hadn’t read the details. Do you have a source where I can read more about it. I’m interested in seeing what the simularities are.
http://www.penny-arcade.com/dl/whitewolfcomplaint.pdf
Let’s look over it shall we? And count with me how many are stolen directly from Dracula.
- White Wolf claims that Underworld is infringing on their copyright because it uses the “Romeo and Juliet” story in relation to werewolves and vampires.
- Sony used the same game engine as White Wolf’s video games to make an Underworld video game
- White Wolf claims copyright over gothic-punk settings (this is mentioned twice)
- White Wolf claims copyright over vampires being able to disappear
- White Wolf claims copyright over vampires having super speed and super strength
- White Wolf claims copyright over the word “Elders”
- White Wolf claims copyright over a popular line from the legend of Hercules (“the strength of ten men!”)
- White Wolf claims copyright over vampires aging when they don’t feed
- White Wolf claims copyright over the word “Coven”
- White Wolf claims copyright over the letter “V”
- White Wolf claims copyright over Middle Eastern and African vampires
- White Wolf claims copyright over humanity believing vampires and werewolves don’t exist
- White Wolf claims copyright over “ancient texts”
- White Wolf claims copyright over female ass-kickers
- White Wolf claims copyright over uppity women
- White Wolf claims copyright over a council of vampires
- White Wolf claims copyright over the word “Abomination”
- White Wolf claims copyright over knifefights and gunfights
- White Wolf claims copyright over silver harming werewolves (this is mentioned twice)
- White Wolf claims copyright over aristocratic vampires
- White Wolf claims copyright over vampires turning into bats
- White Wolf claims copyright over vampires dying from sunlight exposure
And it goes on like this. The whole thing is ridiculous and White Wolf was rightly laughed at in the court of public opinion.
Yours is the third mention of the World of Darkness games, and the second mention of the lawsuit.
I’ve bolded the ones that could arguably come from Stoker’s “Dracula”. A lot of the others I’ve encountered elsewhere long before White Wolf (such as the silver/werewolf thing). Some of them (aristocratic vampires) long predate even “Dracula”.
This is the first I’ve heard of White Wolf or this suit. The suit does appear absurd, from what you wrote. Thanks for bringing this up.
Actually, flipping through the suit I think White Wolf did have a decent case. The point isn’t that White Wolf was claiming copywrite over any one aspect of Vampires, but that basically every combination of aspects present in the Masquerade game was also present in Underworld movie. Some were of course going to be present in any Vampire movie (vulnerability to sunlight, etc), but the combination of all of them is pretty stark Underworld was a Vampire:the Masquerade movie, they just didn’t pay to use the title. The overlap in lingo between the two properties seems especially damning.
On the other hand, Whitewolf itself was cribbing pretty from earlier sources, who themselves were taking from earlier properties and so on down the line. So I don’t feel to bad for them.
Specifically from the 1819 publication of John Polidori’s The Vampyre, which introduced the concept of a sophisticated aristocrat. Previously, the Slavic folkloric conception of the vampire was “the manifestation of an unclean spirit possessing a decomposing body. This undead creature is considered to be vengeful and jealous towards the living and needing the blood of the living to sustain its body’s existence.”
A college course I took emphasized that the original Slavic vampires were often mindless and decaying, almost pitiable sufferers; much more like the modern movie zombie than the suave and elegant creatures of modern fiction.
Going back further: I have a copy of Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, by Les Daniels (1971), containing a color reprint of a story from EC Comics’ classic pre-Code horror-comics line from the 1950s – I think it was The Vault of Horror – in which a (male) werewolf and a (female) vampire quarrel over a kill, but then realize there’s enough for both, and then they team up and fall in love.
It turns out to be an origin story for the Old Witch. After a village mob catches the vampire and werewolf and kills them and inters them, they beget the Old Witch.
That’s the way I see it. I’ve watched a lot of vampire movies and read a lot of vampire books over the years. I’ll give Whitewolf credit for the vampire nation vs werewolf nation idea but most of their other stuff was already out there. They just took a bunch of different horror-related themes and put them together into one big setting.
An example of this would be them claiming with a straight face that Sony stole their idea of having a Romeo and Juliet story between a vampire and a werewolf. Did they ever consider the possibility that Sony just stole the idea directly from Shakespeare like they did?
That reads like a transcript of the worst Adventure knock-off ever.
But again, the case wasn’t that White Wolf had X (say, a Romeo and Juliet plot), Y and Z in their game, so they can sue anyone that has any one of those things in their story, even if it obviously turns up in earlier works. The case is that including all of X,Y and Z in the movie when they’d previously been included in White Wolf is an infringement, even if all those elements had appeared individually in other works. Dwarves and Elves and Wizards and Magic Rings all predate the LOTR, but that doesn’t mean its impossible to rip off LOTR (indeed the White Wolf case kind of reminds me of the Tolkien’s Estates suit against the makers of D&D, who basically just took the Tolkien world, changed Ents to Trents, Hobbits to Halflings, and sold their game without paying Tolkien a dime).
Like I said, I’m not sure I agree with the White Wolf. Sci-fi and fantasy books/movies/shows/games always “build off” cliches and tropes built up in other previous works, and often come pretty close being “rip-offs”. Cal was in a previous thread pointing out how much of Star Trek:TOS was a rip-off of Forbidden Planet, but the resulting works are still things I enjoy, I wouldn’t want to live in a world where we never saw Star Trek because the makers of Forbidden Planet sued to keep it off the air.
Still, I can understand White Wolf feeling ripped off, and I think there’s more to their case then “White Wolf claims they invented Vampires” which is often how it gets summarized.