Sigh… so Eclipse (or as they’re pretentiously referring to it The Twilight Saga: Eclipse) has set some sort of box office record for mid-week openings.  If this was something solely confined to tweens, like Hannah Montana, maybe I wouldn’t be so disheartened by it.  But this is a huge culture-spanning thing.  They’re not even good movies!  (Or, to be fair, the one and a half movies I saw sucked)  Almost any sin can be forgiven with a good enough story but these movies don’t have one.  The biggest thing I object to is how these movies seem to be trying to strip away everything that made vampires interesting in the first place.  The classic vampire images like Bela Lugosi in Dracula and Max Schreck in Nosferatu (pictured above) are being forgotten for the likes of Robert Pattinson in glitter make-up.  Like Ellen Fox of The Rotten Tomatoes Show said “if a stripper can replicate your power with a trip to Bath and Body Works, it’s not cool.”

Twilight started in books.  Now generally I support anything that gets young people reading but really, can’t they read something better?  The success of the Twilight novels has been compared to the success of the Harry Potter books but Stephen King observed “the real difference [between J.K. Rowling and Stephanie Meyer] is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer, and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn.”

There are numerous takes on vampires in literature, the most famous of which is undoubtedly Bram Stoker’s Dracula.  My favorite novel in the genre is Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend.  Now don’t confuse this with the recent movie adaptation which swapped vampires for zombie-ish creatures.  The book is very much a vampire story in which they have overrun Los Angeles and hunt the one human left.  The book’s “scientific” analysis of vampirism and the deeply unsettling ending make I Am Legend a classic.  More recently film director Guillermo del Toro and novelist Chuck Hogan teamed up to write The Strain, the first in a planned trilogy of vampire novels.  It starts with a Dracula homage as a plane full of dead people arrives at JFK.  The vampires in The Strain are more similar to the Reapers in del Toro’s film Blade 2 (pictured above) and they quickly overrun New York City.  Less Than Zero and American Psycho author Bret Easton Ellis wrote a book of short fiction called The Informers, which included the story ”The Secrets of Summer” about young vampires in Los Angeles (all supernatural elements of the book were excised from the recent film adaptation).  In Ellis’s world the vampires were little different from the amoral drugged-out oversexed youth of the rest of his stories, which was almost scarier.

In the realm of comic books, my favorite vampire is Cassidy from Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher.  (The above illustration is by cover artist Glenn Fabry)  A century-old vampire from Ireland, Cassidy is less a brooding melancholy type and more a hard-drinking brawler with impulse control issues.  You know, Irish.  There’s more to him than initially meets the eye and the comic explores what kind of life a person can lead when he cannot die and gives no thought to consequences.  Cassidy’s life and the people left in his wake are one of the more compelling aspects of Ennis’s comic (which is not for the faint of heart or the easily offended… especially those who are sensitive about religion).

Another entry from the realm of comic books is 30 Days of Night, created by Steve Niles.  The story is about a town in Alaska where in the winter the sun does not come up for a month.  Opportunistic vampires use this fact to go on a feeding frenzy.  The original “graphic novel” (the pretentious term for comic books) spawned several sequels as well as a series of novels.  In 2007 it was adapted into a film by Hard Candy director David Slade.  The film doesn’t shy away from the brutal tone of the comic book.  In one scene a victim begs Danny Huston’s vampire character (pictured above) “please God.”  Huston looks around then shakes his head before replying “no God.”  What is director David Slade’s latest film?  Eclipse.  Oh, how the mighty have fallen…

A key element of the vampire mythos is the change that comes over people.  Oldboy director Park Chan-wook explored this theme in his 2009 film Thirst.  In it a priest (Song Kang-ho) volunteers for likely-fatal medical testing to cure a terrible disease, an honorable and selfless thing to do.  Through complications with the blood transfusion he becomes a vampire.  The film is about his descent from decent and good man of the cloth to amoral creature that exists only for himself.  The worst part of it is that he is aware of this change as it happens.

Another issue I have with the Twilight “saga,” which may actually be one of the main reasons for its success, is that it’s a very chaste telling of the vampire legend.  Vampires are sexy (as illustrated in the above picture of Salma Hayek as vampire queen Santanico Pandemonium in Robert Rodriguez’s From Dusk ‘Till Dawn).  The idea of a woman being drawn to one is nothing new and many works of fiction (of varying quality) have been dedicated to that attraction.  However the attraction has always been rooted in the inherent danger of being with the vampire.  The attraction in Twilight seems to be rooted in just how safe the sparkly boy with too much gel in his hair is.  The wildly popular HBO series True Blood deals with almost the same subject matter with two very important differences.  The first is that True Blood is sexy.  Pretty naked people abound on that show and the intertwined sex and danger make for one hell of an appealing program.  The second is of course that the vampires don’t fucking sparkle (in fact when they die they become disgusting puddles of viscera).

When I was a young child my family rented Buffy the Vampire Slayer (pictured above) on VHS tape (remember those?) and I must have watched it seven times.  I loved that movie.  It was funny (in an early 90s way) but it never made light of the vampire threat.  I developed somewhat of a crush on Kristy Swanson and the movie always held a fond place in my memory.  When I was a teenager screenwriter Joss Whedon turned his script into a television series that, while still loaded with humor, took the subject matter more seriously.  The show developed a huge following.  It also had good vampires (one at first, later a second) but the key is that the good vampires were not the norm: Angel was only good because of a gypsy curse, and Spike for more complicated reasons.  The majority of the vampires on Buffy were still mean motherfuckers who wanted to drink the blood of the innocent.

In 1987 there were two movies that brought alluring but mean vampires back to the spotlight.  The first, and by far more successful, was The Lost Boys.  The vampires (led by Kiefer Sutherland) were mean in The Lost Boys, but it was still a movie aimed at a younger audience.  The other film was future Oscar-winner Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark.  The story is told almost as a western where a young man (Adrian Pasdar from Heroes) falls in with a gang of vampires led by Lance Henriksen (from Aliens and Millennium).  The film’s signature image is when Bill Paxton is run over by a semi, loses half his face (pictured above), and just keeps coming.

Of course I can’t wrap up this article without mentioning that one of the best films of the still-young 21st century is about a vampire.  Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In is an absolute masterpiece about childhood.  The cinematography is beautiful and the performances by the lead child actors are as authentic as you’re ever likely to find in a horror movie.  A scene towards the end set in a pool is a brilliantly-executed display of understated violence.  This film is being remade by Cloverfield director Matt Reeves under the title Let Me In.  Despite early worries that it was going to be Twilight-ified, preliminary reviews suggest that it’s not bad.  Still I would encourage people to see the phenomenal original version.  It didn’t need to be remade at all but I guess the only things Americans fear more than vampires are subtitles…

People have accused me of getting too riled up over the integrity of creatures which don’t actually exist.  Yeah, maybe.  It just frustrates me to see a genre becoming defined by its weakest entry.  Vampires don’t fucking sparkle.  They are supposed to be mean motherfuckers who will rip your god damn throat out. (If you agree, please join this Facebook group)  It does give me hope to see that they still make movies like Daybreakers (an imperfect movie with an interesting premise that does not skimp on the blood-drenched violence).  But Hollywood copies what works and if audiences send the message that Twilight works we will get copycat after copycat.  That prospect is more frightening than any vampire…

So this is what I chose to write about instead of actually seeing Eclipse.  Even if the movie didn’t actually suck, I’m so biased from my hellish experience sitting through New Moon that I wouldn’t be able to write a balanced review anyway.  It did seem too big of an “event” film to let pass without comment though so I hope instead of chucking more money into the coffers of Stephenie Meyer you check out some of the books or movies mentioned above.  Or others, I left a lot out.  Anyway as usual, mini-reviews here and twitter here.  I’ll be back next week hopefully with reviews of Predators and Despicable Me.  Until then…