Lately I have mostly been watching Dracula movies. I read Dracula in high school and found it shockingly kick ass despite nearly a century of mostly lame adaptations. Despite being perhaps the most adapted character in movies, I believe the definitive Dracula (and vampire) kinographeme has yet to be produced. In this thread I will tiresomely explain why vampirism has consistently been fucked up by generations of film and TV hacks, and a few geniuses who should have known better.
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| Vlad the Impala lol |
Metaphysics vs logistics
The biggest problem with screen vampires is not Twilight (that problem is a consequent of this one). It's the physicality.
Dracula (the book) gets it right, everything else gets it wrong. In the book, un-dead expert Van Helsing lists everything Bram Stoker picked up from his research into vampire myths: their powers, limitations, and general characteristics. Subsequent generations read this like a Pokemon card, in which Dracula is weak against fire but gets a +5 attack after nightfall.
The problem with adaptations is that they make literal everything that exists in a soupy fog of theory in the book. This is compounded by the worst invention of the movies, for which no less a master of the form than Murnau is responsible: instant death by sunlight.
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| If you play this straight, 99% of vampires would just die by accident, and that is fucking retarded. |
In the book Dracula is not harmed by sunlight whatsoever, nor does it harm vampires in any of the original myths. His powers are stronger at night and he prefers to rest during the day, but he can get around during daylight just like you can get around at night. Nosferatu, a loose adaptation, uses the sunlight concept esoterically to suggest the triumph of good over evil. This works in a silent German Expressionist art film. It does not work in entertainment flicks. When you combine a bunch of really easily exploitable weaknesses, vampire flicks become a farcical exercise in logistics: using crosses to herd the vampire toward an open window, making sure to take down the curtains, at which point the vampire either skeletonises, turns to dust, bursts into flame or just dies. It's like the video game Lemmings where you just have to steer the pesky vampire the right way. The Hammer movies are especially egregious in this way: in one instalment Dracula dies because he trips up in a bush he could simply have walked around.
Another concept is that vampires can't enter a home without being invited. Taken symbolically, this is about the need to willingly invite evil into your heart. Taken literally, it becomes really, really stupid. When your monster has more debilitating weaknesses than useful strengths, your monster sucks, and not just blood.
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| Durrr |
Another concept is that vampires can't enter a home without being invited. Taken symbolically, this is about the need to willingly invite evil into your heart. Taken literally, it becomes really, really stupid. When your monster has more debilitating weaknesses than useful strengths, your monster sucks, and not just blood.
The solution to this is to de-emphasise the physicality of the vampire, to go back to the well of folklore in which vampires are evil spirits like a demon or poltergeist, that can affect the physical world but are not part of it - not just guys with superpowers. This makes sense of why the vampire casts no shadow and no reflection, can change shape or dissolve into mist, and is unharmed by bullets: because they're not really, physically there. For the same reason, warding off the vampire with a cross, making it retreat to its grave, and hammering a stake into its heart should be viewed as a spiritual conflict, more like an exorcism than a physical slapfight. If your faith is impure, the cross should have no effect. If it is pure, it should still require a strong effort of will to force the vampire to retreat, like any of those exorcism or house-cleansing scenes in movies. Randos chasing vampires around with two matchsticks or sausages or dildos in a cross shape looks comical and ridiculous.
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| 1992's Bram Stoker's Dracula gets this right. It's the only thing it gets right, but it gets it right. |
No sympathy for the devil
The literary Dracula is an evil prick who keeps his three sidechicks locked up in his castle and brings them babies to drain. When one of the babies' moms shows up to beg for the life of her child, Dracula sets a pack of wolves on her that tear her to shreds. He then takes a boat to England, killing everyone on board, transforms into a huge dog and mauls the first Englishman he sees, springs a wolf from a zoo, and generally causes mayhem and destruction for the fun of it. All that crap about searching the ages for his long lost love was an invention of the movies and does nothing but water down a character who was conceived, and is by far best understood, as a ruthless, sadistic psychopath. Good, nice, angsty or sympathetic vampires are always a huge mistake and don't even make sense since their entire existence is satanic in nature. I know everyone thinks they want complex sympathetic villains because they think it makes them seem like deep thinkers, but no one wants that and it's always terrible. Vampires should be less like Gary Oldman and more like Mola Ram.
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| This dude was hardcore af as fucc |
On camp and cliché
A large part of the effectiveness of Dracula at the time of publication was due to the exoticism of the Transylvania setting. No one knew anything about Transylvania, as evidenced by the fact the only thing you know about it now is fucking Dracula, so poor hapless Jonathan Harker was venturing into the very unknown. Even epic gamer HP Lovecraft cited Dracula in his essay on the canon of supernatural horror. Today, however, Gothic castles, gypsies, capes and bats have the exact opposite effect: they're familiar to the point of redundancy. Dracula imagery is so saturated into pop culture through Count Chocula, Sesame Street and worse that it would be an uphill struggle to salvage any of it from the realm of camp.
At the same time it is important we remember that the classic imagery serves a function: the labyrinthine castle offers endless dark corners for the vampire to stow his coffin, the cape serves to transform him from the mere shape of a human into something more amorphous, and so on. Alternative presentations must keep these type of functions in mind. The clichés are easy enough to swerve without neglecting their essential utility. The vampire may be aesthetically situated anywhere in the world and, since he may live for centuries or more, at any point of origin in history. If the East European style vampire is nowadays over-familiar, there is no shortage of exotic and mysterious corners of the world and history that can produce the same effect. A Babylonian, Scythian, Cambodian, Aztec or Zulu vampire might be cool. How about a Haitian Voodoo vampire with a zombie Renfield ghoul? That would be sweet. Similarly the bat and wolf being overdone isn't a problem: Van Helsing notes that vampires can also command or take the form of rats, owls and moths.
I don't know who needs to hear this, but scientific explanations for vampirism are stupid. Every time it's a virus that coincidentally makes people functionally vampires, the result is worse than if you didn't explain it at all, because now your audience are actually thinking about how that might work and therefore why it wouldn't. If there's any explanation at all, it should just be supernatural.
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| Killer BOB tier cosmic horror vampires would be fuccin sweet |
No modern science crap
I don't know who needs to hear this, but scientific explanations for vampirism are stupid. Every time it's a virus that coincidentally makes people functionally vampires, the result is worse than if you didn't explain it at all, because now your audience are actually thinking about how that might work and therefore why it wouldn't. If there's any explanation at all, it should just be supernatural.
Subtext stay subtext
Finally, vampirism must never be used as a metaphor for any or all of the following, or anything else.
- Sex
- STDs
- Drugs/addiction
- Homosexuality or other sexual orientations or fetishes
- Rape
- Wealth/fame
These have all been done to death, and they're all stupid. Metaphors aren't clever storytelling, and they always break down at some point because the unalike things being equated are unalike. It's the same problem with the X-Men comics and/or movies where they're meant to be this hippy civil rights analogy but if people could blow your head off with a thought in real life you'd be team sentinels all the way. Metaphors are for midwits. Moreover, as writing devices, they draw too much attention to themselves. If you're telling a story you want some degree of immersion, so using some dumb metaphor is like having intrusive title cards saying "Act 1", "rising action", "clap now" and "the end (please leave)".
The fact vampirism shares certain vague similarities to disease or sex or whatever should stay, at most, subtext. People are smart enough to pick up on that stuff by themselves, and it doesn't matter anyway.
By keeping these points in mind it should be possible to do a vampire movie that doesn't lick my prostate, but the last good one was literally Dreyer's Vampyr in like 1932 or something, so I wait in vain.
Kino tier:
OK tier:
By keeping these points in mind it should be possible to do a vampire movie that doesn't lick my prostate, but the last good one was literally Dreyer's Vampyr in like 1932 or something, so I wait in vain.
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| This is the one from which Coppola ripped off the device of the independently moving shadows. Check it out, it's gr8 |
Vampire movies, RANKED
Kino tier:
- Vampyr
- Nosferatu
OK tier:
- Dracula with Bela Lugosi
Shit tier:
- the rest
Did I miss any good ones??? Leave a comment or not whatever fuck you
