It has been a long interesting October in the blogosphere … full of ghosts and ghouls and things that’ll take your head off if you don’t watch out. I’m especially fond of some of my fellow bloggers’ offerings, from Jonathan to Bill to Arbogast to Fox …
As our story opens, so does a car door, and given the angle — low, and focused on the bottom — we’re expecting a slinky Jimmy Choo to emerge, or something. Instead, we get a clunky tennis-shoe: the camera pulls back and its a nurse, complete with white stockings and a uniform. Suddenly, a pale-faced, [...]
Is there a mini-revival of vampire movies I haven’t heard about? Last year’s not-terrible 30 Days of Night and now these two. Although I haven’t seen either of them (Twilight opens next month, Let the Right One In opened earlier this Fall), and even though they’re both about teen vampires, it looks like they couldn’t be more different.
Interview with the Vampire is the “Harry Potter” of vampire movies. It’s based on a novel (by Anne Rice) that was very popular, and there was tremendous speculation amongst its fan-base over how close the film would stick to the novel. As in the Potter stories, every fan of the books had an image in [...]
On December 7, 1941, Heinrich Himmler, head of Nazi Germany’s SS, issued a decree. It said that those arrested in their own countries for resisting the Third Reich would be deported so that they would disappear, without a trace, into the “night and fog.” Fourteen years later, Alain Resnais took that as the title of [...]
At the end of Vampire’s Kiss, just as we’ve come to the conclusion everything was a delusion of its protagonist Peter Loew (Nicolas Cage), we’re given just a little hint that it may have all been real after all. That’s the conceit of this film: is Loew’s conviction that he’s turning into a vampire a [...]
There’s always a point in a vampire movie where it’s revealed that the hero’s lover is a vampire, as if we didn’t know already, as if the BENDING OVER THE NECK wasn’t a big, fat clue. Anyway, there’s always a reveal that every self-respecting vampire-movie fan waits for, and it often — though not always [...]
I always thought Willem Dafoe was a vampire. That whip-thin figure, that rictus grin, those bloodless lips stretched tight over big ol’ teeth. Everything about him just screams “Creature of the Night,” and E. Elias Merhige’s Shadow of the Vampire proves it: he was born to be a vampire.
He plays Max Schreck, star of F.W. [...]
I first saw Dracula as a kid; my father loved the Universal monsters, and he passed it on to me. We thrilled together at the Wolfman and the Mummy, commiserated with Frankenstein’s monster — if only he hadn’t thrown that little girl in the pond! — and gasped at the Creature from the Black Lagoon. [...]
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