Century of the Vampire: The Century So Far

Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.

It's recap week! No spoilers in here, unless a bunch of these movies being bad counts as a spoiler.

I forget exactly why this feature started in January this year -- I think it’s mainly because that Nosferatu movie by Robert Eggers came out the month before, I talk about vampires a lot, am really into vampire media, and I was looking for something that would regularly keep my interest in order to write every week, which I’d never really done for the site and which being a video game and television show reviewer did not lend itself to, since we publish a whole lot of words on this website and shepherding those is my main concern. Two and a half hours of vampire movie is one thing; reviewing all of a Castlevania season with a week turnaround is another. (More on that later.) Over the last few months I have started to wonder if in fact it wasn’t my idea; I’ve started to wonder if I was tricked into this by a deceitful and vengeful CEO. That’s mainly because between the last week of July and the week before Thanksgiving, I’ve watched both the entire Underworld and Twilight franchises, with only a short break for 80s vampire films, which were a mixed bag (okay, actually they were all good except Once Bitten, which again, that was Rob).

He’s not entirely to blame! What I’ve watched (with occasional assists from Greg; he wrote our Blade review, but in fairness, he also wrote our Ultraviolet review), I’ve watched mainly with the input of our Patreon. As some post-Thanksgiving reading, as we enter the dark months on the calendar, here’s a tasting menu of what we’ve covered so far.

The Eighties

It’s notable that the four films we covered were from the mid-late eighties, because that decade didn’t really start until like ‘84, when Reagan had started to get real stupid with it, and then won so hard it locked in his vision of American culture for the next ten years, and his vision of politics until…well. Fright Night 85, The Lost Boys, and Near Dark were all fantastic; Once Bitten was trash, but there’s a Nic Cage movie from 1988 I want to come back to at some point. We might not fully be done here.

The Classic Nosferatu

I started with the Eggers film, and then went back to the very first vampire film, Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre and its infamous Klaus Kinski performance in 1977 were next (with no small thanks to Herzog being an incorrigible promoter in the media), and we capped it with Shadow of the Vampire, the…fake documentary remake, if you will, of the original 1922 film. This sort of metanarrative film-about-a-film was becoming all the rage in 2000, but Willem Dafoe and John Malkovich’s performances transcend the material.

The Classic Dracula

That led us to the great Dracula films in history. These are far more interesting as historical artifacts than they are as films themselves in this day and age; the Bela Lugosi Dracula from 1931 especially suffers from this, and the Hammer Horror with the masters Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing is interesting mainly for the highly-censored effects work. Dracula 2000 (2000) is a trifle; Bram Stoker’s Dracula remains both the best of the bunch and weirdly compromised by its fidelity to the source material, losing steam in the back third. Still one of the very few Dracula adaptations to actually include the goofy American cowboy character who actually plays pretty heavily into the finish of the story.

The Aughts

Van Helsing. Queen of the Damned. Ultraviolet. Fucking BloodRayne. This is actually the “worst” tranche of movies by merit but a bunch of these are actually so bad they’re interesting, especially BloodRayne. BloodRayne is the worst movie I’ve had to cover for this feature. I’d watch it again every time over every Twilight film and half the Underworld films.

The Nineties

A weird and uneven decade, at least in our survey. The previously-included Bram Stoker’s Dracula kind of set the tone for how the decade would react to vampires; sometimes that meant Interview, where Hollywood said “hey we got something here, find a big sweeping Story to adapt” and made Anne Rice both rich and aggrieved -- other times that meant From Dusk till Dawn, a grimy Tales From the Crypt TV movie-meets-exploitation film feeling joint that pissed on the idea of vampires as high society, cultured bloodletters. John Carpenter’s Vampires was in this vein too, but less focused. There actually was a Tales From the Crypt TV movie vampire film in here, Bordello of Blood, but we haven’t gotten around to it yet. Nadja was also in here, and doesn’t fit neatly into any of these boxes.

Animated Stuff

I watched The Batman vs. Dracula movie from 2005 because I was ordered to. It wasn’t a complete waste of my time, but they’ve gotten much better at making these crossover one-offs (check out the 2019 Batman vs. Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles film if you get the chance). The Vampire Hunter D movies were pretty cool. Blood: The Last Vampire was kind of a weird mess, but it was focused in a way that I appreciated.

The Franchises

Already covered the Underworlds and the Twilights -- those links are to what I believe are the two best films in those franchise sets, but you can click around on our landing page for the Century of the Vampire feature if you want to read the others. I complain a lot. The Blade franchise was less deeply unfortunate as a whole, primarily because it was only three movies and even the bad one kept it moving. The best thing I can say about this is that we’re out the other side, and people said my anguish was interesting to read.

What’s Next

Well, there are two decades we haven’t done -- the Seventies, and the Tens. The Tens will have both versions of Let the Right One In, because the American remake (Let Me In) was a 2010 film and the original doesn’t need the stink of the aughts on it. The Tens will also have A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. And finally, of course, no survey of the 2010s can be complete without a review of Dracula Untold. Probably some other stuff in there too.

We’ve already done one of the really big ones from the Seventies -- the Herzog Nosferatu -- but there’s still the Frank Langella Dracula hanging around to round out the Dracula series, as well as John Llewellyn Moxey’s The Night Stalker, and maybe The Omega Man (1971), which is the original film adaptation of I Am Legend. I’m sure I can find some European vampire stuff which I may or may not be able to post a lot of pictures from.

And after that…well I’ve watched a bunch of vampire television on my own time, and can probably review some of that. The Castlevania Netflix show; the Anne Rice adaptation of Interview with the Vampire (the adaptation of The Vampire Lestat is coming soon; looking forward to it). This probably isn’t a poll option, just something I keep in my back pocket. Maybe we do a more robust exploration of foreign vampire films. I’m not sure. We’re gonna keep this running for a little while longer though. And if you want to get involved in further influencing what I watch, you can do so on our Patreon.

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