Century of the Vampire: Vampire Academy (2014)

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.

Last time, Bernhardt reviewed the 2023 Pablo Larraín movie El Conde. Today, he looks at the 2014 Mark and Daniel Waters film, Vampire Academy. This article will contain spoilers.

I’m doing something I don’t normally do, which is starting with a frame from the movie I’m talking about and directly discussing it. This is the most interesting shot from Vampire Academy. Two vampires feeding off a woman, one on each wrist. They’re former lovers, the vampires. They’re in a sort of new communion with each other, through her and with her. In any vampire film worth its salt, this is at least a pivotal moment in a relationship, though it might not be the most important point of the feature.

This is a transition shot in Vampire Academy; it’s just in there to establish business as usual is going on and all the vampires are getting their blood, which they do non-violently through volunteers who are like, their fans? From online? The film speeds past any of the implications of this. It’s part of a montage about school life in the eponymous institution, and it’s on screen for some two seconds and change before the film moves on. Every other thing about this movie is worse than that shot. No one involved in the making of this movie on a creative or conceptual level understood or, I suspect, understands to this day a single thing about vampires. This is the high point of this movie. It’s downhill from here. And it's not even a particularly good shot.

I remain adamant that BloodRayne is the worst movie reviewed in this space from a perspective of craft -- just the simple act of putting the movie together. Vampire Academy doesn’t threaten that directly; all the lighting here is done professionally, no extras wander into the set, and the actors are doing actor things in a way that befits their guild. And Once Bitten is down there with it, just a completely irredeemable and unentertaining film from a writing perspective, saved only by the performance of Cleavon Little. Vampire Academy has no production gaffes worth talking about the way Bloodrayne’s follow it around, and it certainly has no performer able to elevate his material like Cleavon Little. What we have here is an uninspired, treacly mashup of Harry Potter and Buffy the Vampire Slayer, incompetently written on the front and back ends and misogynist in that specific way that 2010s media trying to do “grrlpower!!” without the involvement of any women routinely managed to achieve.

The world of Vampire Academy and the story that happens at Vampire Academy are both stupid and boring. We’ll dispense with them forthwith. There are three kinds of vampires: dhampir, which are “mortal vampires” and are really just Buffies; moroi, the beautiful elfin good guy vampires who the dhampir bodyguard (they also do magic, because Harry Potter); and strigoi, the evil vampires, who are evil. These are biological states that align with morality; as always, you have to be really careful with those because implying immutable moral characteristics based on biology means -- oh, no, okay, a bunch of the moroi are gonna be beautiful blondes and most of the strigoi are gonna be slavs and all the TV actors we hired will be dumped in the middle as dhampir, and we’re not gonna interrogate any of this any further. Alright. Dhampir Rose (Zoey Deutsch) and her moroi sister/bestie/charge Lissa (Lucy Fry) have run away from Vampire Academy because it sucks and some strigoi are trying to kidnap or kill Lissa. They are captured and returned to the school to begin the film. We follow the general plot outline of your Harry Potter knockoffs -- there is a School Nonsense arc about pranks on the quad and who’s dating who, and there’s a Meta Lore Plot arc about the nature of vampirism and deep evil deeds and why Lissa’s blood is so dang important, and wouldn’t you know it, eventually these plots will kind of intersect (but not all that well, because the writers are bad).

The secret villain who wants Lissa’s blood is revealed in the final act to be the previously-kindly aristocrat Victor; viewers paying close attention could have guessed this given the clues of “multiple scenes pointing out that he is suffering from a rare blood disease that could be cured by Lissa’s blood” and “Victor is played by Gabriel Byrne.” The final boss is his daughter Natalie (Sarah Hyland), whose big tells are “completely wastes all her screentime on goofs setting up the glasses-off hair-down glowing-red-eyes evil turn” and “was directly parachuted into the plot by Victor, her father, the obvious villain.” There was a Snape-analogue teacher that was set up in the first two acts of the movie who had Disappeared; we learn in the third act that she has been turned into a strigoi (biologically evil) and is the hook for the sequel, as the final shot of the film is her standing in a CGI cavern carved into the cliff face of a mountain a moderate distance away from Vampire Academy, darkly intoning that the true franchise plot is about to begin as a bunch of CGI strigoi hoot and holler behind her. There was no second movie, thank God.

The events of the movie are petty and low-stakes, as somewhat befits the first installment of a planned epic -- it’s been a very long time since I’ve read the first Harry Potter book and I don’t plan on revisiting it, but I recall the stakes there were like, the first report card and some crap in a secret room. Maybe that’s the second one? Whatever. Point is, you get vampire prom and some extremely low-rent aristo squabbling that mainly serves to introduce future threats. That’s less of a problem than the way they get there. The movie is bizarrely infatuated with the concept of vampire sex slavery or vampire sex work, which is to say, that stuff happening to or by young women who happen to also be vampires. If I never hear the term “blood whore” again it’ll be too soon; it’s all over this movie, as an insult, a threat, and at one bizarre point by Rose a speculated-upon career change. The first time we hear it is from the headmistress of the school directed at Rose herself; Headmistress Kirlov (Olga Kurylenko, who you may remember doing brownface as the Bond girl in Quantum of Solace and more recently as Taskmaster in the Marvel films) is a thankless character who shares a number of characteristics with the vampire queen, the other adult woman presented as an authority figure in the film; namely, she’s stupid, immature, flighty, and easily outwitted. She’s allied with Victor mainly because she’s too out to lunch to understand what he’s actually up to, and when it comes time for her confrontation with Rose, our heroine jabs her with her own sedative needle in one swift move and keeps it moving.

The last time the term comes up it’s because the minor-league villain of the film, the evil tiny blonde with a pixie cut that has been doing Mean Girls stuff to Lissa ever since she got back to Vampire Academy, is revealed to have been fucking her way through all the hot jock boys of the class in order to get them to help her do blood graffiti. So the script constantly talking about “blood whores” pays off, in the most irritating way possible. It’s notable that the Waters brothers got this gig because of the success of Mean Girls, and their comprehensive faceplant here demonstrates who was responsible for that film’s success and who wasn’t. There’s even a scene where a bunch of stuck up vampire girls bare their fangs at our heroes as they enter prom and like three of the five of them don’t actually hit the fang shot correctly! They just decided it was fine and kept that take in! What are we doing here, I ask you.

The men of the film are hardly any better, though they of course do get to drive the plot forward while the ostensible heroines mainly end up reacting to what they do; there’s the Friend-zoned Nice Guy who isn’t going to get the girl, Mason (played by Cal Lightsaber himself, Cameron Monaghan) who essentially solves the Mean Girls plot offscreen by himself and gets a kiss for it from Rose, but only on the cheek, which he immediately complains about; there’s Dmitri (Danila Kozlovsky), the head of security for Vampire Academy who, as he points out, is twice the seventeen-year-old Rose’s age, but is nevertheless her love interest and has a magically-compelled-but-they’re-both-into-it sex scene with her -- they end the movie claiming they're not a couple but then kissing; there’s Christian (Dominic Sherwood), the Malfoy-type brooding bad boy with a villain turn mid-movie that turns out to be a dream sequence, who ends up as Lissa’s boyfriend after a bunch of uncomfortable speeches about vampire race science; and then there’s Jesse (Ashley Charles), who as far as I can tell is just a scumbag that Rose decides to make out with and almost fuck near the start of the movie because she’s Acting Out. It would make sense if he later turns out to betray the school and go evil and this was just setting him up for that; I haven’t looked, I won’t look, and they never made that movie, so who cares.

I know that some of the people involved in this can do good work; Byrne needs little introduction, Deutch was quite good across from Mark Rylance in The Outfit (2023), which you should watch if you haven’t, and Cam Monaghan spent a long time on Shameless growing up in the business before his recent Star Wars turn. None of that’s on display here. Deutch in particular mails in an atrociously-written role, not that I blame her in the slightest; “what if Buffy was also the lead in Mean Girls” is a thankless job, and I’m quite sure there was nothing here to elevate, but all of her attempts at bright jocular sarcasm are irritating. Dimitri’s actor, meanwhile, is clearly working in his second or third language and somehow makes David Boreanaz’s Angel look like a paragon of on-screen charisma. Gabriel Byrne tries to have a little fun with it but the role is paper-thin and doesn’t even ask him to give good sleazy villain speeches; his biggest moment in the film is a baffling shot where Victor, a vampire, uses a hand mirror to track the progress of Lissa’s blood cure as it de-ages him. He looks in a mirror! As a vampire! Again: What are we doing here?

It’s far from the worst thing about the film, but in the end we run into the same problem we’ve run into with other young adult vampire media, most egregiously Twilight, which is actually a better franchise with more respect for relevant genre traditions than this film: This isn’t a vampire movie, and the people who made it barely have any understanding about what vampires are. This is a wizard movie with a thin genre veneer painted over it. But vampires don’t go to school! They don’t age! They prey on humans to survive and they don’t show up in mirrors! And if they’re not gonna do those things, there are reasons why! Vampire Academy can fuck off!

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