Fleshing out vampires
By Avis L. Weatherbee
At the moment the gaunt vampire crept down from the Carpathian Mountains in the 1922 German silent film NOSFERATU, a star was born. And when director John Carpenter unleashed the seminal horror classic HALLOWEEN on an unsuspecting public in 1978, his star, too, began to ascend.
Inevitably the twain would meet.
This Halloween eve, JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES brings the popular genre director and reluctant auteur up close and personal with the legend that just won't die - despite stakes through the heart, flashed crosses, protective garlic, sprinkled holy water and scorching sunlight.
Carpenter describes the mythic creature as the evil in our hearts. "We transpose it to the outside," he said in an interview last week. "[DRACULA author] Bram Stoker made the vampire the kind of dying European aristocracy feeding off the blood of the working people. Vampirism is another form of wild beast. It has to do, of course, with seduction, sexuality, corruption."
Those themes seem to play across cultures. There have been Asian, African-American, European, Latin and gay vampire films. The vampire has been used in comedy, pornography, drama, romance and satire. And the blood-lusting behemoth that Carpenter calls "shapeshifting" has taken on a new haunting significance with today's fear of blood-borne diseases.
With those categories noted, however, Carpenter views his film as none of the above. In fact, when asked to classify it, he seemed to relish the self-ascribed label of "politically incorrect." "My movie's a Western," he said. "It's THE WILD BUNCH meets VLAD THE IMPALER."
Based on the John Steakley novel VAMPIRE$, the film looks at the creatures through the eyes of a band of mercenaries ordained by the Catholic Church and dedicated to hunting down and killing the vampires. James Woods plays the lead hunter, and Thomas Ian Griffith is the master vampire who slaughters all but one of Wood's crew and becomes the object of the hunter's obsession.
In the film, Griffith is tall and raven-haired. Like many screen vampires before him, he has a way with women. "He gives an interesting bite to [actress] Sheryl Lee - it's below the waist... a lot of girls in the [test] audience started applauding." Carpenter said, laughing.
And why is this being who is cursed with eternal life often romanticized, despite his vicious nature? "I think the dark, brooding, lonely figure who's destined to walk the night forever - looking for his true love - is all wrapped up [in the myth]," Carpenter said. "It really comes from gothic romances, the Bronte sisters, that kind of stuff... there's a little bit of bodice-ripping feel to it."
Carpenter likens Griffith's imposing bearing to that of actor Christopher Lee, whose vampire made an impression on the director while growing up during the late 1950s. "[Lee] is a massive, tall man, 6-6 or so," Carpenter said. "He takes three or four stairs in a stride. Watch THE HORROR OF DRACULA, watch him go up the stairs. He doesn't take steps. He covers them in bounds."
Just as Lee has become identified with genre films over the years, so, too, has Carpenter, since his entertaining 1972 sci-fi oddity DARK STAR put him on the cinematic radar. After that, it was on to HALLOWEEN, followed by such films as ESCAPE FROM NEW YORK, CHRISTINE, STARMAN, MEMOIRS OF AN INVISIBLE MAN and THE THING.
Still, he shies away from being called a genre film auteur (a director whose work displays a distinctive signiture). "I always go by how I'm seen by others," Carpenter said. "In France I'm an auteur, in England I'm a filmmaker, in Germany I make horror films and in the United States I'm a bum," he said with a laugh.
"The minute you have a success in something, like I did in HALLOWEEN, people come to you and they typecast you," he said. "I think earlier in my career, I was a little disappointed that I was getting offered only those kinds of movies, but I wanted a job and I wanted to be a director - that was my dream since I was a kid.
"Now that I'm older, I feel lucky," he said. "Because I got to be John Carpenter. And within the genre, I've been able to do many different kinds of things: love stories, action films, horror movies, science fiction, fantasies, ghost stories... It's a blast; it's been fun."
The kind of fun offered up by action-horror flicks such as JOHN CARPENTER'S VAMPIRES always seems to strike a chord with teens, who flock to them like the newly bitten mesmerized by their vampire master. The 50-year-old director explained the allure this way; "When you're an adolescent, a teenager, even when you're a young adult, most of us haven't really confronted our own mortality and we're into risk-taking."
"Along with this risk-taking, there are fears of our own aggression. So a fun way of dealing with this is to take your best girl to a scary movie. It can all happen in front of you there - you can put your arm around your girlfriend or she can put her arm around you, and you can still come out safely. It can be kind of a catharsis."
Carpenter cited his film THE THING a masterful 1982 sci-fi horror epic, as the work he thinks "has disturbed people the most." And true, the visceral horror and subtle racial parable would raise goosebumps on even the most hardened of spines.
Not necessarily Carpenter's, though; his fears these days are more down-to-earth. "I'm closer to the end of my life than the beginning, and I'm more aware of the risks of living," he said.
After all, only vampires (in myth, that is) live forever.
