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"I've always wanted to do a vampire movie," states JOHN CARPENTER, director of John Carpenter's Vampires. "This book, Vampire$, came along and it really did some things I'd never seen before. It's set in the American Southwest and has certain western elements to it. I decided this would be the perfect chance to do something different."

"Part of the theme is the dualistic irony of the good guys and the bad guys. It has all the classic ideas that you've seen in a vampire movie -- the humans versus the vampires, the hidden sexuality, the idea of drinking blood. All that's at work in this film, but in essence, I've always loved westerns and one of the reasons I'm doing this movie is that this is the closest I've come to being able to do a western."

"It' s been said that all of John' s movies are westerns," added producer SANDY KING. "if you substitute the situations -- urban or period or space, or in this case, the southwest with vampires -- and you instead think Howard Hawks’ Rio Bravo, what you see is that John very much follows in his idol’s footsteps."

"It's about hunting vampires instead of whoever the bad guys of the day were in classic western cinema," offered JAMES WOODS. "We have set pieces in this movie that are homages to the early works of Howard Hawks and Sam Peckinpah, with the Henry Fondas and John Waynes and William Holdens out braving the ultimate challenge. It’s The Wild Bunch meets vampires."

"The vampire slayers are gunslingers and the vampires are gunslingers in their own way," added THOMAS IAN GRIFFITH, the actor who won the plum role of master vampire Valek. "John's taken the western and added dark overtones we haven't seen before."

It may be hard to envision vampires clashing with slayers in a western setting, but with John Carpenter' s direction, it becomes very natural and real. James Woods' description of a scene may help to bring the idea into focus.

"DANIEL BALDWIN and I come into the town of Santiago on a wide, open street," explained Woods. "There's nobody around but there are signs that somebody was there. It's quiet. We take out our guns and look around. I signal him. He signals back to cover me when I go into this little bar. There's about a minute or so where the tension reads that our characters are going to be slaughtered right there. All of a sudden, we realized it was Rio Bravo."

Sandy King feels that her role as producer is to facilitate her husband's vision as director. She shares his enthusiasm for early westerns and endorses the image of the virile men who rode the celluloid range. This is reflected in her casting of James Woods, Daniel Baldwin and the talented actor/stuntmen who are seen as slayers.

"I always tend to go towards ensemble casting," she explained. "You get a richness of texture and don't fall into that typical blonde, fair-haired ‘hero' boy trap. I really tried to cast men who have a certain kind of charisma.

"MARK BOONE JUNIOR (as Catlin) represents the blue collar fighter," she continued. "He's not your classic athlete, but I buy that he's right in there with the other guys. HENRY KINGI (Anthony) is sexy beyond time and is a great athlete. CARY-HIROYUKI TAGAWA (Deyo) is a very charismatic bad guy. He first worked with us on Big Trouble in Little China and he's proved himself time and again, particularly in Rising Sun. Henry Kingi, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and TOMMY ROSALES (Ortega) usually all play villains. Well, how interesting to have bad guys be good guys."

After all, as James Woods commented, "These are really dangerous vampires, and you like to know that they're hiring real men for the parts -- not the sort of ‘Hollywood’ version of men out hunting vampires."

Each slayer is seen as an individual who has joined this group of mercenaries. It is spoken in their manner and seen in longtime Carpenter associate and Saturn Award nominee (for her Escape From L.A. designs) ROBIN MICHEL BUSH's choice of costumes. There's the classic leather-vested cowboy look of Daniel Baldwin's Montoya, the tough biker of Bambi (DAVID ROWDEN); the high-tech armor worn by Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, CLARKE COLEMAN as Davis and Tommy Rosales as Ortega.

Bush outdid herself with the magnificent robes she designed for MAXIMILIAN SCHELL as Cardinal Alba. Schell's character may come as quite a surprise for the audience. Said Carpenter, "He plays a rather unique character who's conflicted by the situation he has to deal with between the slayers and some of the guilt the Catholic church has to deal with about having created vampires. He's in a tough spot."

The tall, athletic, highly attractive vampire masters wore the kind of clothing one would see at an after-hours club. Sexy, suited men; women dressed in gauzy fabrics that add movement when they attack. Thomas Ian Griffith's Valek wore a textured velvet duster length coat that draped sensuously from his 6'5" frame.

"Southwest Gothic is the look of the film. The flavor of the vampires comes from the European Middle Ages around the time of the Crusades," explained producer King. "If you look at the architecture of the Southwest, it harkens back to very old architecture in Italy. You can see the influence of Italy and Spain in the colonization of this area through the gates, the arches, the block houses. It looks like Tuscany. It made it more fun to connect here to the southwest because you can believe that the ancient monks brought a cross here and hid it. You believe the connection to Europe and buy that vampires from the old country found their way here to search through these places."

"We use a reoccurring theme of gothic arches in this movie which is more subliminal, I hope, than literal," said production designer TOMAS WALSH. "Gothic is all about angles and points, pointed archways and hands pointed to heaven. It connects more to superstition than rational thought."

"We have enormous thunderclouds that rise above gorgeous mesas with huge rattlesnakes going across the road," added Woods. "It's very beautiful and serene but, in keeping with the theme of our movie, rather forbidding in ways that you don't expect. The whole area around Santa Fe has a haunted beauty about it which is, when you think of it, the plight of the vampire."

The choice of location in northern New Mexico provided incredible vistas, unequaled light, glorious cloud formations, raw desert landscape, authentic pueblos, churches, a 200 year old mission and even a small western town where the company took over a square city block to build an old adobe prison. Designer Walsh and his team built the interiors of the farmhouse, jail, hotel, motel and the jail elevator shaft on sound stages at Garson Studios.
His attention to detail was extraordinary, adding subtle touches that enriched the production with its own history. The Berziers Cross and an array of pikes, stakes and crossbows were specially designed and fabricated for the film, each adorned with the slayer logo.

"We adapted the symbol of the Knights of Malta as the slayer logo because the Knights of Malta were the first conscripts by the Catholic Church to go and fight the infidels," explained Walsh. "They were financed by the church and through their own holdings. The Latin words we used around the logo are taken from the Spanish Inquisition. The translation is something like 'Lord declare this cause.' We took the emblem of the early crusaders and had it placed on the top of the stakes the slayers drive through the heart. We use it throughout the movie in various ways as a symbol, a tool, a weapon."

These devices all serve to give the film a basis in reality, a means for the audience to accept the story and the danger it imposes. The actors added their own suppositions that may be quite fantastic and at the same time give pause to ponder.

"Consider those thousands of people who end up on milk cartons every year," conjectured Woods. "Where did they go? Just suppose they were vampirized. If we accept that premise and go from there, and then take very seriously that we must slay the vampires who are in little nests all around the country, there's a much more complicated plot to the film."

"There's also something about vampires that is attractive, something forbidden, the dark side," added Griffith, who not only plays the ultimate vampire, but is the perfect actor for the role.

"Thomas moves like a panther. He exudes a sexuality that can overcome the grave," declared producer King. "We wanted somebody incredibly handsome whom we could decay and would still have charisma. I was sitting in my office when a shadow filled the doorway backlit by the Southern California sunshine. One of the things I look for in casting is how other people react, and when Thomas walked through that door, everybody went, 'Whoa!' Men and women alike. Women, of course, offered to follow him home. Men said, 'God...’"

Carpenter endorsed her take on the actor: "Truly there's no one else who has the power and stature that Thomas has. He is Valek."

Daniel Baldwin brings a strong presence to the role of Montoya, but it is his blue eyes that Carpenter noticed as "dazzling." Baldwin's Montoya is a man's man with heart. He cannot deny compassion as he responds to Katrina's plight.

SHERYL LEE plays the role of Katrina, a prostitute who rather than finding sex an occupational hazard, thoroughly enjoys her work. Unfortunately, she finds herself clearly in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Carpenter explains: "Katrina gets bitten by a vampire and her story is about her transition from human to vampire. It takes about four or five days until the virus or whatever it is gets into your system and takes over. In the meantime, she's having a relationship with Daniel Baldwin's character and they're beginning to fall for each other. It's an interesting situation."

"In essence, besides this being a vampire picture, you have a love triangle with all of these main characters battling over a woman who is turning into a vampire. She's being controlled by the master, but she's with our slayers who are using her to track him down. It's a story with a lot of tension."

Lee is, of course, the actress who played the infamous Laura Palmer in David Lynch's Fire Walk With Me as well as his series, Twin Peaks: The Last Seven Days of Laura Palmer. "I was initiated into this world by the best of them. To become well known as a corpse is a very strange thing. It doesn't happen that often."

She connected to the concept of vampires in a very real and visceral way, allowing herself to experiment with her senses. We see her in several stages as her character evolves. "I feel very raw," she confessed. "I started working with hunger -- not eating all day until I was so hungry I couldn't stand it -- then going past it and eating a medium rare steak, seeing it pink and opening those primal, instinctual places. It's not just ‘I'm hungry,’ it's ‘I HAVE TO HAVE THAT PIECE OF MEAT!!’ This is coming from someone who was a vegetarian for 4 or 5 years."

She was also the set vampire "historian," the kind of actor who steeps herself in volumes of literature on her subject.

"I've got all the vampire books. My favorite one is Zen and the Art of Slaying Vampires," said Lee. "At first I thought I shouldn't read it because it's about a vampire slayer, but the vampire slayer is actually a vampire, which is why he's such a good slayer. It's a spiritual journey about facing the vampire within us. When we slay the vampire, we're also slaying the vampire within us. It's spiritual in the sense that we're not just light, we're light and dark. To deny the dark does nothing but give it more power. To embrace it and acknowledge it and see its purpose is what makes you whole."

"What a vampire represents is our most primal instincts -- all of the stuff that we're not allowed to do, all the stuff that's bad and wrong," added Sheryl Lee. "But that's what it is. It's survival, blood, the life force, the hunger, the desire, the passion, the need. It's immortality. That's why vampires are so romantic -- the mystique, the myth, because there's so much seduction involved in vampirism."

Carpenter agreed. "My feeling about vampire movies is that if you don't have sex, it's not a vampire movie."

This was an ongoing discussion on the set. Are vampires sexual or simply sexy? Absolutely everyone had an opinion on the subject.

"From the dawn of mythology, evil has always been alluring," said producer King. "Vampires have a heavy sexual connotation. They came out of Victorian times. Bram Stoker's Dracula was entirely about repressed sexuality, though he was not so repressed when he wrote it. "

"One of the things I think we did do rather well is that our masters are all incredibly sexy," said King. "It's no coincidence that they are the tallest, most beautiful, most physically agile men and women we could find."

There are seven masters who accompany Valek through his travels, killing and feeding on their prey. They rise from the ground and stand in formation behind their master, played by Thomas Ian Griffith. It's an image that is absolutely breathtaking.

It turned out to be rather interesting that on the subject of vampires and sex, the opinions of those who would play the slayers were in direct opposition to those who played the vampires. In speaking with each of the "vampires," it was certain that they all agreed that vampires were both sexy and sexual.

On the other hand, Woods offers a slayer's opinion. "Our vampires are not seductive," he declared. "They're just ornery, down-home, blood-drinking mothers. We're out to get them and kill them and that's it. We're basically going after the 'alien pod.' They're bad people who need to have wooden stakes driven through their hearts and get pulled out into the sunlight and blown up."

Pretty cold, but then again, this comes from the actor who played Bryon de la Beckwith and Roy Cohn.

And on the other side of the coin, you have Griffith's opinion of the "humanity" of the character he plays.

"It's not that I hate the slayers. It's not just rage and killings. It's much deeper than that," he explained. "I don't think he's a bad guy. He's been wandering the earth for 600 years doing penance to the light. Valek is rejected by God and that is the reason he is what he is today. The act itself for a vampire is need - need to survive. Let him walk in the light."

No, it's not easy being a vampire. Griffith and the other "vampire" actors learned just how tough it is. Everyone knows that sunlight is the best way to kill a vampire, but most of us wouldn't want to take that route. DARRYL PRITCHETT and his special effects crew worked closely with stunt coordinator JEFF IMADA and special effects make up artist GREG NICOTERO (Spawn, From Dusk Til Dawn) and his talented KNB crew on the burns.

"We didn't want to do a lot of computer enhancement for the flames, but we wanted a different kind of look," he continued. "There are different grades of heat with different types of fuel or fire. We had to use a metallic base where the fire is much more intense. The stunt people were on fire for probably less than 10 seconds, but it was a lot hotter. I don't think it's been done this way before, so that made it more challenging."

And if being burned up in the sun wasn't bad enough, John Carpenter's vampires also had to be literally buried alive.

Thomas Ian Griffith and his seven masters were buried under about a foot of desert sand while they waited for individual numbers to be called to rise from their graves. Jeff Imada devised a breathing system whereby each actor used a small box placed over his mouth to provide a short supply of air as he called them to rise from the ground one by one.

"Some people are uncomfortable breathing through their mouths with a straw, so we came up with the idea of using a box," he explained. "We were concerned with the weight of the soil possibly crushing the box so we did a test ‘burial’ the day before we shot the scene," he explained. "I told the actors, ‘If you have any kind of problem, just get up.’"

Nobody wanted to blow the scene, but none of them were particularly crazy about being buried alive.

"It's a very personal thing to face," said Imada. "You have to bring yourself down a few notches and keep yourself together. You have to slow your breathing down and tell yourself, ‘I’ll just be underground for a little while, and I can get up any time I want.’"

"It was really claustrophobic, even for that short amount of time," said Griffith. "You're only a foot under, but the weight of the dirt is amazing. When you get up, you realize how heavy it is. It was quite an experience, but not one I want to repeat again."

Stunt actor Troy Robinson agreed that he'd rather jump off a building 150 times than be buried alive.

While the "burial" was somewhat passive in terms of action, many of the scenes were not. "I'm being dragged across the floor on top of this female vampire who's being stabbed through the heart and shot with arrows," recalled Woods. "I'm shooting her face with a 9mm special gun, then she blows up in flames."

Then there was the motel explosion.

"There's a scene where this entire motel blows up," said Woods. "It was a huge explosion with flames 40' into the air when this entire motel blows up," said Woods. "I was told to just walk away from the motel and when I hit this line in the sand to brace myself so I didn't flinch when it blew. It was wild, but I guess it's all in a day's work when you're a vampire slayer."

It's clear that the actors had a great time making the film. There was a camaraderie among them with Daniel Baldwin being the resident comedian and Tim Guinee exaggerating his character's ongoing tiffs with Crow. Their first "fight" had Guinee flipping over a picnic table when threatened by Woods' Crow. The fall was more than scripted as cast and crew watched horrified that Woods had gone too far. The actor protested innocence and, as it turned out, Guinee had actually thrown himself clear over the table. The actors enjoying playing off Guinee's physicality throughout filming, though sometimes their fabricated altercations looked a bit too real for observers.

Reality was the name of the game in bringing the movie to life. As time wore on and night shooting got later, there was much discussion about the existence of vampires.

Woods had a pretty good tale that just happened to be true. Growing up, in among other places, a small town in Rhode Island, he learned about one Mercy Brown, a young woman who was said to have been a vampire. Her grave was a favorite haunt of Woods and his friends who liked to visit it at sunset to see if Mercy or her vampire friends would show up.

"The grave was a couple miles from my house," explained Woods. "There's a rock next to the tombstone where her dad cut out her heart and drove a wooden stake through it. It was a legitimate thing. She was certified as a vampire and buried in the church courtyard. It was on her tombstone and there are records from that time in the church and the City Hall that say that the problem had been dealt with. Genuinely, it was the political and governmental equivalent of the Salem witch trials. There was a lot of talk about it, but they've now determined that she had that rare disease where she was allergic to sunlight. She also was allergic to garlic. All these weird things happened that conspired to make it look like she was a traditional vampire, I guess. Either that or she was a real vampire - one or the other."

And then there were those who fell under that good, old vampire spell.

Sheryl Lee's role took her from woman to vampire-bitten woman. While the men may have viewed vampires from an external point of view, Lee, the only actress in the film except for the female vampires, perceived vampirism on a much deeper, more personal level.

"I dream as Katrina," she admitted. "It's great because it means, subconsciously, it's working. Is it comfortable? No. I wake up in the middle of the night and I'm freaked. I don't know that I believe that vampires exist in the way that they've been portrayed in films and the way that they've been written about, but do I believe that there is something like a vampire out there? - absolutely!"
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