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The Staff of SOH
Daybreakers
- Thread starter Eoraptor1
- Start date
If you wanna see a good vampire film, check out "Let The Right One In". Its a swedish film (actual name "Lat Den Ratte Komma In") It's one of my favorite all time movies. None of that high school garbage, but there is a great story between the two main characters. I can't recommend this film enough!
http://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/lat_den_ratte_komma_in/
:ernae:
Quixoticish
Charter Member
I'll stick with Interview with a Vampire to be honest.
cheezyflier
Charter Member
i saw that movie a few months ago. i'm not saying it wasn't good, but there was one aspect of it i was...uncomfortable with. other than that, i really liked it.
I think I know what you mean... I definitely wouldn't recommend it to say, my parents or a pastor. I think it could be misinterpreted as perverted, but in my opinion the filmmaker did a good job at portraying the innocence of the children which made it a tad less awkward for me.
Navy Chief
Senior Member
I grew up watching Bela Lugosi, playing THE role as Count Dracula. I still love watching him. He was a natural. Somewhere I read he was buried in costume.
[youtube]IVPxAgy7lBA&feature=youtube_gdata[/youtube]
[youtube]IVPxAgy7lBA&feature=youtube_gdata[/youtube]
I have a Special Edition DVD of that 1931 Tod Browning version, Chief. There’s a documentary narrated by Carla Lemmle in Special Features. It’s remarkable how much trouble they had with the censors back then when making the thing. Rats, for instance, were considered to be in poor taste, so we see possums in Dracula’s castle instead. There was also a Spanish language version of the film made at the same time with the same set; one crew filmed during the day, and another a night. In many ways the Spanish version is more "cutting edge" than the American, but the actor playing the Count had nothing like Lugosi’s onscreen charisma. Lugosi’s portrayal is so dominant culturally that I’m willing to bet if you ask almost any kid in the world what Dracula sounds like, he’ll go into a version of Bela’s accent. One of the ironic things about this, is that the Dracula of Bram Stoker’s novel was very concerned about erasing any trace of his Continental accent before arriving in England.
Everyone has their own notion of what crossing the line entails in horror movies and horror lit. I personally see no redeeming value in a lot of the digital torture porn playing at the multiplex, but these films continue to be made and people continue to see them. I also upset a lot of people when I say that IMO a lot of our self-styled guardians of taste have much more trouble with sex than they do torture, but I insist that for a lot people, in my circle at least, it’s much more acceptable to see a young woman being graphically eviscerated than it is having an orgasm. I had a landlord who insisted that Interview With the Vampire was kiddie porn, and wanted nothing to do with it. I knew him for many years, and believe me, he was FAR from being a prude, but he was heartfelt about this. Everyone has their line, and his had been crossed.
I did see Let the Right One In and found it profoundly creepy, but the scene that most affected me was the young male lead’s head being held under water by the bully at the pool. This actually happened to me at that age. I don’t know if the kid who was doing it to me just thought he was playing or what, but I definitely saw it as his trying to drown me, on purpose or not, and I punched him in the nose from under the water as hard as I could and he let me go. I was a pure panic/survival reaction, because I’m not a tough guy. Believe me, if I’d had a vampire girlfriend at the time, I’d have welcomed her tearing this guy to chunks.
I don’t really hate Twilight, it’s just not for me. I found out in an article in Entertainment Weekly that the original novel was aimed at a readership of 11-12 year olds, so the horrific and sexual overtones of the vampire legend were sanitized with that in mind. The actual vampire folklore is both varied and extremely interesting (you get to find out what makes various cultures anxious) but at its center is a predatory supernatural creature who extends its own life by drawing it out of children and young nubile adults. They generally don’t like feeding on the elderly. This rapine attack on a society’s future is what is missing from Twilight, again IMHO. The pretty person vampire of Anne Rice and the Twilight saga is really an evolution of English Romanticism. The 19<SUP>th</SUP> poem Vampyre was written by Lord Byron himself, and was later fleshed out by John Polidori. This is the same crowd Mary Shelley hung out with when writing Frankenstein.
To my knowledge, no one has ever made a movie version of Dracula that remains faithful to the novel from beginning to end. Coppola’s 1992 version was very close for the first half of the film, but after that he for some reason decided to remake Jean Cocteau’s La Belle et la Bete for the second half using the cast of Dracula. He pretty much admits this in the Director’s Commentary of the Collector’s Edition, but I’d already decided that was what he was doing; Gary Oldman’s prosthetic wolf-form Count even looks like Cocteau’s Beast.
Enough lecturing. A series of vampire novels that I very much enjoy, but despair of ever seeing brought to the screen (maybe that’s a good thing, though) are Kim Newman’s Anno Dracula novels.
JAMES
cheezyflier
Charter Member
my only real gripe with that part was that i felt it unnecessary to a good story. it woulda worked just fine without it.