A Retrospective of Vampires in the Movies, Part 1

Does it seem like there are a lot of movies being made about vampires these days? There may be, what with the influence of the Twilight and "True Blood" film and TV series, respectively, (both adapted from book series - making them marketable), and all the levels of release nowadays (wide, limited, cable-TV original movies, direct to DVD). When you think about it though, there have been films coming out involving vampires for quite some time.

Bram Stoker's Dracula (1992)

Whenever movies have been made with vampires as a major plot point there will always be some element of horror, just because of the fact that traditionally, vampires drink blood. To the casual film watcher the sight of blood being drunk, whether a human character is killed for it or not, equals horror ten times out of ten. But from that starting point, the vampire film has been combined with nearly every other genre besides horror. The exceptions might be the vampire-western (unless you count Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark from 1987, which takes place in the dusty American west, but in the then present-day 1980s) or vampire-musicals (unless you count that Dracula puppet musical within 2008's Forgetting Sarah Marshall).

Before I get into my individual film discussions, let me say that while this retrospective turned out to be lengthy, it is by no means comprehensive. This is because there are just to many vampire movies out there to see, nor do I want to see them all. There are many that just aren’t any good, not even by cult-film or fun b-movie standards. Even among the ones I do want to see eventually, I did not wish to see all of them as a prerequisite for writing about the subject, although I did see a handful of them for the first time recently just for fun.

Why I Love Film - "The Graduate"

Dustin Hoffman and Anne Bancroft in The Graduate

I was re-watching the The Graduate the other day and I came out of it reassured that it is one of my all-time favorite favorite films. When  I get around to re-thinking my top 100 films of all time it will most likely remain in the top ten. This movie has such a simple-sounding plot, how could it be one of the few mainstream films (i.e. non-genre films) to crack my top ten? It’s not even one of these slick new films with quick edits that get the young kids all excited. This is from 1967, the second picture in Mike Nichols’ filmography which totals 22 titles. Throughout his career, Nichols has also mixed-in directing jobs on Broadway plays, and finding this out was not surprising after viewing some of the one-room, dialogue heavy scenes in his work (The Graduate has also been on Broadway, but not involving Nichols). But there also are things I like about The Graduate that I don’t imagine would transfer well to the stage. Some of these are the things I love about it, such as the the camera tricks, the musical montages and driving scenes, and the film’s setting- the 1960’s time period and the California location.