The wife and I have been watching Van Helsing. It’s sort of a more serious version of Buffy The Vampire Slayer. The basic premise is that Vanessa Van Helsing (yes, a descendant of Dracula‘s Abraham Van Helsing) hunts and kills vampires after there has been a vampire apocalypse. Instead of zombies rising up, biting everyone, and creating more zombies, vampires do it instead. Thanks to a volcanic eruption spewing tons of ash into the sky and blocking out the sun, vampires don’t have to come out just at night anymore. One vampire uses this new found freedom to go around and start biting anyone and everyone, thus populating the world with more vampires than it really needs.
So, let’s talk vampire table manners.
I’m not sure when exactly this happened, but most vampire movies I’ve seen made in the last two decades have given vampires very messy eating habits. Honestly, were they raised in a pigsty or something?
I remember in the 1970s (yeah, I’m old) when the rise of the modern vampire myth really took off. Frank Langella played Dracula and all of a sudden vampires went from horrific, malevolent creatures of the night, to suave, sexy romantic fantasy partners. The Hammer films of the 1960s played up the sex angle in their films but vampires were still horrific creatures.
After Buffy, vampires started reverting back to their horrific roots. And how is that portrayed in horror movies? The vampire stalks their potential meal, pounces upon them, and bites them, sucking their blood. OK, nothing new there. But then they go and splatter blood everywhere. Oooo, look! There’s lots of blood. Aren’t vampires scary?
No, they’re wasteful. Look, if your main source of sustenance is blood, fine. Just don’t let it all run off instead of consuming it. Some movies go over the top with this trope. If I recall correctly, John Carpenter’s Vampire$, based on the book by John Steakly, was way over-the-top on the scenes where the vampires eat their victims. So why do they have to let the blood run all over the place? Why do they have to cover themselves in it? I mean, when I go out to eat a pizza I don’t take two bites of it, then smear the rest of it all over me. I would think they’d keep every drop of it from going to waste so they can feed properly. Yes, I know the answer is that they are showing how horrific the vampires are.
But I think back to all the vampire legends and lore before they started doing this. Vampires were scary without all this throwing blood everywhere. Just the mention of vampires would send villagers and peasants inside after sundown, huddling in taverns and homes, near the fireplace, hanging garlic over the doors and windows to keep the bloodsuckers out. They were scary because of what they were, not because of poor eating habits.
Has the modern audience gotten so desensitized to blood, horror, and the grotesque that they aren’t scared by anything anymore? How far is the envelope going to be pushed so people can continue to get their thrills from horror movies? (That’s something I don’t quite get either, but that’s a topic for another time).
The last truly disturbing thing I remember seeing in a horror movie came from Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk To Dawn and it was actually a very tiny part of the film. There’s the point in the movie where all the main characters are in the vampire night club, the doors are being barred so no one can get out, and the staff is about to turn into vampires. There’s a mariachi band playing on stage. Then boom, the staff all become vampires, including the band, and start chowing down on the customers. The disturbing bit, to me at any rate, was the guitarist in the mariachi band. His guitar also transforms. The body of the guitar is a human torso, the neck is a really long human neck, and the tuning part is a human head. That’s the disturbing image that remains with me after all these years, not the blood being dribbled off the vampires who can’t be bothered to use a napkin and wipe their mouths after eating.
Sometimes, less truly is more. Let’s get back to storytelling where the viewer uses their imagination to fill in the horrible parts. They are most likely going to come up with something more horrifying than blood covered victims of messy eaters.
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