F  I  L  M    R  A  M  B  L  I  N  G  S


This All Hallows Eve, instead of trick-and-treating, The Moviejerk confronts the postmodernist movie vampires (I'm talking to you Twilight wusses) with a sharp stake on hand, sending these pretenders back to their shallow graves and resurrecting the truly frightening vampire that would scare the living daylights out of us all.


Bella is captivated by Edward's smouldering stare, model locks and glittering skin. The epitome of the 'wussy' vampire.


Hallowe'en is here, folks. There's barely a better time of the year to spend the night-in, turn the lights out, put on a horror film and start screaming until the next door neighbour starts banging on your door. But before all that commotion, you begin browsing your film library to choose the best all-out scare when you begin wondering - when was the last horror film you've seen that brought you to a point of near heart-attack? The modern day horror cinema is currently built around shock tactics and pseudo-documentary post-Blair Witch gimmicks in the likes of [REC] and Paranormal Activity. That's barely scratching the surface. Those people who shrieked their way watching these have probably done so just because the entire cinema is roaring with screams, to go along with the flow, and have never seen a genuinely terrifying horror movie. With monsters. Or vampires. Speaking of which, the recent day audiences have seem to be desensitised with sparkly kiddywink fantasies pretending to be 'horror' movies. Before in the old, halcyon days, kids go trick-and-treating dressed up as the wolfman or the vampire, replete with fake plastic fangs and dripping Heinz ketchup on their chin. Now, they've all grown some chest hairs and start wearing leather jackets to look like a rip-off version of Edward Cullen. 

Unless you've been living in an underground bunker recently, planet Earth is presently run over by vampires. No, we're not talking about power-hungry politicos nor soul-sucking corporations. We’re talking about the fantastical fanged creatures of the night that have recently claimed resurgence in our screens both big and small, drawing a phenomenal amount of the hot-blooded female audience that would make Count Dracula sweat in excitement.
Whenever you stare into a screen, may it be cinema, television or even your computer, chances are, you’ll find a flour-faced bloodsucker staring back at you. So impossibly debonair and good-looking that these transmuted species don’t look like they just stepped out from a coffin, but rather from a Dolce & Gabbana advertisement. The Twilight Saga, as you ordinary moviegoer very well know, is to be blamed for this consternation. Those that watch, worship, roll over the ground in the holy name of Twilight - you are to be blamed that the next instalment Break Dawn is going to be split into two movies and do a Deathly Hallows route. As if the abominations the were New Moon and Eclipse were enough to send this back to its abyss. Apparently, movie producers have realised that there are hordes of teenage girls (and their mothers, too) that could carry on vehemently screaming their way into the brink of throat cancer in the next stage of the franchise. Nevertheless, aside from this Twilight shithole, arthouse cinema saw maverick filmmakers also dabble into the vampire genre with Let The Right One In and Thirst, with the former being remade in the Stateside as Let Me In. In the box, Stateside television is mauled by True Blood and Vampire Diaries, two TV series that serve as great magnet to soaring ratings and female titillation. The plague is here, people. The apocalypse looks like it’s all teeth-on-neck action. 


Let The Right One In sees a new vampire evolution - the existentialist, lonely nightwalker. Still very dangerous, nonetheless.


This trend is somewhat baffling at first, at least from the male perspective. Vampires these days have seem to shake off their dust-beaten, castle-lurking existence. Gone are the cobwebbed days of literary monsters that prowl in the dark, the black-clad, insomniac, bloodsucking spawns of Vlad the Impaler. Hello, gorgeous, glamorous vampire – all fashion-model locks, brooding stares, looks that kill, Abercrombie & Fitch six-packs and flawless, sparkling skin. In The Twilight Saga, vampire protagonist Edward Cullen glitters under the sunlight. Literally. The new breed of vampires are now anti-photosensitive, and don’t burst into flames at the touch of sunbeam, unlike what happens to curmudgeonly Uncle Dracula during the old days. They don’t flap around ancient castles and hunting for village virgins anymore. Instead, they infiltrate high school grounds looking like a bunch of reanimated James Deans – admired, socially recognised yet dangerous. Their prey are now females of the emotive, obsessive sort, who longed to be bitten and to be one of the vampires’ ultra-elite, Alpha-Omega-esque fraternity.

The Twilight Saga is responsible for this current revivification of vampire culture, fulfilling the caprices of the tween dream; young, barely legal girls who harbour unabashed fantasies of being whisked away by some handsome hunk who happens to be a vampire. The premise of this romantic fantasy is that the heroine, Bella Swan, is willing to give up his mortality to be with elusive dog-toothed lust object Edward. Nevertheless, there’s a central conflict (surprise, surprise). Bella is torn between vampire Edward and werewolf boy Jacob. But oh no, it's a difficult choice and she shouldn't shag either of them because it's really about abstinence. And preservation. And love. And romance. It's a blatant contradiction, then, given that vampirism practically links to eroticism, sexuality and often unfeigned hedonism, not gift-wrapped in a Mormon Sunday service. This is the stuff scarlet Harlequin novels are made of, the butch guy and the damsel in distress, only with fangs. And this is not without justification - the novels of Anne Rice about Southern American vampires carousel around this premise. 


Nosferatu scaring local village folks in F. W. Murnau's silent horror classic. 


But why is such the appeal of vampirism that it lures the starry-eyed masses? Let’s look at history. Vlad the Impaler’s reign of Wallachia circa 15th century is renowned to be bloody and brutal, sending his enemies to deathly stakes. His sobriquet ‘Dracula’ is immortalised by Bram Stoker in his quintessential horror fiction, which in turn has flourished cinematically from F.W. Murnau’s German silent classic Nosferatu, to versions that seduced directors such as Terence Fisher, Werner Herzog and Francis Ford Coppola, the latter rendition being the most lavish, flamboyant, luxurious of them all. What is installed to be a horror genre at first, from the creepy, disturbing manifestations of Max Schreck of Nosferatu, Christopher Lee and Gary Oldman, these supposedly forbidding graveyard creatures gradually become glamorised throughout the years, becoming increasingly buff and swoon-inducing to the female sexual sector. Look at Neil Jordan’s adaptation of the Gothic Anne Rice novel, Interview with a Vampire. Vampires look like Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise looking impossibly muscular and drop-dead handsome. Combine all of that, we now have sophisticate Robert Pattinson, the epitome of vampire bourgeois. 

95% of the modern-day vampire movie audience are reportedly female. The remaining 5% is presumably husbands and boyfriends being dragged into cinemas to be put through an ordeal of girlish shrieking. Hell is no match over the fevered female fantasia. Books by source author Stephanie Meyer are even lapped up by the same exact female demographic. What is troubling is that the central heroine of the franchise is an ambitionless, passionless, passive individual whose main driving force of her existence is knight-in-shining-armour, or teeth rather, Edward’s sculpted cheeks, square jaw and smouldering gaze. Take Edward away, and Bella reduces to a non-existent, inanimate object unable to pursue a passion, an ambition, life's goals. Of course, millions of girls watching this are too captivated to realise the misogyny beneath Edward’s charms, as the hypnotised Bella is devoid of any decision-making, life-management skill, letting Edward and wolf-boy Jacob debate about her future. If anything, this sends a sharp wooden stake into the very idea of feminism, to which pundits from The Guardian call ‘the epitome of submissive passivity’. Strip these men away from her and she’s left with nothing. Just a pale, passer-by forlornly dreaming of a vampire hero to whisk her away of her demure existence. 

Whilst this mainstream tag-along is less than complex, the left side of the arena offers us more complicated, damaged and less romanticised night creatures. In Thomas Alfredson’s Swedish arthouse masterclass Let The Right One In, the entire vampire mythology is flipped around its head. Eli, a 200 year-old vampire frozen in the body of an eleven-year-old girl, is devoid of any sexuality, ambiguous, melancholic and only driven by the will to survive. Her neighbour, bully-victim Oscar strikes a friendship with her and both find solace in a harsh world. social drama about adolescence draped in a diabolical vampire film. Vampirism is just an excuse to explore uncertainty and frailty of human existence. In South Korean indie Thirst, directed by Oldboy Cannes-winning director Chan-wook Park, a rural priest turns into a vampire via disease infection and is compelled to question his moral, religious and sexual nature. Sexuality here is depicted in an unfettered manner, as the protagonist falls into a destructive, deviant relationship with a young seamstress. The approach is so unhinged that Thirst’s bloodlusty sex scenes will make average Twilight fans blush their way out of a cineplex. Yet this is what separates mainstream from an independent movie approach, where younger audiences are catered for in the former and the artistically liberal in the latter. Try and swap these two demographic and we’d expect a gigantic groaning in theatre houses.


Klaus Kinski mutilating a virgin back in those days when vampire are still frightening, in Werner Herzog's 1979 version.

But no matter how magnificent these arthouse vampire movies are, they still remain unseen by a great many. With a good exception of Let The Right One In, this generation has failed to produce an outstanding vampire movie that frightens, stuns and moves simultaneously, seen by both mainstream and the left-field. Perhaps it's about time to resurrect the old ones, then. In spite of these severe differences, there is a common vein that runs through both mainstream and arthouse vampire flicks – it’s the curious shift from villainy to central protagonists. We all know Dracula and his German counterpart Nosferatu were enemies, loitering in dark corners, preying on oblivious victims, but the new wave of vampires have seem to gain some forms of heroism, saving damsels-in-distress and courting them like any other conservative gentleman. They are now conflicted, tragic anti-heroes, flawed, vulnerable and sexually repressed, depending on MPAA rating, that is. In the more adult terrain, they are hedonists of unaffected deviancy.

The evolution of the modern vampire film is striking, indeed, but that largely depends on the nature of its audiences who feed on this undying genre. Perhaps vampirism is part of human nature, elements of desire, forbidden lust and wantonness suppressed within mankind’s, or womankind’s, Freudian slips. And there is no escaping, no matter how many nails you hammer on that coffin lid, this immortal blood will continue to live on, mutate and thrive on the next generations to come. But please, this is a call to filmmakers, make vampires less handsome and more terrifying to make for a really satisfyingly creepy and frightening Hallowe'en movie night. One that could make you lock your doors.