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Credit: Screen Gems
With the remake of Fright Night looming on the horizon, we thought we’d get some vampire opinion out there.
And so…
Our friend and celluloid compadre with a predilection toward horror, sci-fi, and basically anything to do with decapitations and impalements, Dimitri A.C. Ly, over at TheDreamersEdge.com had the opportunity to have his inner thoughts on vampires excised by Josie Kafka at BillieDoux.com. We thought his answers were so full of his wit and charm that we couldn’t resist sharing them with our Yell! Magazine readers.
Truthfully, however, if your read between the sarcasm and, well, honesty, you’ll find Dimitri’s answers to be insightful and hilarious.
Enjoy.
1 What do you like most about vampires?
Ironically, the thing I like most about vampires is that I couldn’t care less about them. What all the nastier Twilight detractors out there refuse to understand is that the pasty blood-suckers belong to women and have for decades. Consider Anne Rice’s body of work (before she found Jesus obviously) or TV shows like Moonlight and The Gates; vampires are the new unicorn. They’re to genre fiction what Sex and the City (2008) is to summer blockbusters, except, you know, they don’t suck. Well, they do, but not in that… Oh, never mind.
2 What are your top three vampire movies?
I reserve the right to change my mind on a whim. At number three ranks Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino’s From Dusk Till Dawn (1996), an admittedly odd choice in a list of top vampire movies, given my interest always starts to wane as soon as the blood-suckers show up. What can I say? I like the first half of the movie that much.
Tomas Alfredson’s Let the Right One In, aka, Låt den rätte komma (2008) is number two. Based on the novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist, it tells of a bullied 12-year-old who, instead of learning kung fu from Jackie Chan, falls in love with a vampire. If you haven’t yet seen this disturbing Swedish gem, sprint to the nearest video store right now. I’ll wait.
As any self-respecting horror fan knows, F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922) is the single most important vampire flick ever made. It’s the one that started it all, using German impressionism to bring gothic horror from the page to the screen. In doing so, the movie not only created the basic vocabulary for its genre, but helped pioneer as well the notion of cinema as an emotional experience. For these reasons and many more, my number one pick is Blade (1998).
3 What are your top three vampire books?
Number three: Guy de Maupassant’s The Horla, aka, Le Horla, never explicitly mentions the blood-sucking creatures — in fact, H.P. Lovecraft interpreted the being as an alien bent on world domination — but I’ve always read it as a vampire tale, so there. Reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe’s more haunting short stories, the novella comprises the final entries in a French bourgeois’ diary as his life is slowly sucked out of him by an entity that sneaks into his room every night and consumes his milk and cookies. Come to think of it, maybe the Horla is a killer Santa Claus!
Number two: Not only did Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend redefine contemporary horror by taking gothic tropes and providing sci-fi explanations for them, it’s also a deeply moving tale of a man coming to terms with mortality on a global scale. None of the film adaptations do justice to the book’s philosophical intricacies, so I urge you all to pick it up at your earliest convenience. What you’ll find in this novella is the modernist sensibility at its most poetic.
After the jump you can continue to read Dimitri’s diatribe, then you can decide for yourself why vampires suck…
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