I saw recently that one of the new shows this season is another angst ridden teen vampire show called The Vampire Diaries. Just what we need, another psuedo-horror soap full of emo-music and whiny teenagers complaining about the burden of being a vampire. What ever happened to vampire’s being oh, I don’t know, evil. What happened to cool, deadly monsters like Bela Lugosi and Christopher Lee. Not to say a vampire on film can’t be a little introspective, Jonathan Frid on the old show Dark Shadows is an excellent example. He didn’t like being a vampire but he didn’t whine about it, he bounced back and forth from looking for a cure to locking himself in his tomb to protect his friends, when he occasionally succumbs to his darker impulses and went pure evil.
I think the last decent vampire I saw on film was Gary Oldman’s romantic, tortured and very nasty Dracula from the nineties. The vampires in the Blade movies? Oh please, two words, Donal Logue, scene for scene one of the worst vampires ever. Van Helsing? Meh, Richard Roxburgh started out okay, but as the film went on he got almost as whiny as Angel on Buffy used to get.
And don’t me started on those so called vampires from Blade II or 30 Days of Night. The last thing I want to see in a vampire movie are a bunch of vampires acting like blood sucking zombies. I shudder to think what will happen when producers decide that the teen vampire craze has run it’s course and start doing whiny teen werewolf or even worse teen mummy movies. Oh the horror!
