Foreign Vampires

We should consider the history of vampires from different regions of the world as well. Tajian, I know you don't want to watch "Let The Right One In" but i think we really should. There are things about it that we have not run across in the movies we have been watching. It is possible that vampires have a different history in France than in say, England. We might want to look into that on top of everything else.

Vampire Report

First, sorry i have not been posting a ton. My computer has a really hard time posting for some reason so most of what i say just never shows up. It's becoming quite frustrating.

Second, the point of my post: I think we should begin discussing what makes a vampire truly vampiric. We should create a list in class of all of the aspects of a vampire from old to new. I have been noticing that there are two main types of vampires; the zombie-like ones, and the human-like ones. The human ones, like Dracula and Carmilla, blend well into society while the zombie-like ones tend to roam the streets in search of blood without trying to hide their vampiric qualities (i.e. being dead).

We could make catagories of vampires or simply decide what we think makes a vampire a vampire. What are the universal vampire qualities (blood sucking, being dead.. )? What makes a vampire unique from other monsters?

Then we should also look at vampire lore. We have all posted and talked briefly about the history of vampires, but i think we should put down in writing (apart from the blog) what we have been finding. Lets start a basic vampire report in the next week or two.

Vampires vs Zombies (cont.)

while we are on the topic of vampires vs zombies, i think something to look into is i am legend. i was thinking about this movie and it came to my attention that i do not know whether the monsters in this film are zombies or vampires. i dont know if everyone has seen it but i think we should watch it and come to our own decision about what type of creature the monsters in this film are. it might also be worth taking a look at the book (no necessarily reading it but at least reading synopses) to figure out the answer to this question

Vampires vs Zombies

In order to make a horror movie/book good, the "monster" must be generally more powerful than the humans who must fight it. This is easily seen in vampire films (and books), as vampires are clever, superhumanly strong, and also often have other superpowers. However, the villains cannot be to overpowering, so there is generally only one main vampire per story. Carmilla and Dracula each feature only one main vampire. The Batman vs Dracula features Dracula's army of vampires, but they are not standard, smart vampires; they are more like fast zombies. They are not even as fast as 28 Days Later-style zombies, which is why there are so many of them. We also see this in 30 Days of Night, where the vampires are not the type of vampire that can function in normal society, at least for a little while, like Dracula and Carmilla can. 30 Days of Night zombies are like animals, like fast zombies only smarter and able to work in a group. Because of this, they are only allowed to have a group, not a full horde. This type of thing is very similar to the inverse ninja rule, which states: The difficulty in killing a ninja is inversely proportional to the number of ninjas one is trying to kill, such that killing one ninja in impossible, killing two is difficult, but killing a hundred is easy. We can apply this to the horror genre and say that, because the total abilities of the monster(s) must be greater than that of the average human (or group) but less than that of the protagonistic person (or group), the number of monster(s) is inversely proportional to the abilities of a single monster. Thus; slow, unthinking, undead zombies will be much more numerous than fast, clever, handsome/beautiful, shape-shifting, hypnotizing vampires. This is my hypothesis, let's see if it holds true as we move through the semester.

Dark Days

so i finished reading the second book in the 30 days of night series. here are some things that i noted about vampires in this book:
-some vampires could control other people (but only like the elder vampires could do this)
-unlike the first book, vampires in this book could control their thirst for blood and could even blend in with members of society (so long as it was at night)
-vampires never truly die. as long as there is some part of them still left they can be brought back to life with blood

i think thats all the new stuff that i learned about vampires from this book

Scientific Vampiric Interestingness

Probably too long to read the whole thing, but this article is about stem cells in mice. Stem cells are the cells which can turn into anything, which is handy in an injury or just when other cells die. However, stem cells age on their own too. These particular mice were injected with the blood of younger mice, and the stem cells in their blood got "younger." Not entirely vampiric, but it is a case of one being receiving the blood of another and getting younger as a result. Maybe vampires really have it right.

The Vampire Lovers

Today we watched "The Vampire Lovers," which is a film Nik mentioned a few posts ago. It is about Carmilla, who is a vampire in an early vampire story, earlier than Dracula. We obviously know a lot more about Dracula, though, and came to the conclusion that it was because of the legnth of the two stories (Dracula being much, much longer).
We have a growing idea of vampires as very sexual creatures. We have discussed this in the past briefly, but in this movie Carmilla seemed to have to seduce everyone before biting them. For what reason? I have no idea. There was also the idea that she could put people under a trance. The only other movie in which we have seen this is "Dracula vs. Batman." I am not sure if that aspect of her is in the book but I'm sure Nik would know since he just read it.
There was also mention of Carmilla turning into a cat rather than the wolf that Dracula can change into in other films and literature.

'Salem's Lot

Since we are in the business of posting about our respective books, i thought i would add a post on mine. I am only about 1/4 of the way through, but it's very long, i will finish it soon, i promise. So far, the main character, Ben, has told us that when he was younger, he went into this big scary house in 'Salem's Lot and saw the recent owner hanging by his neck (presumably dead). However; this man, Hubie Masterson, was green and his eyes opened. We are not given more information at the moment but there are shady people who have moved into the big creepy house (the Masterson House). I am really loving this book, Stephen King can be very creative when he wants to be, and this is one of his good books. The vampires should show up with more detail soon and i will let you know what style they are. I'm not sure if the movie of this book is any good, but when i am done i may watch it or we could watch it as a group if it has a new way of portraying vampires. I will certainly look into it.

Carmilla

"Blood and Roses" is a film from the sixties and has good reviews for being relatively accurate to the novel. I think we should watch at least one Carmilla film, as it's a shorter, more clearly-written story and therefore is more easily adapted to film. Also, as it's shorter and better-written, we should drop Dracula and read it. It is available on the Gutenberg site.
"The Vampire Lovers" is another Carmilla movie, well respected it appears, and done by Hammer Film Productions, which is the studio which produced huge numbers of horror movies. They did Draculas, Frankensteins, everything, and lots of them. So, maybe we should watch this one.

30 Days Of Night

so i just got done reading the first book in the 30 days of night series and i must say that i really enjoyed it. it was a lot like the film, but just with less in it (seeing as the book is 104 pages and the movie is 113 minutes). but i think they still got the point of it and even kept a lot of the shots..well at least as far as i can remember. i havent seen the movie since it was in theaters, and i probably should watch it again. maybe we can all watch it.

basically the book is about barrow alaska where in the winter they have 30 days of night (thus the title). vampires decide to come to this town because they have an extended period of time when they can live without being bothered by sunlight. so they massacre the town and there are only a few survivors left when this like big head-honcho vampire shows up and is angry that this massacre occurred because as he puts it, vampires have been working for hundreds if not thousands of years to drop from reality into myth and this event in barrow alaska will raise suspicion in the world that maybe vampires do actually exist. so he decides that they should burn the town and thus destroy all of the evidence. and then the story wraps itself up from there, but i wont spoil it for those of you who havent read it...just in case we watch it or you decide to read it.

here are some interesting things that i noticed in 30 days of night:
-vampires could be killed by sunlight.
-could not be killed by stakes.
-were not affected by crosses.
-did not have wings, but could still fly (at least one or two of them could)
-and the only way that they died was when they were decapitated

just some interesting things about vampires in 30 days of night

A Little News Story..

http://www.newscientist.com/blogs/shortsharpscience/2009/02/a-short-history-of-vampirism.html
^This is a story i found while perusing the interwebs. It's short and i think you two should read it just because it's interesting that modern (we're talking about 2005!) people still greatly fear vampires in some areas of the world. Just something to think about.

Batman Vs Dracula [2005]

this on the other hand (from bram stoker's dracula) was unequivocally awesome. i think it was a really cool representation of dracula and it even had batman in it. this is definitely one of the best animated films ive seen lately (then again i can only think of maybe 3 that i have seen in the past year).
i thought it was interesting to look at the cast list for this film because i found that the voice of dracula was peter stormare who has played a number of other villains including satan in constantine. just thought that was kinda cool

Bram Stoker's Dracula [1992]

ok. this was a very strange interpretation of the classic story. i dont think they were justified in putting "bram stoker's" in the title because while there were a lot of references to the book, there seemed to be more that were not. i realize that i have not read the entirety of the novel yet, but as far as im aware, the director added a lot into this film. for example the addition of sexuality into the plot. while i do believe this is an important theme to look at with vampires, as they have become a sort of sexual manifestation of evil, this is not something that really appears to have come out in the book. additionally, the whole relationship between winona ryder's character and dracula was completely made up as was the whole pre-story about him being an ancient warrior. i did not see how any of the things that they added were at all relevant to the plot. nonetheless, i feel that it was a good film for us to have watched as it gave us a completely new look on vampires that we have not yet had a chance to see in this class.

1/26/10

hey sorry i wasnt there today. what did you guys cover?

Netflix.

Anything you want from netflix let me know, i will order it so we will have it soon. or tajian can cause he has my account on his computer too. I put "dracula; dead and loving it" in the queue so it should be here soon. and the Bela lugosi one is watch online and so is 'interview with a vampire' so we can watch either of those whenever we want too.

After school wednesday?

in the post below, nik mentioned a lot of movies that we should watch... including batman vs dracula and the classic 1931 film. so what say we stay after on wednesday and watch at least one of these? let me know if this works for everyone.

Dracula

I know that we have all been over how difficult and painful it can be to read books online, but I have found that a simple trick can ease this process considerably: make your web browser skinnier. This is why a blog is easier to read than something that goes across the page, and why books are the width they are. When something is not too wide, it is much easier to find the beginning of the next line. In this manner, we can all get through Dracula, though the library only has one copy and the audio version would take forever.
Also: Dracula is supposed to have a big, bushy mustache. He just gets better and better.

The Wolfman

sort of a side note seeing as i realize that we have not yet gotten to werewolves but we should definitely go see it when it comes out. it comes out 2/12/10. and it has some cool people in it. like hugo weaving and benico del torro and wait for it... ANTHONY HOPKINS.
so lets go see it when it comes out.

as far as anthony hopkins goes, there is a movie that he is in that i think we should watch next week. its a version of dracula and he plays van helsing. and keanu reeves in it too.

"Real" Vampires

I posted a comment under Nik's last post with a link to an article about a 4000-year old vampire grave that was found. To summarize it; a grave was found with an alleged vampire buried in it- the body was weighted down so that it could not rise from the grave and prey on other humans. I then found another small article about how the belief in vampires is connected to plague- it was believed that instead of the living dead sucking the blood of humans, the vampires would actually chew on the shroud of the dead and that would spread the plague. Not sure exactly what that means but the grave diggers would put stones in the mouths of the vampires (it kept saying they were women so i'm not sure if they thought any men were vampires... might be something to look into) so that they could not spread the plague further.
Here's the link where i got that: http://discoverytimes.blogspot.com/2009/06/vampire-skeleton-discovered-from-grave.html
not sure how credible it is but i thought i'd share it anyway.

Literature

I'm going to be reading "Carmilla" as well as "Twilight" because I want to read something good. "Carmilla" is, apparently, the novella which most heavily influenced "Dracula." Both "Dracula" and "Carmilla" can be found at http://www.gutenberg.org/, being as old as they are and having the copyright expired. It is possible that other books we look for may be here too and, while online books are quite annoying and difficult to read, there are also audiobook versions of many of the books, including these two, so that's something we should consider.

Nosferatu [1922]

I loved this movie. for the 20s it was pretty creepy. it could have been from the stop-motion parts because things that move in strange ways scare me more than anything in horror movies.

The story line was interesting and some of the narration made absolutely NO sense but i think we got the idea.

it was definitely a good place to start for vampires. i think we should go to Dracula next for a movie, we will start reading it out loud on friday so we can talk about it while we read it.

^ this picture captures the best of Nosferatu in my opinion. Thriller! ^.^

monster myths on cracked

so this is a site that nik found on cracked that talks about monster myths

http://www.cracked.com/article/177_6-popular-monsters-myths-that-prove-humanity-doomed/

definitely worth checking out.
...just ignore some of the profanities.

Ok

so for those of you who dont know, basically just nik, this is how we are going to write our progress throughout the next semester. i was thinking that we would each post something at least once a week, probably towards the end of the week. that way we can keep mary ann and richard and even karen up to date on what we have been doing.