Recent Vampire Movies I Just Saw for the First Time

"How many vampires do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their life to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: carriages made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, men attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the vampire himself; everything except the vampire is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, this immortality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value. One evening a vampire rises and realizes what he has feared perhaps for decades, that he simply wants no more of life at any cost. That whatever style or fashion or shape of existence made immortality attractive to him has been swept off the face of the earth. And nothing remains to offer freedom from despair except the act of killing. And that vampire goes out to die. No one will find his remains. No one will know where he has gone. And often no one around him - should he seek the company of other vampires - no one will know that he is in despair. He will have ceased long ago to speak of himself or of anything. He will vanish." (Anne Rice, Interview with the Vampire, 1976)

Daybreakers (four stars total)
Contribution to vampire movie mythology - a world where vampires are the majority and humans are an endangered species

Basically, what we've got here is the reverse of Richard Matheson's sci-fi/horror book, I Am Legend (1954). The whole point of that title (and what was missing from the 2007 movie adaptation) is that humans come to realize they're a greater threat to vampires than vampires are to them. Instead of a sunlight-immune female vampire sent to spy on the only living human, we get a sensitive male vampire who's invited to the human's secret hideout. Willem Dafoe is a former vampire/born again human that has stumbled upon the cure for vampirism (exposure to sunlight minus oxygen for bursting into flames), but he's comic relief, not the Vincent Price or Will Smith lead character. That part goes to Ethan Hawke, a resentful vampire who's ironically still working on a synthetic replacement for human blood. I agree with most of the reviewers on IMDb that the conceptual world of Daybreakers is its most interesting aspect. Unlike I Am Legend, it's not a post-apocalyptic world and the streets are not empty during the day (tinted car windows, wide brim hats and sunglasses go from pimp to purposeful). When I first watched Ethan Hawke's other movie, Gattaca (1997), I hated to see it end because I wanted to hang out a bit longer in its near-future world with zoot suits and self-driving cars. Same goes for Daybreakers (I hated to see its ending because of the cheesy slo-mo and pounding score as well). All you get to see is that coffee shops would serve blood au lait and the homeless population would die real quick without safe shelter, but I could spend all day thinking of ways in which a world full of vampires would be different. Take accidental death and disease out of the question and the healthcare and insurance industries would be gone. Fitness gyms, food and agriculture too, except livestock might still be used for blood, but most country fields would be left overgrown. How would people entertain themselves without drugs or alchohol? What would there even be to escape from if they didn't have to plan for retirement and they couldn't procreate? I know - they would worry about the possibility of starvation without death, which is actually what the movie is about.

Let Me In (three and a half stars total)
Contribution to vampire movie mythology - what happens when vampires try to ingest food and go where they're not invited

Like it or not, one of the great and terrible rites of passage in mortality is puberty. What would it do to a person, psychologically speaking, to live forever without ever experiencing those pesky hormones, eternally damned in what is commonly referred to as "the awkward stage?" That, ladies and gentlemen, is horror. The concept of an old vampire trapped in the body of a young girl is not new. It went mainstream with the book, Interview with the Vampire (1976) and even before Dracula was published (1897, exactly 25 years before), it was featured in Carmilla (1872). Nothing is really new in Let Me In, but what can you expect from a remake? Yet that's precisely why I wanted to see it. I had to know if it would have more music (it telegraphs everything, but the '80s soundtrack includes Freur's "Doot Doot"), if it would have better special effects (except for the car wreck, it has worse, actually), stronger actors (I'll come back to this) or more exposition (the storyline just jumps back and forth this time around). I could be a whiner and complain that they left out my favorite scene (the cat attack) from the original Swedish movie. What I'd rather point out though, isn't the remake itself, but the perspective I brought to it. Having heard that it's a faithful adaptation, I was free to ignore minor plot points and focus on the characters. "The father" figure, played by Richard Jenkins, exhibited more the humanity of getting old and tired, coming to terms with it and embracing death. Was he the vampire's first familiar, or did he see that he was part of a centuries-old cycle? Chloë Moretz acts more like an old lady than her vampire predecessor, Lina Leandersson. Her fictional maturity may go a little unnoticed at first, next to Kodi Smit-McPhee, seeing as how girls tend to mature faster than boys. Back to my question up top, what would happen if two prepubescent kids met at the same age, but only one grew up? How would that play into the relationship? That's something I didn't think about before. Nor did I catch a possible moral to the story - don't put cardboard up in your windows lest you look suspicious to police investigators.

Welcome October Horror Movies, Part III

Above are the results of an online poll, printed in the September 10, 2010 issue of Entertainment Weekly. In terms of scare factor, I agree with the order, although I'd eliminate The Strangers from the list entirely and maybe replace it with the remake of The Last House on the Left (2008). If you're thinking about watching any horror movies during the Halloween season and you haven't seen the ones on this list, it's as good a place as any to get ideas. None of them are personal favorites of mine but then the scariest movie I've ever seen isn't either. Curious? Before I say what it is, let me clarify that it isn't necessarily a recommendation. Do you believe in fates worse than death? Do you mind subtitles? I ask these questions because the scariest movie I've ever seen, Audition (1999), has both, plus it leaves a lot of things unresolved, and most people I know demand nicely wrapped, Hollywood packages. I'm not one of those people.

Before you judge me for watching a bunch of horror movies, check this out: The other day I was standing in line at a Wendy's and there was a group of women laughing behind me. They obviously did manual labor because of their blue shirts and dirty faces. One of them said matter-of-factly, "I had to call the police on my husband AGAIN" and then she chuckled. The other women made some unbelievable cracks about getting beat up and they all took turns giggling. When I finally got my food, I overheard one of them say "a nice, sharp screwdriver to the neck would do the trick" and another followed that with "but you'd have to smash your face against a brick wall to make it look like self-defense." Some people wonder where the ideas for horror movies come from, but they're all over the front page of the newspaper. And the second page. And every page after that. Morning, noon and night. It's as hard to avoid horror as it is to go through life without ever standing in a line. The real question people should ask is, "why does anyone keep up with the news?"

I can already hear people excusing the news as informative while condemning horror movies because they "glorify" violence. My claim is that both sometimes do both. The worst news is useless sensationalism that unintentionally glorifies violence by awarding it fifteen minutes of fame. The best horror movies are informative, cautionary tales, neither exploitative nor politically funded. The easy mistake to make is to define all movies exclusively as entertainment. People say, "I don't want to spend $20 at the theater to be grossed out and left feeling depressed!" Personally, I can't think of a better place to watch horror movies than on the big screen, in the dark, deafened by screaming but free from the distractions at home. However, I am as much "entertained" by all that as others are by watching the news. I used to work with a guy who said his perfect day would consist of sitting at home watching CNN. All. Day. Long. To me, that just sounded like school, which may give insight on how to think about horror movies.

Let's check the metaphor. College costs a lot of money. It causes stress and affects your sleeping habits. Hopefully, it's remembered with fondness and leaves you with a few valuable life lessons. That sounds like a horror movie to me. Consider the following reasons why people watch horror movies, then compare and contrast them with the standard college experience (I find it helps to break things down into the motivation and organization theory, or "four dimensions" of human nature, from The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey):
1. Emotional - escape from mundane life and/or a euphoric sense of relief at the end
2. Mental - perspective on personal problems and/or a test of courage
3. Physical - adrenaline rush and/or an excuse to get high
4. Spiritual - a taste of forbidden fruit and/or vicarious rebellion against social norms
You could argue that people go to action thrillers or gross-out comedies for all the same reasons, but none to the same degree.

People go to horror movies to be affected on a deeper level. If that makes me sound emo, goth, or holier than thou, I don't mean it that way. And it has nothing to do with being desensitized or numb either. People who can watch the news without feeling powerless or at least partly responsible are the desensitized ones. Most action thrillers and gross-out comedies are full of flattery. This is almost the opposite of horror movies and that's why they're a surer bet if you're looking to be deeply affected at the box office. On the other hand, genuine scares are harder to come by than laughs or sighs, hence all the bad horror movies out there. It helps if you know what scares you the most, aside from death, pain or paralysis (again, the "four dimensions" work well):
1. Emotional (threats against home)
abduction/false imprisonment/identity theft
alien invasion/government conspiracy/terrorism
bullying/pedophilia/rape
2. Mental (threats against reason)
addiction/hallucination/split personalities
brainwashing/hypnosis/sleepwalking
imaginary friends/implanted memories/metafiction
3. Physical (threats against body)
birth defects/deformity/nuclear fallout
disease outbreak/mutilation/surgery
metamorphosis/nature gone wild/primitive creatures
4. Spiritual (threats against faith)
demonic possession/evil children/reincarnation
devil worship/paganism/ritual sacrifice
fortune-telling/voodoo/witchcraft

Looking back at my October 1 posts from 2008 and 2009, I realized that I've yet to specifically detail why I love Halloween and watch horror movies. I've compared Halloween to my other favorite holiday, Christmas Eve, and I've ranked my own top ten horror movies, so I guess I've already offered some indirect reasons. To put it in a nutshell, I could just say I like the way they make me feel. That leaves out a lot of descriptive words though. As for Halloween, I'll go with clichés like the crisp autumn air and the magic of playing pretend. I'd be lying if I didn't admit to nostalgia, but as a child, the reason it was so cool was the danger element behind going out after dark. Nowadays I have to supplement my holiday with horror movies to get back to that fear from yesteryear. You see, it's fun to be scared. It's obvious and simple, and it may seem like it's missing from the list of reasons above, but it's inherent in all of them.

Here is an alphabetical list of all the movies I watched for the first time during my last "31 Days of Halloween" and the ratings I gave them (titles in bold are those I had yet to see from my "100 Years of Horror" post 10/30/08):
1920 The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (3 stars)
1942 Cat People (2 stars)
1994 Cemetery Man (2.5 stars)
1971 A Clockwork Orange (3.5 stars)
1954 Creature from the Black Lagoon (3.5 stars)
1993 Cronos (2.5 stars)
1944 The Curse of the Cat People (2.5 stars)
1992 Dead Alive (1.5 stars)
2009 Drag Me to Hell (2 stars)
1990 The Exorcist III (2 stars)
1956 Godzilla, King of the Monsters! (2.5 stars)
1981 Halloween II (2.5 stars)
2009 Halloween II (2 stars)
1987 Hellraiser (3 stars)
1977 The Hills Have Eyes (2.5 stars)
2006 The Hills Have Eyes (3 stars)
1985 The Hills Have Eyes Part 2 (1 star)
2007 The Hills Have Eyes 2 (2 stars)
1957 The Incredible Shrinking Man (2.5 stars)
2009 Jennifer's Body (2 stars)
1972 The Last House on the Left (1.5 stars)
2008 The Last House on the Left (3.5 stars)
2009 Paranormal Activity (4 stars)
1925 The Phantom of the Opera (3.5 stars)
2007 Planet Terror (2.5 stars)
1988 The Return of the Living Dead Part II (2 stars)
1968 Rosemary's Baby (4 stars)
2009 Saw VI (2 stars)
2007 Trick'R Treat (2.5 stars)
2009 Where the Wild Things Are (3 stars)
1932 White Zombie (1.5 stars)
1979 Zombi 2 (1 star)
2009 Zombieland (4 stars)

It's a Girl!

For the reason pictured here I will be ending this blog sometime before February. Enjoy it while it lasts!

September Books

These are some titles from last month's New York Times Book Review section and this week's Entertainment Weekly that I might like to read at some point:

Fiction

The Dervish House - Ian McDonald; "Having written novels set in a future Brazil and a future India, McDonald now tackles Istanbul circa 2027 in this ambitious, harrowing, sometimes frustrating science fiction thriller."

Elephant and Piggie series - Mo Willems; "Better than Beckett . . . Elephant and Piggie are the Vladimir and Estragon of Children's Literature."

How to Live Safely in a Science Fiction Universe - Charles Yu "must tread carefully: too much of the world-building, the whimsical invention, the armchair mathematics, the flights of philosophy, these lateral motions of the novel, threaten to destabilize it and leave it incapable of imparting a satisfying narrational truth. Too little of these intricate electron clouds surrounding the nucleus of the book and we wander into the boring hold of sentimentality and banality."

The Maze Runner - James Dashner; "A stone wall imprisons teenagers who live by their wits and remember nothing of their earlier lives."

Zero History - William Gibson; "Several characters from Spook Country return to a viral marketing and coolhunting agency; from the author of Pattern Recognition and Neuromancer."

Nonfiction

It's a Book - Lane Smith; Children's picture book that "doesn't tweet or need recharging."

Justice: What's the Right Thing to Do? - Michael J. Sandel; "A Harvard professor seeks to bring implicit arguments about justice into the open."

Squirrel Seeks Chipmunk - David Sedaris; "Some Sedaris fans felt he had begun to exhaust his store of Homo sapiens-based anecdotes in 2008's When You Are Engulfed in Flames, and Squirrel does seem to free him creatively, while still indulging his singularly skewed worldview."

Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages - Guy Deutscher "who stresses the role of culture in language, treads some amusingly idiosyncratic linguistic bypaths."

A Week at the Airport - Alain de Botton; "One of our most influential essayists and thinkers indulges his somewhat freakish love of airports by spending a week at London's Heathrow."

My 31 Days of Halloween Start a Week from Today

By "31 Days of Halloween," I mean my 2nd annual 31-day horror movie review marathon, so come back here next Friday and everyday through October, if that sounds interesting to you. I don't claim that Halloween is all about horror movies, or vice versa for that matter. Halloween just makes for a good excuse to watch horror movies. The fact that there's a community of bloggers who celebrate by posting something related to Halloween for 31 days just makes for a good excuse to watch A LOT of horror movies. Halloween is all about fear. Horror movies are all about fear. That's the connection - nothing more and nothing less. Now for a rant.

Halloween has nothing to do with sex. Halloween is all about children and the dead, and if either of those make you think of sex, then you should seek professional help. Everybody seems to agree that pedophilia and necrophilia are wrong, but nobody seems to mind when young people celebrate Halloween by dressing like sex objects. If you want to talk about horror, that's real horror. It's scary but not enough to scare away the dead, which you may or may not remember is the original purpose of dressing up on Halloween. Straight or gay, it doesn't matter. Halloween has NOTHING to do with sex. So don't even think about calling it "the drag queen's holiday."

While I'm on the subject, horror movies also have nothing to do with sex. At least, they shouldn't. I hate it that the line between exploitation and horror has become so blurred over the last quarter century. The terms have become almost synonymous in most people's minds. Fans that grew up on '80s teen slashers actually complain anytime a new horror movie doesn't include boobs or gore. There's an unwritten rule that says a horror movie has to be rated "R" to be any good. These people would say mood and atmosphere belong solely to thrillers. For me personally, you can take the boobs and gore out of horror but not the mood and atmosphere, else it's not horror anymore.

Back to dressing up though. Halloween costumes should be about facing fears and this is a good thing. It may not be about love like Valentine's Day, or freedom like Independence Day, but Halloween has its morals. When children say "trick or treat," they should be learning to face the fear of receiving a "trick" rather than a "treat." It's a harsh lesson, but then it's a cruel world out there, and they need to be prepared. I can't think of a more noble cause for this pagan holiday. Literally and figuratively, Halloween has always been and will always be about facing death. Don't be superstitious about taunting death by dressing up as something that could kill you. Overcome fear of death by doing so.

If, after all that, you still want your Halloween to be sexy, may I recommend the Avatar Neytiri unitard. It's not recommended for preadolescents to go trick-or-treating in high heels, but for the adult female in your life, it may work at scaring off the dead. In addition to dressing up as something you fear, I recommend dressing up as something you hate. They say that we dislike the things we don't understand, and that sounds like fear of the unknown to me. My wife hated the movie, Avatar, so I'm all about this costume. What's the scariest costume to me, you ask? Well, scroll down to the bottom of these lists (a different costume category for each day in October) to find out:

Never Scary (10 costumes that deserve tricks on Halloween)
1. Anime/comic book characters - Archie and Friends, Hellboy, Naruto, Popeye and Speed Racer
2. Celebrity impersonators - Michael Jackson (yes, so soon), Lady Gaga, Marilyn Monroe, Barack Obama and Sarah Palin
3. Cultural stereotypes - Chinese cheongsam, German lederhosen, Hawaiian hula skirt, Native American buckskin and Scottish kilt
4. Fashion styles by decade - '20s flapper, '30s hobo, '50s greaser, '60s hippie and '80s rocker
5. Food items - banana, candy corn, condiments, cupcake and ice cream cone
6. High school cliques - cheerleaders, goths and marching band uniforms (although why would you do that to yourself?)
7. Politically incorrect - the KKK, Osama bin Laden in a "I (heart) NY" t-shirt and Ronald McDonald with a Hitler moustache
8. Recent movies/TV shows - Harry Potter, Jersey Shore, and coming to theaters next year, Smurfs
9. Sports uniforms - boxing gloves, fishing vest, football pads, lucha libre mask and a sumo suit
10. Toys/video games - Raggedy Ann/Andy, Super Mario Bros. and a Twister mat

Sometimes Scary (20 costumes that may earn treats on Halloween)
11. Aliens - the picture shown here was taken at this year's San Diego Comic-Con (it could be considered both scary and funny and you can't beat that)
12. Animals - scary if a bat, gorilla or spider; silly if a bunny, cat or an ostrich
13. Career paths - construction workers, police officers, soldiers, then again, you could just include all the Village People (definitely scary), but flight attendants and UPS delivery are still personal favorites (albeit not so scary)
14. Carney folk - bearded ladies, clowns or people covered in tattoos (all scary)
15. Couples' themes - Adam and Eve, bacon and eggs, plug and socket (okay, so maybe my examples for this category aren't scary, but the rest on this list are)
16. Dead things - La Llorona, skeletons and zombies
17. Escaped convicts and mad scientists - easily confused with the "career paths" category except for that wild look in their eyes, and maybe some blood on their hands
18. Fairy tales/folklore - Alice in Wonderland, Grimm's, mermaids, unicorns and The Wizard of Oz
19. Grim reapers - Azra'il, banshees, and Edgar Allan Poe's The Masque of the Red Death
20. Historical periods - cowboys, dinosaurs, knights, pirates and vikings
21. Makeshift/non-costumes - bedsheet ghosts, toilet paper mummies and trash bag California Raisins
22. Monsters/mythological creatures - dragons, golem, Medusa, vampires and werewolves
23. Ninjas - air, earth, fire and water (I'm kidding, I don't really know anything about ninjas but I'd be scared to meet one in a dark alley)
24. Other holidays - leprechauns, the Easter bunny, Santa Claus, the Statue of Libery and the Tooth Fairy(?)
25. Plants - a weeping willow tree swung onto the sidewalk at Universal Studios' Halloween Horror Nights one year and it was the scariest thing I saw there
26. Post-apocalyptic - gas masks, hazmat suits and two-headed mutants
27. Religious - angels and devils, friars and monks, nuns and priests, Satan himself
28. Robots - The Jetsons (1962), Star Wars (1977), Small Wonder (1985), Terminator 2: Judgement Day (1991) and Transformers (2007)
29. Scarecrows - when I was a kid, I thought one of the scariest TV shows ever was a Disney miniseries called Dr. Syn: The Scarecrow of Romney Marsh (1963)
30. Slasher staples - Chucky doll, Freddy Kruegger, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface and Michael Myers

Always scary (my pick for scariest Halloween costume/accessory)
31. Translucent masks - young female with lipstick and eye shadow or old male with a moustache and wrinkles; basically, it's you, but not quite you; wear it with any other costume and double the scare factor or wear it alone and try to go into a bank or convenience store; it's just as cheap and effective as putting pantyhose over your head; in other words, it hides your identity without hiding your face and people know right away that you're up to no good; these masks first stood out to me on Tricky's Knowle West Boy CD cover; they've been sold for decades during Mardi Gras and they used one with a yellow raincoat on Alice Sweet Alice (1976; Brooke Shields' first movie)