Biting Criticism: The Curse of Postmodern Vampires
Based on a friend’s recommendation, I recently rented the Russian horror/sci-fi/action blockbuster Night Watch. I’d long been skeptical about the film and the trilogy of which it is a part (the second installment, Day Watch, is currently in limited theatrical release), curious about the majority of somewhat positive reviews for it but finding little of interest in the premise or the previews I’d seen. My response to it was close to what I’d expected; as I told my friend, I wish there were a rating in Netflix’s user review system that signified, “I like this movie but I’m really, really sick of postmodern vampires.”
It’s a sentiment that applies to a lot of the bloodsucker flicks that have hit over the last decade or so, the progeny of a culture that discovered movies like The Lost Boys and Near Dark while playing White Wolf’s role-playing games and then went off to college to subsist on Hong Kong action pics for four years (or five, or six, or seven…) and got a girlfriend who owned autographed copies of all of Laurel K. Hamilton’s books. Suddenly, beginning sometime in the mid-90s, nearly every vampire movie that gurgled its way across the big or small screen featured attractive young actors in tight leather and dark denim, pouting like someone from a Calvin Klein ad in one frame and then brandishing the Terminator’s shotgun and/or motorcycle in the next. There was typically at least one sequence in which someone writhed orgasmically on a bed or bathtub, and another involving one of the vampire characters being shot by a human, only to shrug off the blast with a terrible one-liner. Wesley Snipes owes his summer home to this phenomenon.
The formula was stale before it had finished unspooling through the projector, and yet traces of it still plague the genre to this day, undermining some otherwise unique and engaging movies. Case in point, The Hamiltons, which came out at the top of last year’s After Dark Horrorfest crop (or at least the top of those films not named The Abandoned; I’ve yet to see that one).
The Hamiltons, a story about an trio of odd siblings orphaned and living on their own following the death of their parents, was also recommended to me by a friend and holds up to her promises of smart, compelling, character-driven horror. Its narrative organically integrates a lot of the traditional vampire conventions into a story that’s actually about more than just people being vampires. Its subtlety defies the aggressive nature of most modern vampire movies, forgoing hypercut chase-sequences and fight scenes set to pounding heavy metal in favor of quiet, methodical talks at a kitchen table and the drawn out, palpable anxiety of characters placed in uncomfortable situations. It’s a movie, not just a horror movie, and not even just a genre movie.
Yet despite its originality and nerve, The Hamiltons is slighted, and slighted heavily, by pandering to the lowest common vampire film-viewing denominator in the form of two characters who seem to have walked right off the set of Blade 4. By lingering on these two – a pair of sexually lecherous, morally antagonistic, OMG HOTT! young twins clad in stylishly dingy garb from Hot Topic – for a good portion of the film and fetishizing their actions, the directing team of the Butcher Brothers pull us away from the The Hamiltons’ core (the coming-of-age of its young and confused protagonist) and turn the proceedings into an MTV horror movie.
The twins don’t completely stake the heart of The Hamiltons, but they do perpetuate many of the problems of the modern vampire movie within the last realm of horror cinema once thought safe from their bite: the art-house pic. More importantly, they rob modern horror of yet another otherwise viable candidate for the overall horror pantheon.
In other words, like the seemingly immortal curse of the postmodern vamp, they suck.
But if you can get past them, maybe you’ll catch a glimpse of what the post-postmodern vamp film will one day look like – ambitious, thought-provoking, challenging, and naturally scary.
