Waiting for Twilight

With the impending release of "Twilight," and "True Blood" getting renewed for a second season, it seems like it's the right time to launch a blog on which I can share my passion for all things vampire on film and TV. I was never terribly into vampire fiction (aside from the original Dracula and a few others, like Whitney Strieiber's The Hunger) but I thought I'd read Twilight just to see what all the hubbub was about. I'm pretty long past Young Adulthood, and so assumed that I wasn't really the target audience for the book; I thought I'd read it as research for the book I'm working on about vampire films. I was immediately sucked in. I couldn't stop thinking about the characters, I couldn't wait until I could get back to it whenever I put it down. I read it on the treadmill, I read it while eating dinner, I read it before falling asleep. I didn't want it to end. I remembered what it felt like to be seventeen and unpopular, to be attracted to someone and so terrified of that attraction at the same time. And, oh yeah, it was about vampires. Stephanie Meyer has managed to create an entirely new vampire mythology while maintaining those all too familiar characteristics of the vampires who came before hers.

So, needless to say, I'm eagerly awaiting the movie's release. Will it live up to the book's promise? From everything that I've been reading, it seems that it will.

I'm also bemoaning the fact that I live two hours away from a theater where I can see "Let the Right One In," the Swedish vampire movie that's been getting excellent reviews. Newsweek's David Ansen called it "mesmerizing," and dozens of other reviewers have followed suit. Check out this one, from CineMoose. While nothing at all like "Twilight," the two films share a few things in common. They're both about young love, first love, between social outcasts and the undead (which is, I guess, more common than one would think. This makes me very happy that I am not the parent of a teenager.)

From a filmmaking perspective, both "Twilight" and "Let the Right One In" share another commonality, in that the writers of the books that inspired both films contributed to their transition from page to screen. John Ajvide Lindqvist, whose bestseller inspired the film, wrote its screenplay. Melisssa Rosenberg is the screenwriter responsible for keeping the displeasure of the hundreds of thousands of fans of Twilight at bay by not betraying the essence of the world that Meyer has created. In a recent interview in Fangoria, she says the book "was my bible. If I didn't lift it directly from Stephanie's writing, it was inspired by it."

Well, I certainly didn't intend to take off in that direction when I started this post, but that's what you can expect from this site. Vampire movies, regardless of how different they might be, do seem to be linked by common threads, from the best to the worst (and sometimes the worse ARE the best, but more on that later.)