Nelsan Ellis on True Blood’s Season of the Witches, Lafayette’s Mohawk, and Dodging the Marines

 Completely captivated with the new season of True Blood?  I am, and we're only a couple of episodes into the season.  New York Magazine's Vulture blog has featured interviews with some cast members, including this one today with Nelsan Ellis, AKA Lafayette. 

Photo: John P. Johnson/HBO

Nelsan Ellis on True Blood's Season of the Witches, Lafayette's Mohawk, and Dodging the Marines

The Undead Undead

Back in the day, when vampires in movies were presumed to be the very definition of evil, audiences could pretty much rest assured that before the credits rolled, that the undead fiend would be vanquished by the forces of good.  If you track the popularity of vampire movies back to Universal's 1931 release of Dracula, the formula - as diversely altered as it's become in the decades since - has dictated a final, climactic scene in which the film's hero or heroes destroys its villain, no matter how handsome, suave, urbane or charming he might have been.

Lately, however,  our fascination with the vampire has progressed to the point where they've become so attractive, so sexy, so sympathetic, that screenwriters just can't seem to kill them off.  Even if audiences for New Moon arrived at the theater completely unfamiliar with Stephanie Meyer's books, was there really a moment where they believed that Edward was going to walk out in the sunlight, out the existence of vampires to the crowd and thereby insure his destruction by the Volturi?  And what about the doe eyed child vampires of Let the Right One In and Let Me In?  How could someone, or something, who was the only friend of a bullied kid, no less a kid herself, end up with a stake through her heart, reduced to dust or ash? 

At least director Neal Jordan allowed the uber-creepy Claudia to be destroyed in Interview with the Vampire, even if her death was at the hands of other vampires.  That little blonde vamp was so soulless, so evil, that her destruction seemed ensured.  Not so with the mopish Louis or the amoral Lestat.  Of course, Anne Rice wrote the screenplay for Interview with the Vampire based on her novel, and since that debut launched a series of very successful sequels, she could hardly have killed off the vampires that were the heroes of her  unique universe.

Before the  financial appeal of the sequel prevented celluloid vampires from meeting their just ends, filmmakers were pretty creative when it came to killing them off.  Here, then ,are some of the most creative undead deaths:

• In Underworld, the lycans shoot vampires with bullets filled with daylight
• In Jess Franco's erotic Vampyros Lesbos, the preferred method of killing vampires is to either cleave their heads with an axe or to pound a stake into their brains.
• In the Hammer classic, Dracula Has Risen From the Grave,  Dracula falls from a cliff and is impaled on a cross
• In Frost - Portrait of a Vampire, vampires are shot with wooden bullets
• In Interview with The Vampire, Claudia - before she herself is killed by sunlight - believes she has killed Lestat when she lures him to drink blood from a corpse
• In Ganja and Hess, the two titular vampires destroy themselves with the shadow cast by a cross
• In Bram Stoker's Way of the Vampire, head vamp Sebastian is done in by drinking the blood of a woman who drank holy water
• In Daughters of Darkness, Countess Elizabeth Bathory is impaled on a tree branch (which is far more dramatic than being walled up in her castle.)
• In John Badham's 1979 version of Dracula, the count, as played by Frank Langella, is impaled on a ship's hook and hoisted into the sunlight, his body aging, then decaying, with each rotation of the hook.

Check out this little bit of dialogue, from Quentin Tarantino's From Dusk Til Dawn for a comprehensive primer on killing vamps:

SETH
...Now since we all believe we're dealing with vampires, what do we know about vampires?  Crosses hurt vampires.  Do you have a cross?

JACOB
In the Winnebago

SETH
In other wrds, no

SCOTT
What are you talking about? We got crosses all over the place.  All you gotta do is put two sticks together and you got a cross

SEX MACHINE
He's right.  Peter Cushing does that all the time.

SETH
I don't know about that. In order for it to have any power, I think it's gotta be an official crucifix.

JACOB
What's an official cross?  Some piece of tin made in Taiwan? What makes that official? If a cross works against vampires, it's not the cross itself, it's what the cross represents.  The cross is a symbol of holiness.

SETH
Okay, I'll buy that.  So we got crosses covered.  What else?

FROST
Wooden stakes in the heart been workin' pretty good so far.

SEX MACHINE
Garlic, holy water, sunlight...I forget, does silver do anything to a vampire?

SCOTT
That's werewolves.

SEX MACHINE
I know silver bullets are werewolves. But I'm pretty sure silver has some sort of effect on vampires.

KATE
Does anybody have any silver?

No.

Then who cares?

Numbers Don't Lie

I am finding myself as obsessed with Twilight as are its millions of teenage female fans. Psychologically, that's a tad worrisome, but I find myself unable to move on to writing about other vampire movie related issues.

Twilight's increasingly impressive box office figures and the wildly mixed reviews it's received have got me to thinking about whether the box office success of vampire films - and possibly horror films in general - rely more or less on what critics have to say than do other sorts of movies.

First, let's look at some numbers. Twilight's opening weekend gross was nearly $70 million dollars, according to www.boxofficemojo.com, making it the most successful opening weekend for any vampire movie since 1978. That figure is close to the lifetime grosses for such vampire movies as Bram Stoker's Dracula ($82,522,790) and Blade II ($82,348,319.) As of this weekend's box office figures, three weeks after its opening, Twilight has grossed $138,402,068, which makes it the most successful vampire movie EVER.

I feel I need to make a disclaimer before I go on. I spend my days working with journalists and bloggers, encouraging them to cough up good reviews of music from artists that I represent. I have nothing but the greatest respect for each and every one of those writers, who often work for little or no pay, and who have to fend the dozens of emails from PR people who clamor for their attention. Still, I've noticed that there are often disconcerting discrepancies between CDs that garner critical acclaim and the sales figures for those CDs. I don't understand that inverse correlation. But I know that without those reviews sales would be even lower, and I see the value in the exchange. It doesn't seem to work that way with movies in general, and with vampire films specifically.

Sure, the New Yorker's review of Twilight said, "the picture delivers." But Entertainment Weekly, surely a more popular read among Twilight's core audience, called it "repetitive and a tad sodden, too prosaic to really soar." Roger Ebert gave it two and a half out of four stars, and both Variety's and the the Associated Press' reviewers grudgingly coughed up two out a possible five stars.

Compare those reviews to the ones for Let the Right One In, which grossed $49,295 its opening weekend, and has earned a mere $1,000,653 since opening a month before Twilight. Ebert gave the Swedish vampire flick three and a half stars, and www.Cinemoose.com called it "not only the best vampire movie of the year....but also one of the year's best movies."

Of course, the press leading up to the release of Twilight (fashion spreads in Vogue and Vanity Fair, covers of Entertainment Weekly, interviews on the Today Show and the Tonight Show, etc.) coupled with the already rabid fan base for Stephanie Meyer's novels more or less guaranteed the box office success of the movie. I think further exploration of the box office numbers for such past vampire movies as the Blade trilogy, Interview with the Vampire, Bram Stoker's Dracula and Van Helsing in comparison with the critical reaction to those films might provide a more comprehensive take on the topic of this post. Stay tuned.

Giving Thanks for Twilight

As an official start to the Thanksgiving weekend, I finally saw Twilight. It's not like I didn't try to see it the day it opened.How could I not? I live in a city of 40,000 people, in a county of about 150,000 and, since the theater was showing Twilight on two screens, I just didn't think that there were THAT many teenage girls who would be flocking to see the movie on opening day that I needed to do anything like pre-buy my ticket through Fandango. I should have recognized my mistake as I walked toward the theater, overhearing snippets of frantic conversations like "We're going to the 7:30 show!" and "Darla saw it at 5:00!" So I was only a little surprised and majorly disappointed to find out that both screens were sold out until the 11 PM show. Strangely, I underestimated the cultural phenomenon that the Twilight series has become.

By yesterday the crowds had thinned out a bit, but the audience was still primarily female, still mostly under 18.

Of course I liked the movie. There are no vampire movies I don't like, given my fascination - okay, my obsession - with the genre. Fans of the book - and I number among them - certainly wouldn't find fault with how accurately Stephanie Meyer's world has been brought to the screen. I've thought a lot about what I wanted to say about Twilight over the past few hours, and none of it is negative, except that I, as have many of the reviews I've read in the past week, really don't understand why, with all the special effects available to the filmmakers, they choose make up, especially for Peter Facinelli's Carlisle, that looked so obviously like a bad Halloween vampire costume (take it from someone who tried - and failed - to get that same pallor for my own vampire costume this Halloween. I probably looked less obviously made up than Facinelli did. And what was with that blonde hair?)

Niggling critiques aside, Twilight was, well, exactly what it needed to be. It wasn't a great film because vampire movies don't have to be great films. It was rife with undertones ( I'm still trying to find a review that mentions that scene in the chem lab with the wings behind Edward's head implying Bella's perception of his angelic beauty) because throughout their 75+ year history, vampire films have always had some social subtext. It was distinctive, because of the unique mythology that Stephanie Meyer created in her books to enhance existing vampire lore. That being said, it was the number one box office movie of its opening weekend, the fourth top November weekend opener of all time, and is, after just its opening weekend, the fifth largest grossing vampire movie (according to www.boxofficemojo.com) in 30 years.

Reviews of Twilight have been mixed. Nothing unusual there. Reviews of horror film in general, and vampire movies specifically, have always ranged from raves to pans. But box office numbers don't lie when it comes to determining the commercial success of any movie. All of which raises the question, which I'll address in my next post: When it comes to vampire movies, does what the critics say really matter?

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.)