too many vampires

If it hasn't been said yet, "From Dusk 'Till Dawn" is The Greatest vampire movie ever made. No exceptions.

 

Just as lame as any Twilight stuff.

Yeah, From Dusk till Dawn rules, it's so cheesy and ridiculous, but it's everything you ever needed in a survival film: hot chicks, guns and other weapons and a varied and implausible cast of entertaining characters. Good movie.

I always liked the Lost Boys too. They're cool.

 

Lost Boys are my favorite portrayal of vampires. Thrill-seeking monsters! The best version of vampires is debatable, but I live Lost Boys the best. They're much better than the homo-erotic, brooding vampires of today.

 

I understand that, I'm a horror lover myself. However, some films, such as the 'SAW' films, for example, are built around nothing but franchise and gore now. The story was completely lost after oh...say, the first film?!. Now it's just gore for the sake of gore - no story what so ever, and if there is, it's paper-thin
. It seems that their one priority now is to invent more and more horrible ways for empty-shell characters to die. In this day and age, I'd expect better. There are far too many films like this now.

However, films with less gore seem to just revolve around NOISE more than anything....Mirrors, Drag me to hell, last house on the left (all came out this year, I think, or just before christmas for mirrors) - all SUCKED as ordinary films, let alone horror films! They were terrible. But they all had one thing in common - every scream or boom of music was blasted from the speakers to create the shock-effect...even when the scene wasn't that scary. I was so dissappointed with those movies. It seems like as opposed to creating a believable story and avoiding CGI in favour of hard-work on scenery and design, they choose to make films very loud and very gorey in order to slap the 'horror' label on it.

However, 'The haunting in connecticut' genuinely scared the crap out of me in the cinema - I adored it. They used traditional methods, minimal CGI, interesting concepts with scenery and character/ghost design, flashbacks amongst a linear setting...and good old fashion horror. Oh, plus the story was great, very smooth and quite sad too. Sure it had a few 'hmm' bits (As in the typical shower scene for example. Grr. she could've been cut as a character but i guess they needed the pretty young girl just like every other horror does. hrumph. ) but on the whole, it made an excellent film.

^ Best one of the year i'd say.




Oops. Sorry. weren't we talking about vampires? RIGHT!

Dusk til dawn was funny but good.

 

I'm not much of one for horror, but even still, you'd think I've seen more genuinely scary films. There's been a lot that surprise and shock, or disgust, or are creepy, or suspenseful, but only three that have genuinely scared me.

The first tw probably don't count because I was a kid at the time. One was Darby O'Gill and the Little People. That is not the kind of show you should be showing your kindergarten students at school. *shiver*

I'm not sure now what the second one was, but I still remember some of the images to this day. Some browsing through the horror section at the video store leads me to think it may have been Poltergeist.

The third one was the remake of The House on Haunted Hill. I watched it in an open house during the middle of the day and I still turned it off before the end. I slept with the lights on that night.

None of those had a surplus of gore. Things like Alien were suspenseful and kept me on the edge of my seat, but weren't genuinely scary.

By the way, Underworld is practically the anthropomorphic personification of everything I hate about vampires and werewolves in modern media.

 

One man's lame is another man's treasure.

 

Well, it appears to me from reading through (and participating in) this thread that there really is only one pair of conclusions:

1) Some people have had their fill of vampires, in all their guises, from Nosferatu to Dracula to Sparkle Ken Doll.

2) Other people will never get enough of vampires because vampires push some button for them that is eternally pushable.

Is there really anything else to say?

 

This thread isn't over until blood is drawn, god damnit.

 

That just about sums it up for me.

I just got a papercut...that count?

It would be better if it was a keyboard cut or something...but I don't know if I could cut myself on my keyboard.

 

Did someone say paper cut?

I like the Sparkle Ken doll.

 

-giggles- I bet Stephenie Meyer never though her 'mainly hero' would become a plastic doll for all the little girls to play with.

 

Underworld is such a horrible movie though. I hate the vampires and the werewolves, but I hate even more the terrible dialogue, recycled plot devices and incredibly boring action scenes.

 

Nobody's brought up Fright Night!

Has anyone seen it? It's out on DVD. Go rent it! It's hilarious and scary all at once.

 

Stephen Geoffreys from that movie later went on to be a gay porn star.

It's a fact!

 

How would you know that, Wrey?

 

Ummm......... Um........ I plead the 5th.

 

If I were a guy, I would definitely prefer a girl with skin like that to the orange-skinned individuals I see prowling the streets in the summertime. So would most of the guys I know.

On the other hand, each to his own.

 

ughhh. That kills me. I do not use the cancer box.

 

At the risk of ruining the current conversation in favor of the original...

I like vampire mythology. the mythologies world-wide are fascinating and unique, especially compared to the trash being produced on a large scale currently, targeting teens. It makes it really hard to churn out a good vampire novel with all the refuse around, as Cogito earlier pointed out.

 

Same! I mean, sure, some of the stuff they put out today is alright, but it's the old fashioned myths I really love. I did my graduation project on mythical vs. modern portrayal of vampires, and went back all the way to Peter Plogojowitz and even to the common myths on vampires in China. It was amazing! I learned more about the 'original' vampires that way. I think I still have my research paper here somewhere, if someone wants to read it.

 

Do you know what I want to see? A vampire novel about the whole thing being some disease which ravages poor, relatively innocent people. I want to see how they go from being average folks to being so desperate in life that they are willing to kill others and drink their blood in hopes it will purify their own. I'm sure there are vampire novels out there just like that, but I want to see it. I want people to acknowledge something other than the same old crap we've read, heard, and seen a thousand times.

That and NO more British wizards. To hell with them both.

 

I just recently stopped reading Evermore by Alyson Noel. I was at about the halfway point and finally realized I didn't give a damn about the characters or storyline, and I could be working on my math instead. The whole story was so Twilight derivative--only this time the girl MC is blatantly gorgeous, can read minds, and lives in luxury. I think I've finally gotten fed up with it all. But despite how derivative these vamp/romantic fantasy books are, they seem to keep selling big time. I just wish a really good writer would write a great YA vampire romantic fantasy; put a nice literary touch on it, give us a great plot, well-developed characters, Rhett Butler type of hero (enough w/the Byronic hero type), etc.

And for any Twilight haters out there, you must see this hilarious video--a mock remake of Twilight, but imagined with Buffy the Vampire Slayer in place of Bella. Go to youtube and copy/paste this into the search bar: Buffy vs Edward: Twilight Remixed -- [original version]

 

I do agree with you that the vampire craze went into overdrive, and this is from a die-hard Twilight fan. But before you beat me up for my love of all things Cullen, I just never liked the "traditional" vampire stories. The idea of trasforming into bats, and burning in the sun and sleeping in coffins and, in the creepy, Van Helsing-style, laying (laying?) huge sacks of eggs. Yuck. That's just my opinion.

I respect Stephenie Meyer because she put a daring twist on two traditional themes: vampires and forbidden love stories. She knew that people wouldn't like it, and yet she still did it. You have to respect that. Plus, I adore the idea of a more civilized, humanized vampire. They can't sleep, super-speed, super-strength, etc. Even the sparkling skin makes sense, even though that's been made fun of. Vampires are predators, so they would need a variety of weapons to take down their prey. Sparkling skin dazzles prey into standing still, which makes for an easy kill. If you saw someone's skin sparkling like a diamond, you'd freeze too.

That being said, I don't like the helplessness Bella has when it comes to Edward. In a way, what happens to her in New Moon makes sense: the love of her life has gone away, left her alone. This isn't some replaceable boyfriend, this is the real deal. If YOU lost the love of your life, or at least someone you love and are close to, wouldn't you go into a deep mourning period as well? I sure would. But when it comes to her needing him so desperately, I don't agree with that.

End Twilight rant.

But it does make sense. The world saw how successful the vampire genre was after Twilight, so it only makes sense that people would cash in on it hoping to make some moolah.

 

It has been said during this thread that Twilight is not a "real" piece of literary fiction that is worth being examined. Well, okay, so no one said those exact words, but I did get that impression. Having read the series this concerns me. The underlying messages in these books scare me:

- men should be rich and buy expensive things for women
- men may inherently want to hurt/kill women, but if they truely care, they will resist
- women are helpless, and men must take care of them, even if its not what the woman wants
- men should tell women who they can/cannot be friends with, because women do not know better
- no matter how many times someone says "I am not interested", if you continue to wait long enough he/she will change his/her mind
- violent sex is okay, and women must deal with it if they love their partner
- if a man attempts to talk a woman into an abortion, she should just give him time, because eventually he will love the child

Are these really messages that we want our teenage girls (or to be fair, any person, of any age) to be reading, without any discussion on the true nature of relationships, and what is and is not healthy and abusive. After reading them, all I could see is an abusive relationship which is being glorified and idolized by millions of girls/people.

Personally, I cannot stand the Twilight series. Sure, maybe the writing is not so great. And maybe the portrayal of vampires is a bit silly (because, again.... sparkles??). But there are underlying messages which are worse. There are themes to this book that need to be discussed and disected.

 

That sounds ghastly, april! I only read a few pages of the damned thing, and that was enough to put me off from venturing any further into the awful writing style and cheesy clichés that pervade such nonsense work, but if there is any truth to the messages you pointed out, I shiver to imagine the impact those books have on the target market (primarily young girls). You've strengthened my anti-Twilight convictions...