Vampires

What is a Vampire?

A vampire is an undead spirit cursed to walk the Earth feasting on the blood of others by night as an eternally young, attractive douchebag. Vampires sleep during the day, often in coffins, and awaken at night to feed and go to parties. They have a pair of sharp upper teeth and sharp lower teeth for biting victims.

Vampire Powers:

Vampires do not age. They have hypnotic powers over their victims. Some have super human strength and speed. Some vampires can fly or jump really high. Dracula, the father of all vampires can shape shift.

Vampire Origins:

The traditional vampire story started in Eastern Europe with Prince Vlad "The Impaler" Dracula. Dracula was a ruthless ruler who impaled his enemies on large wooden stakes and drank their blood and ate their flesh. He created "forests" of these dead bodies. He imprisoned his nobles and made them work slave labor until their clothes fell off. There are accounts of him forcing mothers to eat their babies. He was not well liked by the people.

The people of Eastern Europe noticed when they dug up corpses, that the receding skin around the teeth and the fingernails and scalp gave the appearance that fingernails and hair kept growing. On top of that, built up gases in the corpse's body sometimes caused corpses to shift or even sit up when the coffin lids were opened. They were alive! And on top of that, the receding skin around the teeth made it look like the teeth grew longer - living dead with long teeth?! The village gypsies came to the natural conclusion that these were vampires, spirits cursed by Prince Dracula himself, and they only way to kill them was with garlic and cutting their heads off and a wooden stake to the heart.

"Hey! Why did you dig up that corpse?"
"Shut up. It's a vampire."
"Let's kill it."

Then Bram Stoker came along and wrote a novel about a vampire noble from Transylvania named Count Dracula. The myth of the vampire had now become mainstream.

Are All Vampires Gay?

Yes. Except for the women. They are bisexual.

The Pre-gay Era:

Nosferatu was the Atari 2600 of vampires. Nosferatu is German for immortal. He didn't talk very much and was mildy retarded, but he scared the shit out of people and at the end of the day, got the job done. A few years later, Bela Lugosi took up role of Dracula in the aptly named movie, Dracula. Lugosi's portrayal was a little more dapper than Nosferatu, but still not the nightmare-inspiring badass we learned to love later.

"Are you touching my breast?" "Back off, bitch. I'm a vampire."

Pictured above: Nosferatu (left) and Dracula (right)

Lost Boys:

Lost Boys was kind of like a Michael Bay movie - it had some good action, but with an infusion of humor and bad cast that made it borderline intolerable. It featured Agent Jack Bauer looking like a demon flying around eating people with his gang of vampires. This movie was right on the cusp of being a Full Blown pride festival. Check out Cracked article: The 5 Most Unintentionally Gay Horror Movies. Lost Boys was also the first movie where the vampires were killed with squirt guns and the first vampire movie to have a rubber duckie bubble bath scene. Also, the Frog brothers. For more info, check out the cracked article 8 Things Modern Day Vampires Could Learn from the Lost Boys.

Bram Stoker's Dracula:

Gary Oldman, Anthony Hopkins, Winona Ryder, Keanu Reeves, werewolf sex, blood, beheadings, topless women, gypsies, Monica Belluci, and intentional old-school special effects made this soft-core porn horror love story a true movie masterpiece. The movie was directed by Francis Ford Coppola, who stayed fairly true to the novel, meaining it was actually scary at parts. Coppola chose special effects that would actually give his take on the movie an old-fashioned feel. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, the titular character takes the form of: a werewolf, a bat demon, a young man, an old man, and mist. As an old man, Dracula has this bizarre double-bulbous haircut that reminds us that the director is afterall Nicolas Cage's uncle.

The Rise of the Gay Era:

One night, vampires are banging chicks in the garden. Four days later, they are having a ponytail all-dude makeout party. It happened that fast.

Interview with a Vampire:

In the perfect storm of homo-eroticism, Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, and Antonio Banderas played vampires who dressed like French nobles, played the piano, and had a sort of ambiguously gay attraction to each other.

"Would you like to talk about the French Revolution?" "Shit! Run! It's a vampire!"

The worst part - this was just the first story in a series. The next book in the series is the Vampire Lestat, where Tom Cruise's character wakes up and finds out that a book has been written about him. So, naturally, he joins a rock band. The next movie in the series, The Queen of the Damned, wasted no time breaking the gay vampire taboos and got straight to the meat. Whereas previous vampire movies were often noted to show female nipple, Queen of the Damned had lots of male nipple:

You know you're gay when you look like Leonardo DiCaprio, only gayer.

The Vampire Rehabilitation Era

Blade

Blade is half man, half vampire, all sword. He has all of the strengths of vampires and none of their weaknesses. Much like James Bond, he has an old man who develops gadgets for him to mess up his enemies. Blade loves humans and sees it as his duty to protect them from vampires. He wears sunglasses all the time, even though he hunts vampires at night. Also, he has an old man that makes gadgets for him. Also, he talks in a low growl all the time. So, to sum it up, he's kind of like a David Caruso, James Bond, Christian Bale's Dark Knight. Only...darker. Because he's black. Yeah.

Underworld

Underworld? More like Hot-vampire-chicks-in-latex-and-corsets-fighting-werewolves-with-guns-and-swords-world. Underworld exposes the centuries-old war between vampires and werewolves (lycans). It all started when the vampires enslaved the lycans. Then, the lycans rose, as seen in the third movie in the series, the prequel, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans. Vampires had been hunting them ever since. When the first movie picks up, the vampires had hunted the lycans down to nearly extinction when Kate Beckinsale, a vampire werewolf-hunter, finds out that she has been tricked by her kind and ends up jacking up the vampires and runs away with a vampire-werewolf hybrid. In Underworld: Evolution, there's more fighting and guns and latex and werewolves, but the director decided to improve on the winning recipe by directing his wife, Kate Beckinsale, in a non-nude, vampire sex scene.

30 Days of Night

Based on the popular graphic novel, 30 Days of Night was about a bunch of sociopathic vampires that finally gave Alaska what it had coming. They go up there during the winter when the sun doesn't come out for 30 days and kill most of the people. Then, they try to burn the entire city down with oil.

The sequel to 30 Days of Night has been greenlit for a direct to DVD release. Meanwhile, you can get your 30 Days of Night fill by watching the online series (see links below).

The Twilight Era

We have a separate page on Twilight, so we won't go into too many details here, but basically, in a nut shell, Twilight is about teenage vampires who totally love each other, but totally fight a lot. And OMG, they are so hot. The IMDB fills us in on this bit of trivia from the books:

Other Notable Vampire Movies:

Fright Night

Fright night was a ridiculous horror comedy classic. Charley's new neighbor is a vampire! So, the solution is obvious - go down to the film lot and tell the actor who plays an 80 year-old vampire hunter on TV and tell him to come down an kill your neighbor in a ritualistic fashion. So, the actor agrees, although reluctant at first. And they kill the vampire. But, the guys had some popsicle sticks that they arranged in the form of a cross, so it was pretty much not fair.

From Dusk Till Dawn

You don't want to make Danny Trejo angry, You won't like Danny Trejo when he's angry.

Acting badass, Quentin Tarantino plays the mildly retarded little brother of George Clooney, who together RV-jack Harvey Kitel and fam and make a get away to the Mexico to escape the law. The meeting place picked at random by Clooney's partners happens to be a bar owned and operated and patronized by Mexican vampire truckers. Selma Hayek does a sweet slow dance and then suddenly, everyone turns into vampires, including Cheech. Clooney and company hold off and kill all of the vampires with makeshift weapons and some impromptu holy water, which was unfortunate, because if the vampires would have won, we probably wouldn't have the 9 sequels we have now.

Buffy The Vampire Slayer

See Cracked article on Buffy the Vampire Slayer here. Hot chicks. Vampires. Killing. Love. Evil. Librarians. Read the article.

Let The Right One In

A Swedish movie about pre-teen vampires. This movie answers the question on everyone's mind? "Do Swedish girls have vaginas?" Spolier: No.

Vamp

There are only two words to describe Vamp: Boner killing. Here's the setup: Some rebellious boys go to a strip club. The girls are kind of hot, but the main show has not come on yet. Then, the DJ (Morty Seinfeld's neighbor) announces that hotness is now upon us - the main stripper is coming on stage. Silence. Awe. Enter Grace Jones. Yeah, Grace. Jones. But not just the scary as Hell Grace Jones we used to. We get the clown hair, African Geisha girl, awkward-moving, zebra chair, coil bra, painted-on-Tron costume Grace Jones.

It's immediately obvious that she has never danced. This is clear when she runs out of moves at about 2:45 and switches from the "I am a mildly retarded sex kitten" to "I'm just going to flip around in my striped chair."

Bordello of Blood

Because Lost Boys wasn't enough, the world needed one more vampire movie with Corey Feldman. This movie stars Angie Everheart as Lilith, an ancient evil demon vampire, who upon waking from thousands of years of slumber and immediately opens up a whore house staffed with vampires. Playboy model and Baywatch star Erika Eliniak hires Dennis Miller to track down Corey Feldman. Denis Miller kills most of the vampire prostitutes with a super soaker filled with holy water. Yeah. Go check Netflix right now to see if this movie is available. In a final battle sequence that ranks somewhere between Return of the Jedi and the old lady fight in the end of Willow, Dennis Miller and Angie Everheart battle on the scene of a televangelist set. Dennis Miller shoots Angie Everheart in the breasts with a bisecting Jesus laser set to kill.

Dracula 2000

Wes Craven is like M. Night Shamalyan. He had 1 good idea a long time ago and now we know that everything else he puts out is pretty much garbage, but we watch it anyway and we have no idea why. Anyway, Craven brings us this forgettable vampire movie, which starred 300's Gerard Butler as Judas Iscariot/Dracula.

The Forsaken

We should point out that we did not photoshop this to make the actors look douchier, nor did we add the line at the bottom: "The sexiest vampire movie since 'The Lost Boys!'"

Van Helsing

Van Helsing. Wow. This movie had Kate Beckisale in a corset fighting werewolves AND vampires. Well, it worked before, so why not again? It also had Hugh Jackman as Van Helsing, Dracula's arch-nemesis. If that wasn't enough, it had these girls as Dracula's brides:

How could that go wrong? Well, it had more subplots than Spiderman 3 and the plot depth of a porno. Soap-opera acting and bad casting rounded out this failure.

Vampires can die from wooden stakes through the heart, removing the head from the body, or exposure to sunlight. Of course, in the movie Blade, the vampires just put sunscreen on to counteract this weakness. In addition, garlic and holy water have been known to hurt vampires. We know that Dracula must sleep in the soil of his homeland every night.

True Blood takes vampires back a step back towards being badass. It is an HBO series with the premise that vampires and other mythological creatures are real. Vampires came out into the public after Japanese scientists invented a synthetic blood substitute called True Blood, which in effect brought vampires out in to the open. True Blood takes place in Louisiana and the main story focuses on Anna Paquin (famous for her role as Rogue in X-Men and also famous for her role as the topless girl in True Blood) and a Vampire named Bill. Vampire blood is also revealed to have a hallucinagenic effect on humans and is sold as a narcotic. There are also sub plots about murder, voodoo, people having sex, and shape shifters.