Low Budget

One of my favorite sub-genres is the vampire movie.  I love it in all its forms.  The purest, of course, is the classic horror tale, best exemplified in Nosforatu.  The related form is the artistic response, found in movies such as Shadow of the Vampire and the under-rated Vampire's Kiss.  Then there are all kinds of cheap vampire movies, big-budget versions, and action-vampire movies.

Of course some vampire movies really aren't. Blade, obviously.  Underworld.  Van Helsing.  (not to pick on Kate Beckinsdale, but she needs a better agent.)  What makes a vampire movie authentic?  Reading through visitor comments on Amazon, Netflix, and IMDB, you might think it was following the rules.  You know, vampires cast no reflection, hide from crosses, burn in the daylight, and possibly avoid garlic.  Approximately one-third of all vampire movies now contain a joke about crosses and Jewish vampires.  But these "rules" have been tightly followed by action-adventure style movies, like Blade, while only invoked in a small percentage of genre core movies.  The vampire rules come from the early cinematic representations of Bram Stoker's version of the tale.  The older peasant stories aren't nearly as clear about daylight, crosses, or garlic.  The stake through the heart has always been popular, however.  And this gave birth to the idea that we've filtered away in film, the horrible breath of the vampire.  That's because when they actually did dig up corpses suspected of being vampires, and drove stakes into their hearts, usually there was a forced exhalation of all those gases building up inside.  It was certainly not pleasant.  But our modern cinematic vampire has grown more and more sophisticated, urbane, seductive.  Bad breath doesn't fit, so we've dropped it.  I'll get back to vampires, but for now we'll say that an authentic vampire movie should include the horrific power of the mind of the vampire taking away the will of the victim.  It should include a sense that something ancient is continuing to live by taking away the lives of the young and current.  It should include a power that exists in darkness and hiding, that cannot be fully seen.  Any movie that just has undead creatures wandering around taking over the world is more of a zombie movie. [Note, we'll do Chinese Vampires as a whole separate topic.]