"Forget Whatever You've Seen in the Movies" – 15 Years of John Carpenter's Vampires

By Kit Rathenar

John Carpenters Vampires (hereafter just “Vampires”, for simplicity’s sake) is a film I feel a little odd writing about. It’s a film that I absolutely love, but I’ve got the strangest feeling that if it could speak to me it would ask me “What the fuck are you doing here?” I don’t think it’s a film that I’m supposed to be the target market for. It’s definitely not, as it might itself point out if challenged, a chick movie. It’s also a movie that a lot of people have considered to be disposable, trashy, and deeply flawed. But regardless of the validity or not of such criticisms, I disagree wholeheartedly with anyone who thinks that this film isn’t worth seeing – or worth defending.

And at it’s simplest, that is because in Vampires, I honestly believe that John Carpenter – quite possibly, entirely unwittingly – made one of the last great vampire movies before the entire genre collapsed around our ears. For the last decade or two, we’ve been seeing the seemingly unstoppable rise of a new breed of vampire. They’re well-groomed, handsome, charismatic, and sometimes they even sparkle in sunlight. They’re portrayed as romantic heroes, tragic tortured souls, and profound and meaningful creatures. They also lose fights to high school students, can be led around by the dick by any woman with a couple of superpowers and/or an insecurity complex, and are generally a bunch of all-round pussywhipped losers. These monstrous alpha predators, these terrors of the night, have been watered down and objectified so far that I remember Waterstones at one point having an entire section titled simply “Lady and the Vamp”. While any given instantiation may have redeeming features, taken en masse I am very sick of the modern, romanticised vampire archetype.

In 1998, though, just as the common domesticated vampire was starting to become a mainstream phenomenon (cough Buffy the Vampire Slayer cough), John Carpenter decided to toss out a nice straightforward little action-horror movie based on a pulp novel called “Vampire$” by one John Steakley. I’ve read the novel, and in honesty, thought it was pretty lacklustre – fortunately, Carpenter played a bit fast and loose with it when he filmed it. And the result is something that, flawed or not, is still uniquely special: a movie with the aesthetics and soul of a Western, the heart of a hard-boiled action movie, and the blood of Dracula pounding molten in its veins.

The background narrative of Vampires is simple. In a world where vampires are incontrovertibly real, the Catholic church runs secret teams of vampire slayers – hard-case fighters who operate in units that have more in common with a military black ops or mercenary team than any gang of high-school cuties – to try and keep the bloodsuckers under control. When Vampires opens, the first thing we see is one of these teams, led by Jack Crow (expertly played by James Woods in classic badass mode) taking on a nest of vampire “goons”, the lowest-ranking and least powerful type of vampire in this setting. These men go in armed and armoured to the teeth, with a priest at their back and years of experience on their side, and they still look nervous. They take down nine goons and it takes them an entire, gruelling day. This is a universe where, for a trained professional with all the right equipment, killing even a basic, entry-level vampire requires cursing, sweating, scrapping, risking your life and losing your dignity every single time. And this, for my money, is as it should be. These vampires aren’t pinups or glamour models; they’re ugly, grimy, vicious and above all, dangerous. They present a threat that even the experts here take seriously.

And that’s before we even meet a so-called “master” vampire. To be precise, the first and most powerful of all master vampires: Jan Valek, a six-hundred-year-old fallen priest who was accidentally transformed into a vampire when the Church tried to exorcise him and screwed it up. Played magnificently by Thomas Ian Griffith (whose training as a martial artist clearly stood him in brilliant stead when trying to capture the inhuman blend of grace and savagery he brings to the role; and all of it without any CGI trickery to make him look superhuman either, he just DOES it), Valek for me is one of the final few of a dying fictional breed, the last of the great vampire lords. He’s as bestial as the least of his followers, snarling more often than he speaks, fighting and killing with an animalistic grace and wantonness that alienate him from any possible claim to true humanity; yet he’s also ferociously intelligent and self-aware, with ambitions and motivations of his own and a mockingly (and justifiably) superior demeanour when he does deign to interact with humans in any other context than an instantly fatal one. He is everything that a true vampire, at least to my mind, should be – something that repels and attracts in equal measure, at once higher and lower than human. A truly loathsome predator with no redeeming empathic qualities whatsoever, and yet simultaneously a thrilling glimpse of something so exotic in its limitless power that it can’t help but be seductive to any mere mortal who’s ever discontentedly asked themselves “Is this really all there is to life?” To add to his classical vampiric credentials, he’s got the traditional Eastern European origins (Czech, in his case, not Transylvanian, but that’s fine with me) and wanders around in elegant head-to-toe black including a huge velvet coat that somehow miraculously sheds all known forms of dust despite the fact that he goes around burying himself in sand with it still on. He speaks with a husky, rasping accent distorted by massive razor-sharp fangs, and has nails like claws that frequently hover breath-catchingly close to other people’s eyeballs, lips, and throats. Yes, I’ll admit it – I wouldn’t touch Edward Cullen with someone else’s bargepole, but Jan Valek could give me one glance and I’d do anything he asked me to. And I do mean anything.

Y’see, when writers try to deliberately romanticise vampires for a postulated female audience, they all too often do it by taking out most of the traits I like about the archetype in the first place. Thus, for me, the joy of Vampires – a movie made with the female gaze clearly the furthest thing from its mind – is that in overlooking me as a potential demographic, it’s actually given me exactly what I wanted from the start. I want my vampires as they’re portrayed in the old films and novels: terrifying, bloodthirsty, unpredictable, inhuman, and dominatingly powerful to the verge of being flat-out unstoppable. That’s the archetype I’ve been in love with since I was way too young to be watching movies like this, and I will forever be grateful to John Carpenter for taking that archetype and turning it up until the knob fell off, right before everyone else started getting it quite so terribly wrong.

But what makes me so convinced that Vampires wasn’t made with a female audience in mind? Mostly the fact that it’s one of the most unrelentingly testosterone-driven movies I’ve ever seen. There’s a universal surfeit of gravelly voices, weapon porn, marginalisation of female character roles (to the extent that LITERALLY every woman in the movie apart from the vampires is a hooker because that’s the capacity in which they were manoeuvred into the plot in the first place), and heartfelt male bonding exchanges with the appropriate leavening of violent scuffling. Like a good vintage Western or war movie, Vampires is permeated throughout with this combat-oriented, hypermasculine aura that allows it to get away with levels of intimacy between the male cast members that simply wouldn’t fly in a less stringently macho environment. One only has to look at Jack Crow’s relationship with his friend and only surviving teammate, Montoya (Daniel Baldwin, playing the role with a low-key yet sympathetic world-weariness). These two ultra-hardass characters, when interacting with each other, do everything but brush stray hair out of each other’s faces. Softened voices, affectionate asides, gentle touches, a near-telepathic ability to follow each other’s thoughts; and when they do quarrel, they’ll instantly join forces to get rid of anyone who dares to try and stop them before going straight back to their argument. They’re more married than most married couples I’ve ever seen while still both being portrayed as heterosexual, and while friendships like this are a revered tradition in “guys'” movies, it’s much harder to play them straight (if you’ll pardon the pun) in any movie that’s aimed outside of a very heteronormative and predominantly male audience. And while there is a male/female romance subplot in Vampires, that clearly isn’t consciously aimed at any passing women either because it’s neither sentimental, overt, nor superfluous to the main plot. The slow, painfully inevitable process by which Montoya falls for Katrina is all played out in a muted minor key, a plangent chord on a steel guitar rather than the sudden obnoxious blast of violins and accompanying bluebirds that it would’ve been if it was meant to placate a hypothetical viewer’s girlfriend. And once again, I love it all the more for that.

But even leaving aside this level of analysis, there’s so much more about this movie that I could praise. I love that it dips into the sinister, darkly glamorous mythology of movie-style Catholicism, and thereby underpins its storyline with just enough sense of history to give it some three-dimensionality. The idea that Valek has been hunting for six hundred years for the Black Cross of Berziers, with the goal of completing his own exorcism and transforming himself into a monster that can walk in sunlight, adds a sudden lurch of scale and perspective to the movie that makes it feel bigger and older and darker than it has any right to. Indeed, Carpenter handles the religious/supernatural element of Vampires with a smooth, unsqueamish assurance throughout, simply putting it in matter-of-factly whenever it needs to be there. The narrative never pauses for one of those aggravating “but surely this can’t really happen!” moments, and so the viewer’s disbelief remains comfortably suspended alongside that of the characters. And I love, too, that this straightforward portrayal of the supernatural sits alongside an equally straight-up handling of the more mundane elements. Everything here is simply what it is, take it or leave it: from the violence and gore and the scrambling desperation of combat, to the drunken sexual energy of a roadhouse party filled with fighters and whores, to the no-excuses-no-apologies way that the heroes will simply get the fuck on with what needs doing and never give up, never go down, never bottle out. This movie runs on blood, testosterone, desert light and pure human grit, and that makes it more beautiful and believable to me than any supposedly “relatable”, watered-down vampire flick could ever be.

It wouldn’t be fair to end this little writeup without mentioning that this movie scores hugely with me in two final areas: cinematography and soundtrack. The camerawork in Vampires is just to my tastes, being relaxed, smooth, and not obsessed with closeups in the middle of fight scenes. The recurring use of red filters to give the daylight scenes a dusty, bloodstained look is a beautifully evocative touch (and also, arguably, a trial run for the massive overkill of the same technique that Carpenter would employ a couple of years later in the much-maligned Ghosts of Mars). The soundtrack, meanwhile, is of Carpenter’s own scoring – I’ve always admired him as a composer as much as a director – and is loaded with Western and blues motifs, deep, languid bass grooves and mournful guitars, capturing the perfect blend of badassery and moody sentiment to fit the look and feel of the film. I can watch Vampires when I’m blind drunk with my brain completely switched off, and enjoy it as pure aesthetic and spectacle; I can watch it with my whole mind and heart engaged, and be as caught up in the excitement, action, and my affection for the characters as I was the first time I saw it. And I can go back to it every damn time I’ve been pissed off by yet another – to directly quote Jack Crow – pole-smoking fashion victim who’s just been offered up as the next big thing in vampire folklore, and remember why I loved vampires in general in the first damn place. If you ask me to list my top ten movies of all time, Vampires will always be in there. Heck, most of the time it’s in the top five.

So cheers, John Carpenter, from the girl at the back of the theatre who you probably didn’t even know you were making this film for. Thank you very, very much.