Good Vampire Show?
 

I've gotten really into Vampire shows lately, but I've run out of shows to watch. I've already seen all of the Moonlight Episodes and I just finished Blood Ties (though I am still trying to find the Blood Ties books...).

Does anyone have suggestions to help me satisfy this addiction?

Vampire Hunter D.

Blood: The Last Vampire

Vampire Hunter D, well, the first one, is one of my favorite movies.

Movie-wise: Near Dark, Blade 1 (maybe 2 and 3 if you're not picky and haven't gotten spoilers), Habit, Innocent Blood, Mark of the Vampire, Blacula, London After Midnight, Dracula's Daughter, Vampyros Lesbos
Show-wise: Forever Knight, Dark Shadows and MAYBE Blade: The Series (only ones that come to mind aside from the obvious Buffy and Angel)

Beat me to the Dark Shadows. I'd definitely recommend that one as well.

I've started watching vampire Hunter D and my friend lent me Blood + So i will start watching that when I get home....I can't wait!

How did Kindred: the Embraced possibly allude mention?

Also: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vampire_High

My favorite cancelled vampire TV shows would be

Kindred: the Embraced
Ultraviolet (the UK series)
Buffy
Angel
Forever Knight

I've heard Johnny Depp is remaking some form of Dark Shadows

There's a gay vampire show on some channel called "the Lair", but I've never seen it yet.

Are you looking for a "series" type of thing, or stand alone movies also?

the new Hammer Films is premiering an internet serial called 'Beyond the Rave'.
www.beyondtherave.com

Buffy and Angel. The only television you'll ever need.

Hellsing of course, Vampire hunter D and the second Bloodlust are both awesome, Vampire Kinight

Because it was horrible.

The only good vampire-based show that I've found has been Forever Knight. I think that one was quite good on all levels. Buffy/Angel are obvious ones, but they're really more "super-teen" shows, with Angel being the "super-college-student" version.

Vampires on film are kind of hard to portray in ways other than Blade, From Dusk Till Dawn and the like. If you want to use a vampire as something other than the monster of the film, then you have to take a damn lot of time to set up who/what/where/why the vampire is. Books do this very well, but movies simply don't have enough time for this.

Cassidy from the comic Preacher is a nice one to check out. Last Blood is a webcomic that was recently picked up for a movie; the general plot is that the world has been destroyed by zombies within the past month, and the last humans are being protected by vampires. The new version of Salem's Lot seemed quite good. There are a few rarer ones out there; Blood & Doughnuts is worth watching if you ever get a chance.

Angel wasn't in college... he was a private investigator. Buffy became a super-college-student around Season Four.

You mean in a way other than as ravening hordes of canon fodder for the hero(es) to destroy? What about, I don't know... Dracula?

What a silly generalization. What about George A. Romero's Martin? What about recent Tribeca Film Festival hit Let The Right One In? What about the hardly exceptional but entirely adequate Interview With The Vampire?

I didn't mean that Angel was in college, more referring to the differences in tone between the two shows. And yeah, I'm generalizing, mostly because I was trying to be brief.

Dracula, Let The Right One In, and Interview With The Vampire are all movies versions of successful books that (which the exception of Let The Right One In, which I have only barely heard about before now) bad been long-standing and highly developed over years. Dracula was written 35 years before it was made into a film, and it was 100 years before Bram Stoker's Dracula was made; while the classic version is a classic, I don't think it did the story nearly as much justice as the more recent one.

My point being that (when created from scratch) movies, television shows and written fiction are all designed (with a few exceptions) in rather different methods. Of the three, a movie is the hardest one to try and bring across radically different ideas. Vampires have a pretty strong sterotype in fiction (on an unrelated note: one of these days I'd like to do a vampire movie with the vampire is a tradidional floating corpse with it's power in a hat, or maybe a floating chinese head trailing entrails from the stump. just to make people go "gwuh? that's a vampire?"), but there is still a certain amount of explanation needed to show how they work in your setting (for instance: name me 5 vampire movies that don't have some variation on the explanation/questioning about sunlight/garlic/holy water/etc).

The best/best known (certainly not one and the same, but there's a good amount of overlap) vampire movies have been based on these long narratives which have allready put a clear picture in both the readers' and the director's eye. Most good scripts don't actually have much of this narrative wording (anything that isn't a character's actions/dialog/etc) because the film isn't going to read the character's mind.

I'm rambling...

My point is that for every Dracula (or for that matter Dead and Loving it (one of my favorite under-rated films) or Vampire in Brooklyn) there are a half-dozen Blades (it will be a sad day when there are literally a half-dozen Blade movies) and the like, and I still stand by the fact that it is harder to make a good non-vampire-monster/mook movie than it is to write a book of the same sort.

As you noted later, all vampire movies draw from a tradition, these movies are hardly unique for this reason.

I'm sorry, I generally like your posts and appreciate your interest in film, but this statement made me say "What the fuck?" out loud. Coppola's Dracula may have incorporated more minutae that earlier incarnations excluded-- the character of Quincy Morris for instance-- but it was absolutely contrary to the essence of Stoker's novel. Indeed, Browning's Dracula is more 'Bram Stoker's' than the 1992 film, which takes enormous liberties with the source material in transforming the eponymous vampire from a soulless, bloodthirsty abomination into a pitiable, love-sick romantic hero, whose main ambition is not to prey upon the people of london but to court Mina. This scene embodies everything that's wrong with Bram Stoker's Dracula. Read the comments and observe teenagers and lonely housewives alike professing that they've love to date Dracula.


That movies has less 'room' in which to develop new ideas is definitely a valid point. However, the vast majority of contemporary films are adapted from some property, and all are designed such that one who has never read the book can understand them. My point was that many good films, despite that to do this is more challenging than it would be to a novelist, have managed to depict vampires as something 'other than just a monster', and not merely because they adapted from books.

A script doesn't really require an extensive interior monologue on the part of a given character or overt exposition to avow to the audience that their preconceptions concerning vampires are inaccurate. Even in 'Blade', Whistler remarks "Crosses don't do squat!". A member of the vampire gang in The Lost Boys mocks the Frog brothers with "Garlic don't work", only to begin sizzling as the two counter "What about holy water?". In Horror of Dracula, Van Helsing replies to Arthur Holmwood's question as to whether vampires can transform into wolves and bats with "that's a common fantasy". Indeed, you're correct that movies which reveal such information through dialogue or action are superior to those which indulge in extensive exposition-- Like Bram Stoker's Dracula, wherein Dracula tells us, in voiceover, something to the effect of "Contrary to popular belief, vampires can walk in sunlight, but we are not at the height of our power."

Ehhh... that's just not true. The 'undead, blood-drinking feudal lord with power over the fog and beasts of the earth' still is, for most, the 'classic vampire'. The "LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU A THOUSAND VAMPIRES" movie has definitely risen to prominence as of late, but that incarnation of the monster still has much catching up to do to Browning's classic and its countless imitators. The character of Dracula alone appears in more films than any single character, excepting Sherlock Holmes.

Definitely, making a movie whose cosmology is contrary to the preconceptions of the audience is certainly harder than creating one which accords with them, but movies of the former sort tend to be more interesting and exciting. This, combined with the fact that making a good movie is hard period, ensures that there are as many quality non-traditional vampire movies as there are traditional ones, which was my original argument.

Last Blood is probably the only upcoming vampire film that I'm looking forward to, due to the originality of the plot (Though I can think of one other movie that used some similar mechanics. Then again, I hate that bloody hack of a director, and the movie sucked.). 30 Days of Night (barring some aspects of the movie) was also a nice bit of originality.

I'd like to see a TV series based on the Anita Blake novels, only without all the damn erotica. I have a running notion (mostly a comical one) that female writers of vampire fiction inevitably slip into an erotica style.

Crimson is a vampire comic book that I was trying to remember earlier; unfortunately it was canceled a few years ago. It's worth checking out.

As for the little back-and-forth; my only real point is that the good "traditional" vampire movies (as opposed to vampires that are akin to "fast zombies") tend to be made from existing novels. In fact most of the traditional-style ones that I can think of were based on novels, wereas I can't think of any of the other type (the so-called "LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU A THOUSAND VAMPIRES") that was based on a novel. Blade is the closest that I can think of, and that's a really weird/bad example.

Oh, and if I ever have to watch Jon Bon Jovi and "'Eddie Winslow" from Family Values fight vampires again I'm going to have to bite someone.

Well, I don't believe you're correct, given that Blade-style vampires have only become popular in the last decade or so while traditional style vampires have prevailed for nearly a century, but the point is moot. Whether a movie is based on a book is entirely irrelevant to the quality of the film, as all adaptations are designed to be totally comprehensible and enjoyable to people who haven't read whatever novel on which they happen to be based. If films were only targeted at the literate, well, the American motion picture industry would not be the lucrative enterprise that it is.
A good example of a LOOK OUT BEHIND YOU A THOUSAND VAMPIRES movie adapted from a novel would be last year's I Am Legend. The 'Bon Jovi' movies, or John Carpenter's Vampires series, are also loosely adapted from a book.

Link to IMDB or it never happened (unless you have your actors mixed up :P)

Seeing that clip made me want to see Browning's version all over again, I wanna kick myself for missing it on AMC.

Doctor Ackula!

Here. The lead star is Jon Bon Jovi, and one of the co-stars is Darius McCrary (aka Eddie). It is horribly sad.

Edit: Oh, and "Eddie" essentially gets turned into a vampire through oral sex. Stay classy, vampire hunters! :D

Wasn't this film lost?

Wow, between this and admitting to a 5th-rate Essence knockoff that he nailed Superhead (even though they were long broken up), I don't know which is more depressing.

And yeah, LAM was lost but Turner Classic Movies got their hands on a version that basically displayed all the stills as a substitute for the movie footage. I think it was shown a couple years ago on their Silent Sunday Night bit.

I'm quite fond of Angel.

I'm going to try not to list any that have already been mentioned...

Some vampire movies that I like a lot...or were at least mildly entertaining:

Eternal Blood (Sangre Eterna)
Razorblade Smile
Ultraviolet (the UK series, NOT the movie)
Dark Prince
The Forsaken
Near Dark
Wisdom of Crocodiles
Thirst
Let the Right One In
30 Days of Night
Perfect Creature
Rise
The Breed
Vampire Journals

vampire comedies:

Blood and Donuts
Vampires Anonymous
Modern Vampires
Innocent Blood