[gothicusmaximus]

Originally Posted by ThreeEyesOni

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.

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

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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."

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)

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.

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.

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.