Vampires

Daydreamers doesn’t stray too far from vampire movie narratives we’ve seen before; there are warring clans of bloodsuckers, a brother versus brother face-off, and visits to flashy clubs stuffed with fang-faced partiers. But it’s one of very few vampire movies to come from Vietnam, which makes it a curiosity worth seeking out. And once you start watching, Daydreamers‘ stylish execution and ridiculously good-looking cast just might hook you in.

Daydreamers opens in select theaters May 2; it’ll hit all the major VOD platforms June 3.

Here's a trailer.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/28676437

Impact Winter is an audio drama released as an episodic podcast. It takes place in the modern world, except a comet impact has blotted out the sun. With no sun, the world has turned into an endless winter and vampires can roam freely during the day. The story is about a group of humans hiding in an abandoned castle in England, with the main character being a vampire hunter who's trying to keep them safe.

The story is pretty neat because there are essentially three types of vampire. The first type is a feral animal that simply attacks and has no humanity. The second type can pass as human long enough to trick humans into dropping their guard so they can attack. And the third type are intelligent with magic powers like shapeshifting or telepathy.

You can listen to it as an audiobook on Audible or as a podcast on Prime Music. Or you can just listen to it for free as a podcast.

It's funny, I started out listening to it on Prime Music. I had finished the first season and moved onto the second. And then the whole series disappeared from Prime Music (for me, anyway). So I moved to the RSS feed of the podcast to finish it. In each episode on Prime Music, it made sure to tell me "this series is brought to you commercial-free on Audible!" Yet when I moved to the RSS feed of the podcast, there were no commercials at all, not even ones telling me it was commercial-free thanks to Audible.

There are three seasons available right now, with the fourth season coming sometime soon. The first season mostly took place around the abandoned castle, while the second season expanded to other parts of the world and introduced some vampire house politicking. So the world really expands as it goes on.

I guess the story has been picked up for a series at Netflix and there's a one-shot of comics that serve as a prequel. Anyway, I recommend it. If you enjoy podcasts, it's a fun story.

Jim Crow-era vampire drama directed by Ryan Coogler and starring Michael B. Jordan hits theaters April 18.

I remembered that Eurovision is next month, so I looked up what Bambie Thug has been up to and saw this music video with a "vampire fighter" theme.

background: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bambie_Thug

song link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVgvEK44hCA

... all I could do is sing Dragostea Din Tei. The lyrics are the only Romanian I know and barely can pronounce. At least I might go down in a rave xD

For as long as there have been movies, there have been vampire movies. Obviously, not every vampire movie will be good. Or even tolerable. Or should ever have been made at all.

I was browsing through the vampire movies available on Tubi and found classics such as Vampire Time Travelers, Planet of the Vampire Women, and Aleta: Vampire Mistress. You're welcome to watch those movies if you want, but it got me thinking... what is the worst vampire movie you actually sat through and watched to the end?

For me, it was probably Dracula 3000.

The poster made me think there'd be a cyborg vampire or something, and it stars Casper Van Dien and Coolio, how bad could it really be? Turns out, pretty bad. And there aren't any cyborg vampires either. So disappointing. I did watch it all the way to the end though.

So what horrible vampire movie(s) have you actually watched?

(For anyone who just can't resist, here's a trailer for Planet of the Vampire Women and Aleta: Vampire Mistress. I actually can't find a trailer for Vampire Time Travelers but I assume that's for the best. Also, I wasn't trying to focus only on the low budget softcore vampire movies in the picture for this post, I was just going for the most ridiculous posters. I could've just as easily used Hood Vamps, Samurai Priest: Vampire Hunter, Vampire Riderz, or Vampyrz on a Boat. Seriously, there's a lot on Tubi.)

There isn't much in this video other than a reminder that this game is actually happening and is now scheduled to release in October of this year (21 years after the original Bloodlines game).

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/23510483

show transcript

mysharona1987 posts:
[screenshot of a tweet]
@iamthedunce tweets:
Vampires don't live in castles, Count Dracula lived in a castle because he was a count, not because he was a vampire.

iamnmbr3 replies:
this feels like a sensitivity training for how to not commit micro aggressions against vampires in your workplace

cross-posted from: https://sh.itjust.works/post/34580607

Cross-posted from !wikipedia@lemmy.world

I was looking for something else and came across this. I'd heard of Japanese Kappas and the Mexican La Llorona before....

But were you aware of Empusa? Turns out she "is a shape-shifting female being in Greek mythology, said to possess a single leg of copper" who "feasted on blood by seducing young men as they slept (see sleep paralysis), before drinking their blood and eating their flesh". Then one day she tried that on Zeus who was in disguise as a normie and... well it turned out like you'd expect.

Then there are the Nepalese Kichkandi who are "a spirit of a woman[1] that is latched to an uncremated part of her dead body, usually a bone". Apparently they appear as "an alluring and young female, who lures a lonely male traveler[2] and saps their life force."

Anyway that's just a couple, check out the full list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_vampiric_creatures_in_folklore

What type of vampire do you like most? Do you want them to be mindless killing machines, monsters that can think but can't exactly pass as human, or something perfectly capable of blending in with humanity? Or should there be stages? Would they become mindless killing machines after they've drank too much blood? Or when they haven't had enough?

For example, in Priest they're completely mindless, mostly just animals. Yet in 30 Days of Night they're human-shaped but don't hide or blend in with humans (or even speak human languages). And... I couldn't think of a good example of an aristocratic vampire so I went with Interview with the Vampire. I know there are lots of other aristocratic vampires but couldn't think of a good example of one that can blend in perfectly well with humans.

Sometimes vampires can change their type, too. Like in Daybreakers, where vampires are mostly human but going too long without blood essentially turns them feral and they lose all sense of humanity. In that movie, feeding on yourself even accelerates the decline. But then there are other stories (can't remember a good example right now) where the longer you live as a vampire the more you slowly lose pieces of yourself and your humanity. And then there are still other stories where a vampire can mostly pass for human except when they get caught up in a bloodlust and temporarily lose all control.

So which form of vampire do you think is best? I don't really have an answer to this, I just like thinking about all the various forms and stages of vampires there can be. And all are valid. There's no wrong way to do vampires... except maybe Twilight. (Ha, I just wanted to make a joke there.)

In the 1930s, Universal Pictures made a bunch of movies starring horror monsters from classic novels. Movies like Dracula, Frankenstein, and The Mummy. Universal milked those characters for all they were worth, to the point that they started showing up in weirder and wackier things like Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein all the way to Abbott and Costello Meet the Mummy. Obviously this had diminishing returns. By the 1950s, Universal finally stopped throwing those characters at anything they could (and after Abbot and Costello had "met" pretty much all of them).

Anyway, in the 2010s the Marvel Cinematic Universe was basically printing money so Universal decided it was time to blow the dust off their old horror movie monsters and get in on this "cinematic universe" cash cow. They decided to create their own "Dark Universe" with all the classic Universal monsters. To kick it all off, they created Dracula Untold. And it failed miserably. The lesson they learned from this failure was to go all-in and throw even more money at the problem, hiring big name actors for these roles:

They got Tom Cruise and Sofia Boutella for The Mummy, Russel Crowe as Dr. Jekyll/Mr. Hyde, Johnny Depp as the Invisible Man, and Javier Bardem as Frankenstein's monster. While Dracula Untold was a standalone movie with plans for future tie-ins (like the first Iron Man movie), The Mummy (2017) was basically an Avengers-level movie that threw in everyone they could. And it failed even harder. So the Dark Univrse was completely abandoned as a cinematic universe and will now only live on as a park at Universal Studios Orlando. What a waste.

But what about Dracula Untold as a movie? Well, it's fine. It definitely isn't strong enough to carry an entire cinematic universe, but it isn't really a bad movie. It just isn't a Dracula movie. Or a vampire movie, not really.

There's a quote from the director which says:

Anybody who's going to the film expecting a horror film, is going to be sorely disappointed. For me, it was telling a story. I was trying to tell a good drama, that has action-adventure elements to it.

So this Dracula movie was never intended to be a horror film. But I think it also fails as a "good drama".

The movie stars Luke Evans as Vlad the Implaer. We're told by other characters in the movie that he was a child soldier and was absolutely ruthless and bloodthirsty. But the Vlad played by Luke Evans is neither of those things. He's a loving and caring husband and father (like, way more than any husband or father in the 1400s ever would've been). He never really shows anger or a dark side. Sure, he's a good fighter, but from the audience's perspective he's basically a pacifist.

Anyway, there's an invading Ottoman army that arrives and Vlad simply wants to protect his lands. He meets a vampire in a cave who says "I'll give you the powers of a vampire for three days and if you don't drink any blood in that time, you'll turn back into a human. But if you drink blood at any point, you'll remain a vampire forever." Now, given that this movie is called Dracula Untold and is the first movie in a larger cinematic universe, we all know where this is going. I don't think it's a spoiler to say he's going to drink blood at some point. So yeah, he holds off the army for three days but (gasp!) he needs a fourth day to completely wipe them out! Also, he mostly just has the power to control bats; he's not much of a "vampire" in my opinion. But maybe that goes back to the director's point about this not being a horror movie.

Overall, I think the backstory in Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula does a better job of setting up this character. I think Gary Oldman did a better job of being so passionate in both his hatred and his love that he would renounce God and curse himself to become a vampire. In comparison, Luke Evans' Vlad is essentially making a deal with the devil and loses. Vlad knew what he was getting himself into (and the consequences for it) and consciously made the decision. I think this is one of those cases where if the movie didn't have "Dracula" in the title and was just a supernatural action movie set in the 1400s it would've been more enjoyable. It was probably my expecations for what a Dracula movie should be that brought it down. So this isn't so much a bad movie as it is a missed opportunity.

Here's a trailer. You can watch it right now on Netflix.

Blindsight is a hard science fiction novel by Canadian writer Peter Watts, published by Tor Books in 2006. ... The story follows a crew of astronauts sent to investigate a trans-Neptunian comet dubbed "Burns-Caulfield" that has been found to be transmitting an unidentified radio signal, followed by their subsequent first contact. The novel explores themes of identity, consciousness, free will, artificial intelligence, neurology, and game theory as well as evolution and biology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blindsight_(Watts_novel)

One of the main characters in this novel is a vampire. It's the future, and this ancient vampire species that used to prey on humans has been resurrected. They sent one of them in a spaceship (as the leader of a team of other transhumans) out to investigate a possible alien artifact.

...just short of the forward bulkhead, Jukka Sarasti climbed into view like a long white spider.

If he'd been Human I'd have known instantly what I saw there, I'd have smelled murderer all over his topology. And I wouldn't have been able to even guess at the number of his victims, because his affect was so utterly without remorse. The killing of a hundred would leave no more stain on Sarasti's surfaces than the swatting of an insect; guilt beaded and rolled off this creature like water on wax.

But Sarasti wasn't human. Sarasti was a whole different animal, and coming from him all those homicidal refractions meant nothing more than predator. He had the inclination, was born to it; whether he had ever acted on it was between him and Mission Control.

• the full novel is on the author's website: https://www.rifters.com/real/Blindsight.htm

John Carpenter's Vampires doesn't have a very complicated plot, but it doesn't really need one. It was written and directed by John Carpenter and he knows what he's doing.

The movie is about a group of vampire hunters just... hunting vampires. This is a "modern day" vampire movie though (where "modern day" is 1998) so the hunters use the tools available at the time. You can tell they thought a lot about how to effectively kill a vampire in today's world without magical objects. There are nice little touches like the characters putting on chain-mail neck-guards before entering a vampire nest to prevent bites.

Of course, there is a plot here. A "master" vampire has a plan to perform some ritual which should give him the ability to walk in the daylight. And he needs the main character for that ritual. That leads me to my main complaint about this movie. James Woods is the main character and head vampire hunter and there's just something about him in this movie that I don't like. I don't know what type of actor would've fit this role better but I don't think James Woods was that type. I think they wanted more of a fast-talking arrogant type?

Also, James Woods and his sidekick Baldwin brother (Daniel Baldwin) are both... assholes. Like, that's their character trait. And it's weird. It seems forced, I guess. They act like normal, rational, cool-headed hunters but then will just slap a hooker and treat her like dirt for no real reason. The Baldwin brother does a better job of this where it's more impulsive and a knee-jerk reaction he immediately regrets, but James Woods has his slow way of talking that makes his asshole outbursts seem out of character. I don't know, I guess I just didn't like the "treat women like dirt" aspect to their characters. It didn't seem necessary. Even if they thought a hooker bit by a vampire is suddenly less than human (because they have no sympathy for vampires) they still don't treat her like a vampire. They just treat her like dirt. Sorry, I don't mean to belabor this point since it isn't a major aspect to the movie (it only happens a couple times). I just didn't see the reasoning for them to act that way.

Anyway, here's a trailer. You can watch it on Peacock.

I was reading some discussions online about recommendations for vampire novels and a bunch of people recommended GRRM's Fevre Dream. I'd never heard of it so I read the description and it sounds... pretty bland? It's about a riverboat captain on the Mississippi River in the 1850s who gets hired by an aristocratic vampire. While I'm sure the description is avoiding spoilers, that all sounds very boring to me. Yet the amazon page proclaims it "A THRILLING REINVENTION OF THE VAMPIRE NOVEL" so I must be missing something.

I'm guessing this is one of those dramatic period pieces with thought-provoking conversations between well-defined characters. And maybe I'm just a simple-minded idiot who prefers action movies like Underworld, Blade, and Van Helsing and this novel simply isn't for me. That's fair. Or maybe that description is leaving out too much and it's actually an action-packed thrill-ride. I have no idea.

So If you've read Fevre Dream before, what's the appeal? What's so great about this novel? It seems highly regarded but that doesn't mean it's for me. I'm sure there are other people here who might enjoy it though, so definitely check it out if you're curious. Obviously the novel does something right, I just don't know what that is.

Anyone who thinks Van Helsing was bad clearly hasn't seen GOTHIC VAMPIRES FROM HELL... just from the title you can tell that they were going for a B movie feel, and managed to hit several levels below that

• fake-looking fangs, fake-looking blood effects
• randomly inserted computer-generated animations
• bad acting, bad writing
• club scenes of people dancing with cheap video distortion effects overlayed
• occasional BDSM scenes interweaved ... to create a mood I guess?
• It all looks like it was filmed in a goth club somewhere with their friends as actors.

Surprisingly, it has a solid soundtrack made up of second-generation gothic industrial / deathrock music. I think Cleopatra Records had something to do with this movie. Anyway, this is a great movie to play in the background if you like dark vampiric stuff happening in the periphery and you're into "dark" music.

I caught it on Tubi (uBlock Origin adblocker on Firefox seems to work here):

• https://tubitv.com/movies/662920/gothic-vampires-from-hell

And that's it. That's all the vampires memes I've got. I tried stretching it out as long as I could, but I'm done now.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ca/post/39196288

A small-town farmer's son reluctantly joins a traveling group of vampires after he is bitten by a beautiful drifter.

Director - Kathryn Bigelow.

Stars - Adrian Pasdar, Jenny Wright, Lance Henriksen.

6.9/10 on IMDB, 74% Popcornometer.

"Near Dark is at once a creepy vampire film, a thrilling western, and a poignant family tale, with humor and scares in abundance."

Movie Trailer.

Anyone seen this film? It hide in the lost boys shadow he is definitely a worth watching so check it out if you haven't. If you have, what did you think?

Look, I'm not going to argue with anyone who says this is a bad movie. But that doesn't stop it from being fun. Just turn off your brain and enjoy it.

There's a movie from 2003 called The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (yes, yes, I know it was a graphic novel first). That movie took a bunch of fictional characters (Tom Sawyer, Captain Nemo, Dorian Gray) and throws them into a wacky action-adventure movie. Van Helsing does something similar but uses horror monsters like the Wolfman, Frankenstein's monster, Dr. Jekyll & Mr. Hyde, and Dracula to make a wacky action-adventure movie. It makes no sense, and that's perfectly fine. At least it's a more fun mash-up of horror movie monsters than The Monster Squad. You might have some nostalgia for The Monster Squad but I'd argue that Van Helsing has aged much better than it.

Anyway, the plot is almost able to weave all these characters into a cohesive narrative. But more importantly, it has Kate Beckinsale in a tight corset. Obviously a sign of a great movie.

Here's a trailer. For vampire movies that are more action than horror, I think this is one of the best.

Comparisons of scenes in each of the three Nosferatu movies. But beware, the video compares scenes all the way to the end of the movie!