Charles Bramesco - Vampire Movies

Wes Anderson

BY SOPHIE MONKS KAUFMAN

New York Movies

BY MARK ASCH

Charles Bramesco is a former staff writer for Rolling Stone and his work has previously appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, Vanity Fair, Newsweek, Forbes, The A.V. Club, Vulture, The Dissolve and Pitchfork. He lives in Brooklyn, he is a graduate of New Orleans Tulane University and his favourite film is Boogie Nights.

Australia

HarperCollins Publishers (Australia) Pty. Ltd.

Level 13, 201 Elizabeth Street

Sydney, NSW 2000, Australia

http://www.harpercollins.com.au

Canada

HarperCollins Canada

Bay Adelaide Centre, East Tower

22 Adelaide Street West, 41st Floor

Toronto, ON, M5H 4E3, Canada

http://www.harpercollins.ca

India

HarperCollins India

A 75, Sector 57

Noida, Uttar Pradesh 201 301, India

http://www.harpercollins.co.in

New Zealand

HarperCollins Publishers (New Zealand) Limited

P.O. Box 1

Auckland, New Zealand

http://www.harpercollins.co.nz

United Kingdom

HarperCollins Publishers Ltd.

1 London Bridge Street

London, SE1 9GF

http://www.harpercollins.co.uk

United States

HarperCollins Publishers Inc.

195 Broadway

New York, NY 10007

http://www.harpercollins.com

Contents

CHAPTER ONE
THE FERAL VAMPIRE
Vampirus Nosferatus

CHAPTER TWO
THE DEBONAIR VAMPIRE
Vampirus Domesticus

CHAPTER THREE
THE CLOWN VAMPIRE
Vampirus Comidicus

CHAPTER FOUR
THE COOL VAMPIRE
Vampirus Nihilisticus

CHAPTER FIVE
THE BLACK VAMPIRE
Vampirus Africanus

CHAPTER SIX
THE FEMALE VAMPIRE
Vampirus Vampira

CHAPTER SEVEN
THE WESTERN VAMPIRE
Vampirus Varminticus

CHAPTER EIGHT
THE CHILDISH VAMPIRE
Vampirus Juvenalius

CHAPTER NINE
THE HEARTTHROB VAMPIRE
Vampirus Smolderiam

CHAPTER TEN
ASSORTED SPECIMENS FROM AROUND THE GLOBE

William Collins

An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers
1 London Bridge Street

London SE1 9GF

www.WilliamCollinsBooks.com

This eBook first published in Great Britain by William Collins in 2018

Copyright Charles Bramesco and Little White Lies 2018

Charles Bramesco asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work

Series editors: David Jenkins, Tom Killingbeck, Clive Wilson

Cover illustration by Christopher DeLorenzo

Interior illustrations by Laurne Boglio

Design and layout: Oliver Stafford, Laurne Boglio, Sophie Mo

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins

Source ISBN: 9780008256616

Ebook Edition September 2018 ISBN: 9780008256623

Version: 2018-10-01

For Bram Stoker,
who gave us the night,
and Bram Norton,
who gave me the gene.

Close-Ups is a series of pocket guides to the world of film from Little White Lies and William Collins. In the title you are holding, our hope is that you find a fresh, personal exploration of a particular director, actor, movement or genre. We hope that you will join our authors in their efforts to look at movies through a new lens.

David Jenkins

Editor

Little White Lies Magazine

What sets the vampire apart from the werewolf, the zombie, the mummy and the rest of the frightful coterie thats paraded through horror cinema over the past century and change? The simple answer and its because the answer is not simple that the book now in your hands exists at allis charisma. A vampires got personality. The vampire has thoughts that go beyond eat or kill or braaaaains. Its capable of surprising an audience, of having internal complexity that no walking killing machine can. Poke around in the strange psychological brew of sex and death from which the vampire emerged, and the figure might even start to look a little tragic.

But only sometimes. The vampire genus collects a wider variety of species than any other monster, appearing in all manner of shapes and sizes, with wildly inconsistent physical traits and abilities. Even a seven-foot rat-faced aberration like Nosferatus Count Orlok shares at least a few strands of DNA with the mute enchantress that Grace Jones portrays in Vamp. Set aside the creature in question, and little binds one vampire film to another; theyve assumed all genres, all tones and covered every corner of the planet. This book attempts to survey the many subspecies of silver-screen vampire for a cinematic field guide, organizing the vast canon through criteria of style and content rather than a historical timeline. Use it as a practical resource on your own travels through cinema, directing you to a new path or illuminating the one youre already on.

O nce upon a time in Weimar Germany, fledgling movie studio Prana Film needed a hit. Founder Albin Grau wanted to mount a project based on an idea a Serbian farmer had given him during his tenure in military service, about a man rising from the dead to walk the Earth and spread terror. Like most of Europe, he had read Bram Stokers 1897 novel Dracula and figured that it would be as good a place as any to start. Grau and Prana cofounder Enrico Dieckmann soon contacted screenwriter Henrik Galeen with an unusual, specific assignment. There was no way that the still-green Prana would shell out to actually purchase the rights to adapt Stokers book, so it fell to Galeen to alter the source material just enough to protect them from litigation, but not so much that the story and its crowd-pleasing villain would be rendered unrecognizable. The Transformers have no-budget imitator Transmorphers, and Dracula had Nosferatu; Galeen retained the particulars of Stokers plot and the core elements of his title character, leaving no room for those familiar with the novel to mistake the fiend. But in order to legally cover both his and his employer's hindquarters, Galeen swapped out a couple of key names. He re-christened the villain Count Orlok, and bestowed upon the film a new title, taken from the scripts hushed word alluding to the bird of death: