The 1987 film The Lost Boys was one of the earliest to feature teenage vampires. Directed by Joel Schumacher the film starred ‘Brat Pack’ actors Kiefer Sutherland, Corey Haim and Corey Feldman, and the plot centred around a California town in which one of the rival youth gangs turns out to be a coven of vampires. The human teenagers are eventually pitted against the Lost Boys in a final battle, and overcome them in a variety of imaginative ways, as the vampires are impaled on arrows and stakes, and in the case of Sutherland’s character, a set of antique deer antlers. Another teenage vampire movie was Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1992) which featured Kristy Swanson in the role later to make a star of Sarah Michelle Geller in the television show of the same name. The film co-starred Luke Perry alongside another Sutherland, Donald. Buffy’s undead nemesis was played by Rutger Hauer, who meets his end at the High School Prom, where he and his cohorts are ‘staked’
Dracula and Interview with the Vampire
While 1992 saw the start of one vampire franchise in Buffy, it also saw the re-imagining of one of the oldest in Bram Stoker’s Dracula. The lavish Francis Ford Coppola blockbuster was a far-cry from the Hammer Horror films of the Sixties and Seventies, and Dracula, played here by Gary Oldman, was certainly a different animal than when depicted by Bela Lugosi or Christopher Lee. While never adhering slavishly to the plot of the Bram Stoker novel, the film does stay true to large parts of it, and the scenes in which Dracula meets his demise are a typical example of this. As in the novel he is stabbed in the heart with a knife, but the film also requires his throat to be slit. Even this does not cause him to crumble into dust, as one might expect, and he only fully dies after later being decapitated.
Another movie adapted from a novel was Interview with the Vampire (1994) for which Anne Rice wrote the screenplay from her own book. Once again, these vampires were young (or at least young looking) and attractive. Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt took the lead roles, with Antonio Banderas, Christian Slater and child star Kirsten Dunst supporting. Unlike most films of the genre, which tend to feature human slayers such as Buffy or Van Helsing, the vampires in Rice’s world are threatened only by each other. Even so, they prove hard to kill. Cruise’s character Lestat is fed a corpse, which should prove fatal to him, before having his throat slit and being buried in a swamp. He returns, only to be set on fire, but even this doesn’t finish him off. Other vampires are not so lucky, and are killed by sunlight, fire or decapitation.
From Dusk Til Dawn and Blade
The 1996 action horror flick From Dusk Til Dawn featured vampires that were far easier to kill. Breaking from modern tradition the bloodsuckers were true grotesque monsters rather than romantic anti-heroes, with George Clooney providing human sex appeal. Co-written, co-produced and co-starring Quentin Tarantino, and directed by Robert Rodriguez, the film is unsurprisingly gruesome and violent, with vampires being despatched conventionally by Holy Water and stakes, but also by means of shotguns, crossbows and pneumatic drills. Blade (1998) then upped the anti for spectacular un-dead deaths, as the ‘Daywalker’, the half-human vampire slayer played by Wesley Snipes used a variety of ingenious methods to combat his enemies. Silver stakes were some of the more normal weapons in an armoury that included ‘Vampire mace’ - a cocktail of garlic and silver nitrate in a spray-can, a UV flashlight, and an anti-coagulant formula named EDTA which caused a violent reaction with vampire blood, which in turn, caused vampires to explode
Twilight and New Moon
It was left to the world of comedy to come up with deaths that could match Blade for imagination as the 2009 British film Lesbian Vampire Killers, which starred James Corden, Mathew Horne and Paul McGann saw the cursed ladies of the title impaled on branches, decapitated with frying pans, showered (quite literally) in Holy Water, hit with Holy Water balloons made from condoms, and skewered with sacred swords. None of which could save the stars from being severely mauled by film critics.
But now the most talked about vampires in cinema are a very different breed. Impervious to sunlight, impossible to stake, and not at all worried by religious iconography, the vampires from the adaptations of Stephanie Meyer’s novels Twilight (2008) and New Moon (2009) may be as young and cool as those in The Lost Boys, indeed Robert Pattinson could be at the head of a brand new ‘Brat Pack’, but they are also, like the undead in Interview with the Vampire, a danger only to themselves. Humans can’t hurt these beautiful creatures, who must be dismembered and burnt to be destroyed, a feat only another vampire - or a werewolf - would be strong enough to manage.
