Hbo Urges Viewers To Drink Blood Responsibly

Stuff like this makes me wonder if I should start a "Can the Vampire Movie Be Saved?" Discussion thread. I bet that would stir up quite a bit of controversy here.

Well, we could get back to the vampire as a "glorified zombie", as they were in the European legends. They used to have that same zombie "mystique", a loved family member coming back as a mindless phantasm to suck your blood, that's potent stuff, and it hasn't been used for a while. Concentrating on the vampire as a persona has gotten beyond boring.

And that's a damned shame. My impression of vamps, from when I read about the legends in books on horror legends as a kid (can't recall the titles, but they were about movie monsters & such by a guy named Daniel Cohen, if memory serves), was that besides being turned by the bite of one, one could be created by God's punishing (or Satan rewarding?) a person that lived their life in a despicably evil manner. I always kind of thought, having grown up on Hammer & Universal vampire films by that point, that vamps were suave and noble in bearing, perhaps, but thoroughly EVIL. A concept that SHOULD be more interesting by MILES than a glorified zombie, particularly w/ the returning loved one scenario. Anne Rice did little to progress this concept, IMO. The mystique of power, and maybe even the crushing world weariness eternal life can often bring were the only contributions, and probably not even original to her (although she did market them for mass consumption better than anyone else to that point).

The new web campaign seems mildly interesting. Support Equality for all citizens (vampires were people too). Enough for me to check out the season premiere at least.

They've been running these ads on HBO for a few weeks. I've been hearing about this show for a while, but honestly, the footage I've seen from it doesn't look all that great. I'll watch the season premiere, but the vibe I'm getting from the acting and cinematography (it has a very DTV look to it) isn't a good one.

I love how on the main 'Chud Forums' page the title was pared down to
'Hbo Urges Viewers To Drink'...

I figured there was something following this.
'The Kool-Aid', I postulated.

...imagine my surprise.

What if it's a sexy persona?

Ever sit in a strip club too long, to the point you kind of become desentitized to the nakedness all around you? Same thing.

I've never had enough money to do that.

Side note: I think I finally fell in love with Buffy the Vampire Slayer when they had an episode that poked fun at goth kids who all dressed in puffy shirts and wanted to be Lestat.

Regarding the series, if it moves away from that "vampires are sexy" thing and plays them more like lepers or sex offenders or Mandy Patinkin with a large, freckled bald head, that could be interesting enough.

Agreed. Emphatically. I'm tired of the emo whiny vampires we're usually stuck with in films and on TV lately. I miss the old school vampires we'd get with the Hammer films and even Bela Lugosi's Dracula. Yeah, I grew up with 'em via Creature Features and Famous Monsters mags, and thus am more used to them, but Bela and Christopher Lee had STYLE. They had an aristocratic bearing to them, and their evil was very seductive to their eventual victims (hell, Lee had girls more or less throwing themselves at him in some of those flicks. Same as Frank Langella when he played Dracula on Broadway and on film in '79). that's really missing today.

Also, I'm getting tired of hordes of vampires going to town - it worked fine in Blade and From Dusk Til Dawn, but when you get to films like 30 Days of Night, those hordes weren't far from your average group of zombies. Characterization went right out the window - you didn't give a shit if this particular vampire got whacked or not, whereas you get more emotionally involved when there's one bad guy to root against. Plus, due to so many sequels, you knew you'd see Dracula again (part of the fun was finding out how he'd be resurrected in the next flick).

Isn't this from Alan Ball? I'm guessing we're going to get some angsty vampires.

I really think it would be very interesting for someone to discard the Victorian sexing up of vampires and do something with their traditional incarnations. For some reason I always found the folk tales from Greece and the Balkans much scarier than Varney The Vampire or Dracula. No motivation except mindless killing until whole regions were completely empty of the living.

All this nonsense about rules and secret societies and such only serve as hooks for thirteen year olds to obsess about.

Flipping through HBO last night, I caught what appeared to be a "20/20"-esque program detailing the whole vampire situation in the show. How a japanese company came up with a synthetic blood substitute that vampires could drink instead of real blood, which led to the vamps going online and reaching a consensus (by way of webcams, apparently) to make their presence known to the general population. By the time the show aired, the vamps had a lobbyist and some lady that was their apparent legal spokesperson ("Truthfully, can you be killed by a stake through the heart?" "Well, Bob, I'd imagine a stake through the heart would kill anyone. Why make this about us?")

My favorite bit was the chick that only dated vampires. Folks like that were given the name "Fangbangers". The vampire boyfriend only mentioned that he was "potent".

Fangbangers. Fuckin A.

Fangbangers.

But, would a vampire's image show up on a webcam? That's the question. Or were there just these blank screens showing empty rooms in the background talking to each other?

Damn, now you've piqued (peaked) my interest. I must know more. To the internets!