Blog-a-Thon: Vampires!

Last month, Nathaniel R called for a Blog-a-Thon on my own favorite cinematic creatures of the season, vampires, and we can look forward to watching it seep along today. Update: That's not seeping, that's gushing. Halloween Update: 53 participating blogs so far. Fantastic.

Halloween Update #2: Nathaniel's drawn up an index of the Blog-a-Thon that looks like the Table of Contents to an excellent anthology on vampire movies. Extraordinarily well done.

Introducing write-ups of half a dozen vampire movies, Flickhead notes that "the age of AIDS has lent a stultifying nihilism to the genre, making the contemporary vampire pictures seem less concerned with simple-minded escapism than harrowing and incurable diseases."

Richard Gibson has a string of entries related to his "Dream Double Bill #17": Martin and The Addiction, "the two most interesting modern day Vampire films."

"There are no brides. There is no Dracula," writes Peter Nellhaus. "Looking past the misleading title, this is one of my favorite Hammer films."

Updated.

As it happens, the subject of today's entry in Not Coming to a Theater Near You's "31 Days of Horror" extravaganza is a vampire movie. Chiranjit Goswami returns to The Hunger "without much anticipation only to be surprised at how the film's shamelessly sumptuous style remains so utterly absorbing and expertly effective. It also made me realize I had become somewhat of a biased blockhead. Though the claim that [Tony] Scott's film lacks sufficient substance may hold merit, The Hunger constantly displays itself to be crafted remarkably well."

Updates: Nick Davis: "For me, Bram Stoker's Dracula distills and sacralizes a form of aestheticized passion, the kind that insists on both the virtuosity and the foolishness in artistic experiment and self-exhibition. The film finds its director living on the outward edge of his mind's eye and inviting a plethora of fellow artists to join him there, all of them enraptured with the arts that constitute the cinema if also a bit skeptical, maybe even a bit cynical, as regards the final product.... It's as though Coppola, his own career all but scuttled and his chosen medium increasingly eulogized, is throwing every new and old inspiration he can find at the screen, and saying, baying, crying, laughing, joking, fuming, declaiming, 'Here, for better and for worse, is a movie that's alive.'"

At european-films.net, Boyd van Hoeij reviews "a rollicking ride that is funnier than it is scary, though the tone of Frostbiten remains admirably on the spooky side of Scream and Scary Movie, never stopping to knowingly wink at the audience."

And Nathaniel's tracking dozens more.

Posted by dwhudson at October 30, 2006 8:38 AM