Monster Scholar

Google is celebrating Bram Stoker's 165th birthday with a doodle featuring the infamous count and his brides facing off against Harker and his band of merry vampire-hunters. Stoker is credited with creating the archetype of the vampire we all know and love--the blood-sucking aristocrat with a snazzy cape and Transylvanian accent-- but his other works, without the larger than life Count, are often overlooked. So get stoked and discover a new side of Stoker with these reading recommendations: Dracula's Guest and Other Weird Stories (1914)  Published posthumously, this collection of Stoker short stories capitalized on the success of Stoker's novel Dracula . The story that makes this collection worth reading is the titular "Dracula's Guest." Intended to be the original first chapter of Dracula , it follows an unnamed Englishman (assumed to be Jonathan Harker) on his way to Dracula's castle when he makes a stop at a local graveyard. There he discovers th...

I picked this book up on a whim at my local book store and was glad I did. This anthology of female vampire tales combines old classics like Carmilla and Clarimonde with more contemporary tales by Stephen King and Richard Matheson. Here's a run down of some of my favorites. In One for The Road , Stephen Kings gives us a short vignette of what would become Salem's Lot.  Here the dreaded place is Jeru salem's Lot and it's the site of many unexplained disappearances at the hands of vampires who live on that unhallowed ground. In this story two natives of a nearby town try to help a city fellow who leaves his family and their car mired in a snowbank in the Lot.   The Cloak by Robert Bloch is a fun little number about a man who desperately needs a custume for a high end Halloween Party. He gets more than he bargained for when his authentic cloak begins working vampiric changes on him. He also chances to meet another cloak owner at the party.   ...

I have the privilege  today of letting you know about a little gem of a film that might just change the way you see vampires in modern cinema. Despite its current popularly, the vampire has been on a recent down slope as evidenced by parodies like Vampires Suck or Transylmania, that take aim at the more sparkly members of the vampire race. But never fear vampire fans, Midnight Son is here to give vampires their bite back Looking at the trailer, the film follows the life of Jacob who works as a security guard by night because of a rare skin disease that prevents him from going out during the day. In addition to this solar sensitivity, Jacob has gotten a hankering for the red stuff. At first he is able to satisfy this unnatural thirst with animal blood, but then he moves on to a human vintage. Jacob meets a local bartender named Mary and is lovestruck, but his thirst for blood might keep them apart as authorities focus in on Jacob as the main suspect in a string of murders. ...

I posted my thoughts about vampires and consumerism awhile back, so I caught myself giggling out loud at the sight of these advertisements geared specifically towards vampires. TrueBlood has created an alternate reality where vampires exist, supporting this alternate dimension with websites like the Fellowship of the Sun Church and American Vampire League, as well as products like the titular TruBlood synthetic blood drink. These devices create a complex meta-text around the TrueBlood series that expands and reinterprets the themes of the show. These targeted vampire advertisements are a part of this meta-text. These ads cleverly propose not to sell us their products directly by using vampires as their demographic. This is an ingenious move, because it makes the product exclusive, sexy and we humans want it just as badly as any fang-banger. We, the thirsty consumers, crave these products and are the true vampire audience for these ads. Brilliant

I’m fighting a nasty cold over here so I figured I’d make a list of my favorite unconventional vampires. When someone mentions the word “vampire” you think of a fanged creature who sucks blood, burns in daylight, sleeps in a coffin and dons a fabulous cape. But that’s where you’d be wrong. This bunch of bloodsuckers challenges the vampiric stereotypes to include energy vamps, vamps without fangs and even dancing undead!   Rise: Blood Hunter Starring Lucy Liu after her fall from Charlie’s Angels fame, Blood Hunter is about an out of control bunch of vamps who turn Lucy’s character into a creature of the night. Sans fangs, these bloodsuckers prefer small daggers to get the job done. The movie was horrible, but some consider it worth seeing Liu scantily clad in a bra and covered in blood.   Martin This barely pubescent bloodsucker uses sedatives to knock out his victims, and then slits their wrists to drink their blood. Persecuted by his overly religious family, Martin believes...

As most of you know, I was one of many people who were looking to Daybreakers as the cure for the common vampire. That is not the say that the film did not succeed on this score and I think it does. Honestly, I enjoyed Daybreakers. In a market dominated by touchy-feely vampires, it was refreshing to see vampires depicted as honest-to-goodness bloodsuckers who devolve into monstrous subsiders when they don’t get enough juice. That said, the only thing that might vex audiences is the fact that Daybreakers is really two movies in one. Daybreakers starts off as a moody, sci-fi noir thriller and the comparison of Daybreakers to films like Gattaca and The Island are spot on. Here is a world on the edge of extinction, vampirism is a virus that has spread the world over and the last vestiges of humanity are struggling to survive while evading capture by the undead elite. Enter Edward Dalton, a sympathetic, self-hating vampire scientist who joins with a band of human rebels to find the cure t...

With the blockbuster success of the vampire in text and film over the past few years, it seems only fitting that January’s Monster of the Month should be the vampire. But the quirky spelling of the “vampyre” here points to this article's focus on the very beginning of the vampire in John Polidori's "The Vampyre," a story that introduces the vampire as we know him today despite his many modern permutations. It was a dark and stormy night in June 1816 at the Villa Diodati in Geneva, Switzerland when a singular meeting of minds spawned the twin nightmares of Frankenstein and the literary vampire. Gathered around the villa’s hearth were the libertine George Gordon Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley the poet, and his wife Mary Godwin Shelly, the daughter of William Godwin and an accomplished author in her own right. Hanging back in the shadows were Claire Clairmont, Mary’s flighty stepsister and John Polidori, Byron’s physician who harbored literary aspirations of his ow...

If 2008 was the year of the zombie in the horror icon zodiac then 2009, looking toward 2010 is undoubtedly the year of the vampire. Films like 30 Days of Night paved the way for a new race of vampires in the form of HBO’s True Blood and the Twilight craze. But despite the hype, the question becomes inevitably why? Past trends in horror have drawn on the fears of the culture that produces them. The slasher flicks of the 80s spoke to the prevailing fear of AIDS as a consequence of drug use and premarital sex. Likewise, the science fiction horror films of the 20s featured aliens as a metaphor for fears of communism and the Red Scare. In an era of horror dominated by torture porn fare like Saw and the Americanization of foreign horror, (The Ring, The Grudge) what is it about the new millennia that summons the ghastly specter of the Nosferatu from its dusty coffin? The shadow of the millennial vampire cast its pall over the US at time when most of us where lying in the ruins of a virule...

Daybreakers has to be the most anticipated vampire movie of 2010 for me. Lionsgate has released another TV spot (via Fearnet ) to hype the release of the film in January. It features the appearance of a teenage vampire who looks like she could be a fan of Hannah Montana, sipping what must be blood from a coffee cup, with a questioning look on her face (are you sure this is O+?). It also gives a glimpse of projectile vampire vomit after Ethan Hawke’s character injects a test subject with a blood substitute. (I feel fine, really…[insert vampire vomit here]). Check out Ms. Harker’s take on the Human Milking PSA spot for Daybreakers at Musings Across a Continuum .

Meet and converse with them Marvel at their pale skin Wonder how they chew on their pointy... Teeth and hair are beauty They know it's their duty To be countess in their hearts and their... Minds that have to whisper See in them a sister Look into their eyes and you'll become Transylvanian Concubine. —Rasputina When reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula , it’s hard to forget his trio of mysterious and threatening concubines. Dark, seductive and hungry, the brides of Dracula first appear in an encounter with the hapless Jonathan Harker. Harker has ignored Count Dracula’s warnings against exploring the castle by himself, and walks straight into the arms of the tree beautiful brides: They came close to me, and looked at me for some time, and then whispered together. Two were dark, and had high aquiline noses, like the Count, and great dark, piercing eyes, that seemed to be almost red when contrasted with the pale yellow moon…The other was fair, as fair as can be, with great masses of gold...

As Victorian scholar and a connoisseur of vampire literature I was excited when I came across Mr. Darcy, Vampyre , a modern continuation of Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice . I imagined the proud and obstinate Darcy as a man who struggles to tell his bride Elizabeth that he is a creature of the night. I hoped that the book would use the tropes of vampire literature in a way that commented on Austen’s original, or at the very least provide some steamy passages between Elizabeth and Darcy. I was sorely disappointed on both points. Grange’s work is an unappetizing mix of cheap melodrama and tired vampire lore. The former is not surprising when you consider the source. Pride and Prejudice is filled with frivolous women like Mrs. Bennett, whose only goal in life is to see her daughters well married and constantly swoons from shocks to her delicate nerves. But as to the second part of Grange’s novel, there can be no excuse for the mishandling of the prevalent themes of vampire prose. Mr. D...

At the very mention of vampire plants most people conjure up the image of Audrey II, the behemoth singing vegetable of the 1986 film musical Little Shop of Horrors , in which Seymour Krelborn, a spineless shop assistant discovers an obscure plant with a thirst for human blood. But Audrey II is just the latest in a long line of vampire plants in fiction, stretching back more than a century to Phil Robinson’s 1881 tale “The Man-Eating Tree” and Fred M. White’s “The Purple Terror,” written in 1898 during the Spanish-American War. Set against the backdrop of this imperialist struggle, British author Fred. M. White crafts a tale of horror and conquest in the heart of the Cuban jungle. West Point naval dandy Lieutenant Will Scarlett must brave the unexplored terrain to deliver a letter from Captain Driver of the Yankee Doodle in Porto Rico Bay to Admiral Lake at Port Anna. His journey will take him into a portion of Cuba dominated by pro-Spanish insurgents where he meets Tito, a man who agre...