HBO perpetuates what I find most annoying about pop-culture consumers' current fascination with vampires (especially in connection with the paranormal-romance vampire, unfortunately propagated by a recent spate of genre books): The linking of the myth to the movies, and the linking of the movies to an alternative lifestyle.
In two documentaries, to coincide with its fictional series about vampires, HBO offers a look at the vampire in history, "True Bloodlines: Vampire Legends," and then the vampire in popular culture, "True Bloodlines: A New Type."
Producer Riccardo DiLoreto tells "A New Type" will take viewers into the "the vamp lifestyle," among other topics.
No, please.
It's not that I particularly care if baby-fat softies and rail-thin social-awkwards dress like characters from "The Crow" and hang out in their living rooms sipping each other's blood from pewter goblets, it's more that the media's constant seasonal penchant for documenting these folks dilutes the actual mythological importance of the vampire in human culture.
Furthermore, it relegates genre cinema to the ghetto, as the invariable intercutting of Max Schreck or Bela Lugosi with the hastily put-together candlelit interview sets connects — irreparably — the one to the other.
In any case, these two rehashes come to screens Sept. 6. And in another sign of the decline of good criticism of the vampire in genre cinema, Fangoria's news plug on the series refers to F.W. Murnau's 1922 "Nosferatu" as the "illegitimate silent film incarnation" of Dracula. Well, if by that the writer meant a script that largely adhered to Bram Stoker's original text and stands as the most effective depiction of the story until Herzog remade it in 1979, yes I suppose the film is just a celluloid bastard.
Who let these guys be the mouthpiece for the form?
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