Fright Night: A film review

 - Vancouver, British Columbia - Just to get this straightened out right now, I am reviewing the 1985 Fright Night, not the 2011 film which was a remake that you may or may not have known about. I still have yet to see the new one, but I'm interested in checking it out. Back in that day, vampires weren't what they are today. You know, they weren't particularly romantic, or a teen fantasy and they definitely didn't sparkle. But they weren't really that popular. Vampires were a big deal in the 1930s when Dracula first hit the big screen and again in the 1950s when the Hammer Horror company brought back the Dracula name and that continued well into the 1970s. But in the 1980s, there wasn't much of note in the genre as horror movies had taken a turn toward the slasher genre with Halloween and Friday the 13th and movies like that. This is where Fright Night came in. It payed homage to the vampire films of old, while doing something new and interesting for the 1980s. Later, vampires would continue to be popularized by movies like The Lost Boys. It's a chance to see what it would be like if vampires were around today, unlike most of the classic films which were period pieces.

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Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter: A film review

 - Vancouver, British Columbia - Like most people, when I first heard of Seth Grahame-Smith's novel, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I chuckled. Steve Ferguson of Sour Grapes Winery has previous reviewed the novel, but this year, the film adaptation was released, which was also penned by Grahame-Smith, which shouldn't be entirely surprising considering Grahame-Smith's undergraduate studies in film and his previous work in television. Fantasy horror action films aren't too common these days, at least as feature films, thus when the opportunity came along to check out this strange looking film, I jumped at it.

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Shadow of the Vampire: A film review

 - Vancouver, British Columbia - I know Halloween is over, but I figured that after watching this movie, I might as well share my thoughts on it. While preparing my character for Halloween, Count Orlok, I did a great deal of research by watching a collection of vampire movies. I think I overdid it because I wound up being haunted by the creatures in my dreams. That's not the first time this has happened when I try and take on a character. Perhaps it's part of the curse of being an actor... it can be difficult to shed the part. It makes me wonder what actor Max Schreck's process was for his chilling performance of Count Orlok in the 1922 classic Nosferatu. His depiction of Orlok was so chilling that there were rumours circulating that Schreck was an actual vampire. Of course, this is absurd, but a fun idea.

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Nosferatu: A film review

 - Vancouver, British Columbia - While I'm not 100% sure that Nosferatu is the first vampire movie ever made, it certainly is the most famous, long lasting vampire film from the silent era. It predates the most famous version of Dracula by 9 years, and is considered still by many to be the best vampire movie ever made. I don't know if I would agree with that statement, but I can certainly understand the appeal and can appreciate all that the film paved the way for. I cannot deny that in many ways, this film is still very effective today.

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Horror of Dracula: A film review

 - Vancouver, British Columbia - While it can be argued that the most iconic portrayal of Count Dracula is Bella Lugosi's 1931 performance, it was Christopher Lee who played Dracula the most amount of times. In the 1950s, a British production company called Hammer Films came to remake many of the classic horror films which had a long run in the 1930s and 1940s. They started in 1957 with The Curse of Frankenstein, which was a box office success, so they sought to not only make a sequel, but capitalize on other popular monsters that served Universal Pictures so well a couple of decades before. Their logical choice of course was Count Dracula. The new version was called Dracula in its native Britain, but to avoid confusion with the Universal version, they called it Horror of Dracula in North America.

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