I like Stephen King's vampires. Of course, recent culture has made a hard U-Turn from the traditional formula of scary vampires. We can give special credit to the Twilight series; something my ten year old loves and I -- well, I love my daughters, so I endure it. But truth is, I like the scary stuff. The original, true, Dracula was pretty good.
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The Past Wasn't Always So Scary:
For all the recent complaining that modern, romantic, vampires are not very scary -- we should also admit that the past is chalk full of vampires that didn't scare. Vampire movies that were meant to scare! The 1960's -- 1970's pumped out some pretty big stinkers. I've been watching "Dracula has risen" (1969), and must admit -- I'm not one bit scared. Not even jumpy. My wife and I laughed when Dracula made his great appearance. And this seems to be true of the entire era.
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Of course, these Vampire movies always dodge back a hundred years or more. King did something brilliant by moving the Vampire to our world. (Well, our world via 1970's).
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Stephen King Weighs In:
For King's own views on the modern vampire crisis; the taming of the vamps, King has an outstanding short essay short essay for the first volume of the upcoming DC Comics titled "Suck On This." (I like that).
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Here's a great line: What should [vampires] be? Killers, honey. Stone killers who never get enough of that tasty Type-A. Bad boys and girls. Hunters. In other words, Midnight America. Red white and blue, accent on the red. Those vamps got hijacked by a lot of soft-focus romance." Ahhh, it's music to my ears.
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King saves his best lines for the end. He writes, "In the end, though, it’s all about giving back the teeth that the current “sweetie-vamp” craze has, by and large, stolen from the bloodsuckers. It’s about making them scary again."
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READ KING'S FULL TEXT HERE:
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