’Tis the season to thirst after immortal, bloodsucking hotties. We said as much five sunsets ago, and after over a dozen stories, a Breaking Dawn — Part Two screening, and a cliffhanger of a What We Do in the Shadows season finale, we feel it even more in our cold, mortal bones. And while we remain firm in our belief that October, when the air is full of nips, is the most vampiric month of the year, we will relent: every season is vampire season. We hope you enjoy these stories all year long.
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Velcome to Vampire Veek
Kristen Stewart’s assistant Megan Stalter was gracious enough to introduce our week-long package of vampire stories on Twitter, reading from a letter that was definitely written by Bella Swan herself. Hot. Tasty. Nasty. We’d absolutely watch a Twilight reboot starring Kristen Stewart’s assistant.
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Matt Berry Has a Type
The actor is known for playing ridiculous characters with a straight face — the stupider the better. Case in point, his portrayal of horny English vampire and longtime Staten Island resident Laszlo Cravensworth, imagined specifically for Berry by What We Do in the Shadows creator Jemaine Clement. “Some things I feel are only funny if he says it,†Clement explains in this profile of Berry.
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What We Do in the Shadows’ Harvey Guillén Is Thrilled to See Guillermo Coming Into His Own
As Shadows neared the end of its third season, we also called up Guillén about Van Helsing descendant Guillermo’s Machiavellian evolution this season, and the importance of chosen family, even when that chosen family is a bunch of thousand-year-old vampires still living as outer-borough roommates.
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The Enduring Legacy of Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Rewatching the series as an adult, Vulture critic Angelica Jade Bastién realized why her preteen self fell so quickly for Buffy: the opening sequence. The first few minutes are a simple twist on horror film tropes, which Buffy mined over the course of its seven seasons. It crystallizes what made Buffy so fresh 20 years ago and still fresh today.
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Twilight’s Final Vampire Battle Is Better Than Anything Marvel Has Ever Done
At regular but sometimes unpredictable intervals, Vulture selects a film to watch with our readers as part of our Wednesday Night Movie Club. This week’s selection — chosen on the occasion of Vampire Veek — came from writer Rebecca Alter and social editor Wolfgang Ruth. Relive their screening of The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn — Part 2 here.
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What’s Your Favorite Vampire Movie?
Vulture staffers gathered together to recommend their favorite vampire movies. Nicholas Quah recommended Mr. Vampire (1985), Rachel Handler recommended Let the Right One In (Låt den Rätte Komma In, 2008), Alison Willmore recommended Let’s Scare Jessica to Death (1971), Emily Heller recommended Mom’s Got a Date with a Vampire (2000), Melvin Backman recommended Irma Vep (1996), and so on, and so forth.
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An Oral History of Queen of the Damned
Queen of the Damned is a movie about a vampire who awakens from a protracted slumber and becomes a rock star. “It sounds like a bad Saturday Night Live skit,†says Richard Gibbs, who wrote the music for the film alongside Korn front man Jonathan Davis. To some, that’s exactly how the movie plays. Here’s the story of how an Anne Rice novel became a Hollywood saga involving Aaliyah and the guy from Korn.
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Vampires, Ranked (by Hotness)
The vampire is a mythical, at least to our knowledge, creature that has appeared in fiction for centuries. Throughout those centuries, a few things have remained consistent about vampires: They have fangs, they can’t go out in the sun, they are immortal, they need to be invited into houses, they can fly, they are generally driven by a thirst for human blood. But one must not forget perhaps the most important trait of vampires: They are very, very hot.
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The Best Last Line in a Vampire Movie Is in The Lost Boys
As the quintessential vampire movie of the MTV generation, The Lost Boys has a great deal to offer: the sounds of INXS and Echo & the Bunnymen, Kiefer Sutherland looking sexy-scary even though he’s sporting a mullet, the first appearance of both Coreys in recorded film history, and Tina Turner’s saxophone guy tearing it up on a California boardwalk stage. But perhaps the most impressive element in The Lost Boys is the fact that it contains the best last line of any vampire movie ever made.
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Forever Knight Is the Best Vampire Cop Show Ever Made (in Canada)
In the early-to-mid-’90s, no one pretended cop shows had to resemble reality. Instead, major networks produced shows like Cop Rock, a jaw-droppingly strange singing procedural, and Moloney, about a cop who’s also a shrink. Unsurprisingly, both Cop Rock and Moloney ran for a single season each before disappearing amid the various Law & Orders. But from this era of “cop who is also X†came the unlikely cult hit Forever Knight, which boldly asked: What if a cop were a vampire … and, moreover, Canadian?
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Krysten Ritter Answers Every Question We Have About Vamps
Warmhearted and sweet are not adjectives typically used to describe vampire movies. But both apply to Amy Heckerling’s Vamps, the 2012 comedy set and partially shot in New York about a pair of vampy besties (Krysten Ritter and Alicia Silverstone) who, thanks to their immortality, are perpetually stuck in their 20s. Here, as the headline promises, Ritter answers every question we have about the film.
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A Casino Is the Perfect Place for a Vampire
Earlier this month, New York Comic Con saw the very first in-person What We Do in the Shadows panel since before the pandemic began. Showrunner Paul Simms, writers Sam Johnson and Sarah Naftalis, and director Yana Gorskaya were joined by cast members Natasia Demetriou, Harvey Guillén, and Matt Berry for the discussion with Kayvan Novak joining in via Zoom. The conversation happened to occur just in time for Vampire Veek.
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Most Shows Would Be Better If They Were About Vampires
Either the words vampire au ao3 mean nothing to you or you are sick in the head. The short of it: many, if not most, TV shows would be improved if they were about vampires instead of people. In honor of Vampire Week, here are but some of those shows and their characters, including Frasier and Niles, who are already skulking creatures of the night.
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A Field Guide to What We Do in the Shadows’ Energy Vampire
In its third season, What We Do in the Shadows decided to explore a creature of its own creation: the energy vampire. Originally formulated as an opportunity for an extra joke, Colin Robinson — played to perfection by Mark Proksch — quickly became a central figure in the dramas and machinations of his blood-sucking roommates. hrough meticulous research and conversations with showrunner Paul Simms and Proksch himself, we’ve gathered every piece of information on energy vamps available to the general public at this current time.
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What We Do in the Shadows Accepts Its Humanity
An ode to the final episode of a tremendous season three, in which a show that has been historically about a group of vampires who don’t give a shit about anything, for whom consequences rarely exist and messes get cleaned up by a reliable familiar, tackles something a little bit different: growth.
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The Greatest Place to Be a Vampire Was New York in the ’90s
With apologies to Transylvania and Sunnydale, the ideal place to be a vampire was New York City in the mid-’90s. The only proof you need is a cluster of indie movies that came out so close together in 1994 and 1995 that they’re basically an example of multiple discovery: Michael Almereyda’s Nadja, Abel Ferrara’s The Addiction, and Larry Fessenden’s Habit.
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The Vampires of The Hunger Haunt Eternity in Endlessly Considered Glamour
Tony Scott’s The Hunger, his 1983 adaptation of Whitley Strieber’s 1981 book of the same name, opens in the most perfect way a vampire movie can: Catherine Deneuve’s Miriam Blaylock and her husband John (David Bowie) are cruising for snacks in a goth nightclub, Bauhaus is performing “Bela Lugosi’s Dead,†everything is glowing blue and cloaked in shadows. But the most striking thing is the clothes. Across the subgenre, in fact, Fashion loves vampires and vampires love fashion. Here’s an homage to eternally chic wardrobe of The Hunger.