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Power and otherness in the new world: vampires in film

Photo by Marcus Ogden

George A. Romero’s Martin, playing under ideal lighting.

Vampires have long been a film staple, with just last week marking the 100th anniversary of F.W. Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922). In their original literary context, vampires performed a complicated thematic balancing act. They, in part, represented the aristocratic classes of the old world: seemingly undying and unchanging throughout many of Europe’s revolutions, powerful beyond the means of the average person, possessing a commanding influence, and inherently exploitative of those beneath them. However, vampires also stood in as an embodiment of otherness as they invaded and corrupted the spaces they occupied and the people they interacted with.

Of course, vampires continued to embody these themes as they were projected onto the screen; but, as time went on and the world changed, the nature of how vampires represented both power and otherness shifted.

The 20th and 21st centuries saw many dramatic reorganizations of the world order. the days of ruling over and terrorizing a powerless countryside from the comfort of a solitary grand castle are long gone; urbanization, neoliberalism, and media drove vampires into the shadows of the modern world.

Certain films portray vampires holding out on the fringes of society, giving up much of their material power to live freely as drifters.

These vampires are rejecting the new world, but they themselves have also been rejected. This is particularly clear in Near Dark (1987), wherein vampires live a life on the road and relish in their fiendishness. Vampirism’s nature as a blood-borne disease that separates them from society in Near Dark also draws inevitable comparisons to the HIV-AIDS epidemic which affected many marginalized communities in the 1980s.

Interview with the Vampire (1994), though largely a period piece, focuses on vampires 2

roaming the world as it changes around them and ultimately leaves them behind. Louis (Brad Pitt) and Lestat (Tom Cruise) hold deep disagreements, but they are bonded into a pseudo-queer relationship by their shared otherness. Claudia (Kirsten Dunst) is driven to madness because she knows she’ll never grow up and be able to fully join the world. Louis ends up adjusting well to the modern-day while Lestat retreats into hiding, fearing the noises and lights of the outside world. The disease-based vampires found in I Am Legend (2007) destroy the modern world due to their inability to live within its confines. The film’s alternate ending humanizes the blood-crazed ‘Darkseekers,’ showing that they too form bonds and are capable of complex emotions and thinking. Neville (Will Smith) realizes his efforts to cure them of their otherness and reinstate the modern world were ultimately cruel.

George A. Romero’s Martin (1977), a personal favourite of mine, navigates the shift between the new world and the old world from the perspective of a vampire takes place against the backdrop of a languishing small industrial town. Martin (John Amplas) possesses the immortality and the blood-lust of a vampire, but he explains that the rest of the ‘magic’ power vampires supposedly possess is just old folklore. He instead makes use of drugs and technology to feed off of his victims, rather than any superhuman abilities.

Martin attempts with some success to join and blend into the modern world by getting a job and attempting to form normal relationships, but he remains powerless and unable to fully adapt despite his best efforts. The only unfaltering joy Martin finds is in anonymously calling a radio station and talking about his experiences as a vampire, a rare time where he can be himself.

Plenty of films choose to portray vampires as masters of the modern world rather than as old-world outsiders. These films tend to focus on secret societies of vampires which use their abilities in tandem with elements of the modern-day to amass wealth and power. The Blade series and the Underworld series show vampires warring over age-old feuds with an arsenal of weapons and high-tech gadgets.

These action films show vampires who possess both supernatural abilities and superior martial prowess which they use to maintain the current world’s order against other supernatural threats. Night Teeth (2021) portrays vampires as a more corrupting power that has fully adapted to the present; Blaire (Debby Ryan) and Zoe (Lucy Fry) navigate an underground world of vampiric decadence inflected by Los Angeles socialite culture, while Victor (Alfie Allen) and other vampire lords orchestrate an exploitative criminal enterprise. Vampires vs. the Bronx (2020) similarly emphasizes vampires aptly using modern mechanisms for their own nefarious reasons, but the vampires instead represent a predatory capitalist class.

I would count the Cullens of the Twilight Saga as part of this latter group, though the series features vampires from across the spectrum. The Cullens are masters of the modern world in that they’ve developed a system that allows them to live mostly normal lives and blend peacefully into society; a task that other vampires in their world are not able to do. Their status as a principled chosen family separates them from the rogue vampires they encounter throughout the series, who live destitute lives and lack the self-control to function outside of their blood-lust. The Volturi, on the other hand, reside in a grand Italian palace and enforce a rigid set of laws meant to conceal vampires from the world.

The Volturi function as the opposite of the Cullen family in that they are cold, calculating, obsessed with power, and that their laws are not so much to protect themselves as they are to maintain an order which allows them to predate on the human population.

This post is, of course, in no way comprehensive. There are lots of vampire films I’ve overlooked and others I’ve just simply never seen. My analysis of these films has also been fairly brief, but I still hope to have given a pretty rough overview of different interpretations of vampires in film.

Horror at the Academy Awards and Titane Photo by Marcus Ogden

Titane projected onto my wall for a late night screening.

There will always be some amount of backlash following the announcements of Oscar nominees because, inevitably, many notable films will be underrepresented if not entirely omitted. Horror is one particular genre that is often overlooked by the Academy Awards.

While for many years the explanation for this would be that horror films didn’t often receive the same amount of critical acclaim as other films, this explanation has become less and less valid as horror has entered a more elevated and recognized phase.

As noted in an article from Vogue, only 6 horror films have ever been nominated for best picture and only one, The Silence of the Lambs (1991), has ever won the award.

Only one horror film, A Quiet Place (2018), has been nominated for an Oscar since Get Out (2017) swept the ceremony in 2018.

While 2020 was a rather dry year for horror, 2019 saw four notable releases that were all snubbed for potential awards despite their quality and strong technical aspects: Midsommar, The Lighthouse, Us, and It Chapter Two. 2018 was an even more tremendous year for horror with at least eight notable entries, seven of which were wholly excluded from the awards: Hereditary, A Quiet Place, Annihilation, Suspiria, Climax, Halloween,

Mandy, and The House That Jack Built. The upcoming Academy Awards ceremony is another where no horror films have been nominated. While this is partly due to the fact that 2021 was another dry year for horror, there is undoubtedly one dire omission from this year’s nominees: Titane.

With Raw (2016) as a successful predecessor and a trailer that suggested much while revealing very little, Julia Ducournau’s Titane was met with high expectations. It is nearly impossible to concisely describe the film’s premise: Alexia (Agathe Rousselle), a woman with a titanium plate covering her traumatic brain injury, is seemingly impregnated by a possessed car and commits a string of murders, after which she disguises herself as the missing teenage son of a grief-struck fireman (Vincent Lindon) to hide from the police.

The first portion of the film is an exploitation speed-ball of sexuality and violence, whereas the second half is an intimate character study underscored with intense body horror.

Blending elements that should not work together, much like titanium and flesh, Titane manages to be an energetic, haunting, and perversely endearing technical marvel.

However, it’s pedantic to argue that a film should be nominated for an Oscar because

of its merits. Many good films are overlooked by the Academy Awards every year, and for good reason. It’s impractical for them to nominate every successfully artful film, so they inevitably have to narrow it down to films that are significant. One accolade that Titane has which not only lends to its quality but also its significance is that the film was awarded the Palm D’or after premiering at the Cannes Film Festival. The BBC reported that Julia Ducournau was thus the second woman to ever be awarded the Palm D’or, and the first to have been awarded as a solo director.

This makes Titane‘s whole omission from the Academy Awards even more outrageous as the past three Palm D’or winners had each been nominated under the foreign film category, with Parasite breaking considerable ground for international features by winning numerous awards at the 2020 ceremony.

Titane is now available to watch on Amazon Prime.

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Photo by Marcus Ogden

Dawn FM as horror

Dawn FM alongside some of The Weeknd’s inspirations.

“A lot of it is inspired by filmmakers like John Carpenter, David Cronenberg, and Ridley Scott, because they know how to capture fear. That’s what Kiss Land is to me, an environment that’s just honest fear. I don’t know who I am right now and I’m doing all these outlandish things in these settings that I’m not familiar with. To me, it’s the most terrifying thing ever. So when you hear the screams in the record and you hear all these horror references and you feel scared, listen to the music because I want you to feel what I’m feeling. Kiss Land is like a horror movie.”

In a 2013 interview for Complex, this is how The Weeknd described his album, Kiss Land (2013). This description shaped my readings of even his most recent releases.

Nine years later, The Weeknd continues to “capture fear” in his music. Describing how he does so, though, is an interesting undertaking. For many, horror is primarily a visual and narrative experience of fear. While much of horror media is amplified by music, it’s hard to think of the music itself being a horror piece rather than a soundtrack.

An easy way to get across how The Weeknd incorporates horror into his music would be to look at his music videos. The leather-gloved giallo inspired video for “In Your Eyes”, the video for “Save Your Tears” wherein The Weeknd gives a performance seemingly from a lost David Lynch film, and the recent “Gasoline” video which resembles 4

the hallucinatory nightmare of Gaspar Noé’s Climax (2018) are all examples of how horror influences the musician’s work. This approach, however, overlooks the music itself and instead clings to seeing horror as a visual and narrative experience scored by music.

A more apt approach to this topic requires a close reading of The Weeknd’s latest album, Dawn FM (2022). In an interview for Billboard, The Weeknd described Dawn FM as a radio station that plays as one travels through purgatory after their death. The horror of the album is found in the listener’s wariness and fear of crossing over into a new existence.

The album is riddled with interludes and outerludes wherein speakers meant to calm and invite the listener as they enter the afterlife deliver their monologues with eerie artificial tones and phrasings that suggest a sinister underpinning. The album’s intro,

“Dawn FM”, foreshadows this dynamic as the station’s unnervingly calm DJ’s (voiced by Jim Carrey) reading of the phrase “commercial-free music” is broken up by a commanding distorted voice saying “free yourself.”

It would be beyond the scope of this post to go through the lyrics of each song in Dawn FM to point out the horror themes and references. However, It’s worth noting songs such as “Take My Breath” which taps into sexual anxieties and ties sex to horror in a way that calls to mind the works of David Cronenberg and Clive Barker. back-to-back songs “Best Friends” and “Is There Someone Else?” suggest a relationship wherein The Weeknd is both afraid to commit to someone and afraid of losing them, and each song uses lyrics that evoke horror imagery to convey that fear (“I don’t want to be responsible/For your heart if we fall/’Cause I’ll get clumsy and tear it apart” “I know that you’re hiding something from me/That’s been close to your heart/And I felt it creepin’ up every day“).

When speaking to Billboard, The Weeknd explained that Dawn FM is meant to use death and the afterlife as a parallel to our new post-COVID state of being. Thus, the fear and horror of going into the unknown are reminiscent of the uncertainty we feel as we stumble forward into an unclear future.

Playing Silent Hill 2, my favourite game, for the first time I have long held a deep appreciation for the Silent Hill franchise, particularly Silent Hill 2, but there has always been one major caveat: I have actually never played a full Silent Hill game myself. When the original four games were released, I was far too young to play video games, especially horror video games. When the later games in the series were released and I was of an age that I could play them, the series was really not on my radar. My first actual encounter with the series was about nine years ago when a duo of YouTubers that I used to watch did a series where they played through Silent Hill: Downpour, a widely ridiculed entry of the Silent Hill series. Aside from being fun to watch, this was not what caught my interest in the series.

What did catch my attention, however, was an absolutely terrifying short horror game named P.T. that was made available on the Playstation Network for a limited time in 2014. Once the player solved the game’s puzzle, P.T. revealed that its title was short for “Playable Teaser” and that the game served as a promising demo for a then-upcoming Silent Hill game developed by Hideo Kojima and Guillermo Del Toro. I could not play P.T.

myself as I did not own a Playstation, but I followed a lot of the coverage it received until Konami severed ties with Kojima and cancelled Silent Hills‘s production.

The final nail in the coffin was when the same duo of YouTubers I mentioned above released a series playing through Silent Hill 2, a game that immediately enchanted me. I went on to read all that I could about Silent Hill 2 and its development, I began following the game’s artist Masahiro Ito, and I continue to sporadically listen to Akira Yamaoka’s soundtrack for the game to this day. Something amazing about the internet is how you can now become a huge fan of all of the parts of one thing without ever interacting with it as a whole.

I recently came around to the idea that I should try to play Silent Hill 2 so that my passion for it can finally be ‘valid.’ There are, of course, a few hurdles to trying to play the game in 2022. Firstly, it’s simply not practical to buy a PlayStation 2 and/or hunt down an original copy of the game. Using one’s PC to emulate a PS2 is another method that comes with a wide variety of its own difficulties. in 2012, Konami remastered the game as part of

the Silent Hill HD Collection for the PlayStation 3 and Xbox 360; This release serves as a more viable option for modern players, but the re-release contains some widely criticized changes and is mired with technical issues.

The option I opted for is the Silent Hill 2: Enhanced Edition, an unofficial version of the original 2002 PC release of the game that’s been up-scaled and cleaned up by fans of the series.

I am not particularly well-versed when it comes to PC gaming and modding, so I was astonished at how easy it was to install the Enhanced Edition files into the game. I’ve not yet gotten very far into the game, but my first impressions of the Enhanced Edition are incredibly positive. Not only can I finally enjoy playing Silent Hill 2, but I can enjoy it with a widescreen aspect ratio, 1080p resolution, and crisp audio. The team has also done a wonderful job subtly remastering the game’s visuals and breathing new life into old assets; My personal favourite is how they made the fog look so heavy and billowing. I will possibly go deeper into the game itself in a future post, once I’ve played more of it.

Mothership: a sci-fi horror tabletop RPG Photo by Marcus Ogden

It can often be difficult a horror atmosphere when running a game of Dungeons & Dragons. Even though additional books such as The Curse of Strahd and Van Richten’s Guide to Ravenloft make a considerable effort to give D&D game masters a wealth of horror resources to implement into their games, there are considerable hurdles that game masters have to overcome because D&D is simply not designed for horror. So much of the game is based upon clever, quirky, well-equipped, and super-powered characters solving puzzles and engaging in action packed encounters that it can be difficult to impose a sense of frailty and fear onto players.

While looking for alternative game systems I was recommended Mothership, a sci-fi horror tabletop RPG inspired by sources such as Alien (1979) and Blade Runner (1982).

After looking into their website, I decided to give the game a try and downloaded the free Players Survival Guide.

Looking at the game system itself, Mothership has many standout qualities. One particular element that I appreciate is how simplified and accessible the game system is. This is best realized in the character sheets which include step-by-step instructions for character creation printed directly on the sheet, eliminating the need for constant page turning and rule book referencing. An issue with D&D, especially for those new to the game, is that there’s an overwhelming amount of character

What Mothership looks like on the table. choices to be made and abilities to memorize.

Character builds in Mothership are greatly pared down in comparison, but are kept open-ended with the game’s very straightforward skill tree system. Additionally, Mothership eliminates the need to ask “which dice am I rolling?” by only using D10s rather than the full array of dice used by D&D. Mothership’s game system is very well designed for horror. Each of the character builds’ bonuses are balanced out by notable drawbacks, meaning no character ends up feeling particularly overpowered. The stress and panic mechanics in the game add suspense into every interaction, as even the slightest misstep could quickly lead to things getting out of hand. Combat is less of an action sequence and more a test of survival, as the actions player characters can take are

much more limited, their chances of landing attacks are much smaller, and everything that hits them is much more damaging.

I tested the game by running Moon Base Blues, a one-shot module often recommended for Mothership beginners, with three friends of mine. I had a few factors against me: I was new to the game system and I don’t have much experience as a game master in general. Additonally, Moon Base Blues requires a hefty amount of improvisation for the game master and adds an additional time mechanic and ‘meteor psychosis’ mechanic to keep track of. Things were also complicated when my players chose a route which I hadn’t prepared enough for. Despite all of those obstacles, the group was able to complete the adventure and enjoyed a fun session with a few scary moments.

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