Welcome back, ghouls and ghosts, to the third annual installment of SpookyJawn! It’s our horror takeover of MovieJawn, and this year we are wall to wall with monsters!

by Ryan Silberstein, Managing Editor, Red Herring 

For so much of the vampire’s history, they were an incursion from “exotic” lands–specifically Dracula and his Transylvanian brethren. Even when they appeared in the New World, they often originated elsewhere, as is the case in the first film on this list. But over time, we have seen the vampire join the “melting pot” of America, blending in and making this country their own, just like many other kinds of immigrants. But what is fascinating about the way vampires actually took root in stories set in America is their connection to youth, especially teenagers. Vampires from Europe (including those characters, like Dracula, in American movies) tend to represent the “other,” a blood impurity trying to pass in the upper ranks of society. American vampires retain an outsider status, but more expressly tied to youthful dissatisfaction or minority/queer identities. 

Salem's Lot (dir. Tobe Hooper, 1979)

Salem’s Lot isn’t the first movie about a vampire in America, but Stephen King’s book–and Tobe Hooper’s subsequent TV adaptation–is explicitly about this country. In some ways, Salem’s Lot feels like a rough draft for IT, both for King, in novel form, and for Tommy Lee Wallace’s 1990 IT miniseries. Both stories focus on a threat to a small town in Maine and how the main characters are affected by the presence of evil.  The three-hour runtime of Salem’s Lot  preserves the sprawling feel of the novel and indulges in the central character relationships. There are a lot of moments in King’s work that feel very cinematic, but the entirety of his epics are hard to capture in a feature film, or even a miniseries due to how much his characters often live in their own heads. Hooper’s adaptation balances the character relationships and the driving force of the supernatural threat well, even if this version is never quite as chilling as the book. 

The main reason I wanted to include it on this list is because of the theme of an older, corrupting force acting on small town America. The Marsten House–which Ben Mears (David Soul) believes to house an evil presence long before the arrival of Straker (James Mason) and Barlow (Reggie Nalder)–is a great location, a symbol of wealth and evil looking down on Jerusalem's Lot. Filled with antiques after its new residents move in, it represents the old world imprinting on the new, suggesting the original sin of colonization as much as it points to a fear of “exotic” immigrants. It is also very easy to see Straker and Barlow as queer coded, which adds additional subtext to the small town fears.

Interview with the Vampire (dir. Neil Jordan, 1994)

I’m slotting Interview with the Vampire next, as Anne Rice’s novel was published in 1976–a year after King’s ‘Salem’s Lot. The novel coincides with America’s bicentennial, and as far as I can tell, Anne Rice invented the idea of American vampires. From the research I’ve done, any vampire movie set in America was still playing off the fear of “exotic” Eastern Europeans invading, and all of the psychosexual threats contained within. While sex is baked into the vampire story, American vampires tend to be a lot more focused on love and are generally younger. There’s a tragic element to the American version of this story, of never growing up being both a blessing and a curse.

Interview with the Vampire is told from the point of view of Louis de Pointe du Lac (Brad Pitt), a plantation owner in 1791 Spanish Louisiana turned into a vampire by Lestat de Lioncourt (Tom Cruise). The main thrust of the movie is the relationship between these two men and their “daughter” Claudia (Kirsten Dunst), who Lestat also turns e despite the taboo of turning children. Here, vampires have been in the New World at least as far back as the first century of European colonization. Rice’s vampires are often seen metaphorically as an expression of queer outsiderdom, and this “family” is a wonderful and sometimes moving reflection of that. The three vampires resemble the American nuclear family, albeit a twisted one with two adult men and a child who will never grow up. Their identity makes them outcasts, unable to even see the sun. This makes it easier to see the problematic elements involved–Lestat is toxic to everyone he encounters–but in some ways, this makes them, in the words of Batman, “perfectly ordinary Americans.”

The Lost Boys (dir. Joel Schumacher, 1987)

Screenwriter James Jeremias specifically cites Anne Rice’s novel and the character of Claudia specifically as half the inspiration for The Lost Boys, the other half being his lifelong love of Peter Pan. The characters were aged up in subsequent drafts, shifting the characters from Goonies age to late teens. Alongside the next film on this list, The Lost Boys invented the most prominent subgenre of vampire story in America: the teen vamp. The way American culture fetishizes youth–we invented the teenager, remember–makes the forever young vampire make sense in cultural context, especially coming out of Hollywood. 

Here, the motorcycle gang led by David (Keifer Sutherland) acts as a substitute family for Michael (Jason Patric) and Sam (Corey Haim), brothers in a family recently broken up by divorce. The vampires here are outsiders but once again offer a refuge and a sense of permanent family, if one is willing to pay the price.

Near Dark (dir. Kathryn Bigelow, 1987)

Released just a few months after The Lost Boys, Near Dark also involves teens. At the beginning of the film, Caleb (Adrian Pasdar) is bit by Mae (Jenny Wright) after a date and begins to turn into a vampire. Mae’s gang, led by Jesse (Lance Henriksen), reluctantly takes him in, allowing him to join their gang of drifters. Near Dark might be my favorite film on this list for the way it blends the road movie, westerns, and vampires together to give us something wholly new. There are chases, horses, shootouts, and bar fights, but at the core of it is another story about a found family and the lengths some will go to exert power over members of that family. The genre elements blend together well, and this story can only be told from an American point of view. We are told Jesse fought for the Confederacy and may have started the Chicago Fire, tying vampires into the tragedies and sins of the past. The sense is that Jesse has been at this a long time, and his survival is largely due to his own ruthlessness and the way America allows for self-reinvention. 

Blade (dir. Stephen Norrington, 1998)

Black vampires in cinema go back at least as far as Blacula, but I need to catch up with them myself. So for now, I offer Blade. With Wesley Snipes in the titular role, Blade is a landmark film in a few ways, and certainly feels like an inflection point between ‘90s action movies and the superhero genre that would fully emerge in its wake. Revisiting it for this article and thinking about it as a vampire movie made me appreciate it even more than I had previously. Blade is a “daywalker,” a vampire/human hybrid and often is insulted for his status as not being “pureborn,” which lands as an effective metaphor for racism.

One thing Blade doesn’t get enough credit for is the commentary on Black bodies and the way they are viewed by society. While Get Out felt like a revelation in 2017, so much of that subtext is here as well, specifically through the use of Blade’s blood as the MacGuffin and Karen (N'Bushe Wright) being a hematologist. While the other, “natural born” vampires look down on Blade both for being a Black man as well as a daywalker, they still covet his blood as a cure against sunlight. And Karen’s role in the story, also tied into blood, further cements the connection between Blade and medical testing on Black Americans, including Henrietta Lacks. Blade remains a perfect example of late 1990s action, while also containing a lot of depth.

Twilight (dir. Catherine Hardwicke, 2008)

When it comes to American vampires, Twilight is the sparkly elephant in the room. Putting aside the debate over how “accurate” the portrayal of vampires is here, Twilight was a genuine cultural phenomenon. As a fantasy romance, it captured the hearts of girls and women by giving them a straightforward yet forbidden love to imagine themselves in the central role. The first film is not the best of the franchise but best captures the mood and vibe of the rainy Pacific Northwest. While later films spend more and more time with the vampires, this one sees Bella (Kristen Stewart) stepping into that world and meeting the Cullen family. Once again, vampires have created a found family for themselves, and that is as attractive to Bella–also another child of divorce–as her paramour Edward (Robert Pattinson). Post-Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the idea of young romance between a human girl and a male vampire has taken root in the culture. From the building of wealth to needing to move around and not get noticed, Twilight understands the appeal of being a vampire would have to a teenage girl looking for a purpose and escape from her boring life. 

Fright Night (dir. Craig Gillespie, 2011)

I chose the Fright Night remake for this list because it is absolutely better than the original. Featuring an amazing cast consisting of Toni Collette, Colin Ferrell, Anton Yelchin, Imogen Poots, and David Tennant, it balances horror and humor in equal measure. Here, Jerry (Ferrell) uses the nature of Las Vegas’ nocturnal and often transient workforce as the perfect cover to build his vampire nest in a suburban neighborhood. But what makes Fright Night so good is the way it harkens back to Salem’s Lot, updated for modern times with its likely ancient antagonist, its turned teen best friend (RIP McLovin), and its update on small town evil. It’s also a lot more lusty than most teen films in the decade since, which makes it stand out and rise above some of the CGI blood used here. 

Whether they stand in for past sins, a corruptive evil, or disaffected teens looking for family, vampires have made America their own. But maybe it is time for someone to make a vampire movie about the CEOs and billionaires truly bleeding this country dry.