Vampires

We shall talk about vampires.

A month late. Halloween was a month ago. 

But vampires are timeless. That’s why they’re appealing.

Tod Browning’s “Dracula” was not appealing.

(d. Tod Browning, 1931)

I was mildly disappointed. That must be what the play was like. Very stagy. I haven’t seen the play. And I probably wouldn’t. After having seen Frank Wildhorn’s “Dracula” and “Dance of the Vampires,” I’m done with vampires on stage.

Browning made another vampire movie, “Mark of the Vampire.”

(d. Tod Browning, 1934)

Which I liked much more than “Dracula” even though they seem to have the same sets.

If they were plays, they could be played in repertory.

Neither of them were scary. I’ve never found vampires to be scary. I was more curious about the emphasis on females as prey. Does “Dracula” only feast on women and not men? Is that a rule? Vampires can only drink blood from the opposite sex?

Is that in Bram Stoker’s book?

I don’t know. I’ve never read it.

That’s shocking.

We weren’t really allowed to watch “The Wizard of Oz” as a Bible Baptist kid because it had witches. I had to read Anne Rice books surreptitiously. I saw a bit of the Francis Ford Coppola version, but I was more dazzled by the costumes. So no, I don’t understand vampire drinking rules.

Bela Lugosi plays vampires in both Tod Browning movies.

And yet all I can think of is Martin Landau’s Bela Lugosi in Tim Burton’s “Ed Wood.” I kept wanting to hear him say, “Be-vare.” He had the Transylvanian accent, I guess. But he wasn’t terrifying.

Horror movies reflect their times. What contemporary fears were in the Browning movies?

In both movies, I suppose the fear of foreigners was strong. That “civilized” women should be attracted to foreigners is cause for fear. Fear of sex sounds too easy. But it’s there.

Is “Mark of the Vampire” a horror movie or a mystery movie?

That’s why I like the second Browning movie more. It’s both!

Like Type AB blood?

The tone is slightly jarring in the middle as the movie morphs into a different genre. But I liked that you didn’t end up where you started. Also always nice to put a face to the name of Jean Hersholt. I always hear his name during the Oscars, but forget that Jean is a guy and that he was an actor.

I can imagine the audience getting pissed off at the end of the movie. 

It’s a movie with the audience in mind. Made me admire Tod Browning more for flipping the script. It’s like he was making fun of his own “Dracula” movie four years later.

On to Roman Polanski’s “The Fearless Vampire Killers.”

“Or Pardon Me, But Your Teeth Are In My Neck.”

(d. Roman Polanski, 1967)

They made really long titles in the 60s.

So this wasn’t on my radar until I read an autopsy of “Dance of the Vampires.” That musical flop was based on this movie. And I am willing to bet that it influenced Mel Brooks and Gene Wilder’s “Young Frankenstein.”

It’s a comedy. 

Slapstick comedy. And it works. Even with Roman Polanski acting as the assistant to the professor who is investigating Count von Krolock.

Sharon Tate is the vampire’s victim.

It’s the sixties so sex isn’t so much the fear. The count lives in a castle. The fear is about the higher class abusing the peasants? 

Communist-lite.

To watch it now feels so eerie.

Seeing Roman Polanski and Sharon Tate in the same frame. Knowing what happens two years later.

I easily dismissed it because of the title. But I was hooked from the opening Cinemascope snowy landscape. 

Shot by Douglas Slocombe. Who went on to shoot “Raiders of the Lost Ark” among other things.

If “Dance of the Vampires” was as cheeky as this, I would’ve enjoyed it more.

Not a work of art that the vampires in “Only Lovers Left Alive” would be proud to produce.

Not a huge Jim Jarmusch fan. “Night on Earth” remains a favorite. “Only Lovers Left Alive” equals it. I guess I’d have to be in the mood to watch a Jarmusch movie to enjoy it.

(d. Jim Jarmusch, 2013)

The humor is cheeky and dry.

I love that they made Christopher Marlowe a vampire and maybe the author of some of Shakespeare’s plays?  The vampires are creators, not mere consumers. Possibly responsible for great works throughout various ages? I wish I could read books the way Tilda Swinton’s Eve reads books. Just by touching them.

A most desirable vampire super power. I like those little details in the movie. They have to wear gloves because their hands are sensitive.

Not because of COVID-19. And the most nourishing blood is Type O negative. 

Your blood type?

Tom Hiddleston’s Adam would be attracted to me.

Now that I think about it, when Tilda Swinton shows up in “What We Do in the Shadows” and refers to a Tom who’s not in the scene, was she referring to Tom Cruise or Tom Hiddleston?

I thought she meant Tom Cruise, the Vampire Lestat.  

But it makes more sense that it would be Hiddleston who starred in the same movie as her.

Adam and Eve’s survival depends on human blood, which has become more contaminated in our time and is not as nourishing.

So if Tom Hiddleston bit you, he would be poisoned.

Afraid so. I would be a fearless vampire killer.

I’m sure that’s not in Bram Stoker’s book. Maybe this would have been a good time to pick it up.

Too late now. Maybe next Halloween.

House of Women

What do you think about when a house is full of women?

That it’s a brothel? Isn’t there some old law somewhere that a certain number of women under one roof is considered a brothel?

I think that’s a myth. But if you were a woman, where would you rather live? A women-only boardinghouse, a sorority house, or a brothel?

Is the boarding house like the one in “Stage Door”?

No Ginger Rogers. No calla lilies. But Kathleen Freeman would be in it!

If it’s “The Ladies Man” boarding house, then yes.

You would want to live in a dollhouse?

Like a Barbie Doll.

One of the best movie sets ever created. 

Too bad it’s a Jerry Lewis movie. 

Starring Jerry Lewis. Directed, produced, and written by Jerry Lewis. After watching it, I still don’t understand what the French see in Jerry Lewis. I don’t care what Cahiers du Cinema says. And that set, as gorgeous as it is, screams misogyny. It conceives the ladies in the house as nothing more than living dolls. It’s definitely a doll house I would like to own.

What do you expect? It’s from the 60s. Peak “Mad Men” era.

The female characterizations are as flat as paper dolls.

It’s a dork’s dream. To be the only man in a house full of women and be fawned over.

But he was great in Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy.”

And as a telethon host.

Can’t say I was an avid annual viewer of that. I guess I like more restraint when it comes to comic acting. He was always mugging for the camera in “The Ladies Man.”

 

You wouldn’t live in a sorority house?

No. It’s usually featured in a horror movie or a skin flick. Sometimes both.

Tell me a moment when you had a black Christmas.

I associate a black Christmas with death. Just like the movie “Black Christmas.” Not serial killer deaths. But I’d say Christmas was black after my brother died. Isn’t that always the case when a family member dies? The first holiday after they’re gone seems like a black holiday.

It’s going to be a black Christmas for many the way COVID-19 cases are rising.

The movie reminded me about “Silent Night, Deadly Night.” I remember seeing that in the movie house when I was in first grade. My mother’s friend brought me to see it. I think it was after a Christmas party.

That must have scarred you as a child. Watching Santa Claus killing people.

I don’t think it destroyed Christmas for me. Sunday school in Bible Baptist Church already burst that Santa Claus bubble for me. I like movies that blend genres.

Is “Black Saturday” a Halloween movie or a Christmas movie?

Depends on the mood you’re in. Like “The Nightmare Before Christmas.”

Do you care that Olivia Hussey’s character is the final girl?

Considering her acting ability, no. But I guess audiences at the time will care about the character depending how they feel about abortion.

My question was - are they graduate students? Because Olivia Hussey, Andrea Martin, and Margot Kidder do not look like  undergraduates.

What I found more chilling was whenever the camera switches to the killer’s POV. Yes, like “Peeping Tom,” but somehow more disturbing because as an audience member you’re filling in motives which the movie leaves unresolved.

Total B movie. Which one would you be in the sorority house?

I’d like to think I would be the final girl. The survivor. But we don’t know if she survives.

I would be Margot Kidder’s character, the boozy sorority sister.

Too bad Andrea Martin didn’t have a solo number …

But she had a fabulous death scene.

If you were a courtesan in Hou Hsiao-Hsien’s “Flowers of Shanghai,” which flower would you be? Crimson, Pearl, Emerald, Jasmin, and Jade?

All of them.

Whoever Tony Leung is with. For a movie set in 19th-century Shanghai, I was surprised how fiercely feminist those women are.

I loved all of them. They understood economics more than the men did.

Because it’s a matter of survival for them. All of them had some agency in their fates. I thought they would be tragic opium-addled figures. And they weren’t. Totally went against my expectations. I'm a delicate flower, so I wouldn't survive in that Shanghai.

And so beautiful to look at.

That camera hovering like an opium haze. Courtesy of Mark Lee Ping-Bing. Even more beautiful with the restored print.

Makes me want to see the restored “In the Mood for Love,” which he did with Christopher Doyle.

Now, can we restore other movies shot by Mark Lee Ping-Bing?

"The Vertical Ray of the Sun!"

“Millenium Mambo” and “Three Times”

***

WORKS

THE LADIES MAN (1961, dir. Jerry Lewis)

BLACK CHRISTMAS (1974, dir. Bob Clark)

FLOWERS OF SHANGHAI (1998, dir. Hou Hsiao-Hsien)

Unicorn Lit

Do unicorns poop rainbows?

Isn’t that a Philip K. Dick novel?

I don’t think so.

What “Blade Runner” is based on?

It’s based on “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?”

Then why is there a unicorn in the movie?

An ingredient to make replicants more human. To dream is human. To dream of mythic creatures even more so. 

Hmm. But are those implanted memories? Or things he has seen? “A moment that will be lost in time, like tears in the rain?” 

A scene I had never seen until recently.

You’ve never seen “Blade Runner”?!

No. But I did see “Blade Runner 2049.”

And you call yourself a film buff?

Exactly what my brother said.

It’s a very famous scene. 

Number 42 on AFI’s “100 Years … 100 Movie Quotes.” I admit to some lacunae in my cinephilia. I have thought a lot about that quote and why it’s moving.

Tell me why it’s moving to you.

I wasn’t thinking much about Rutger Hauer’s Roy Blatty as a replicant nearing human qualities … but as a repository of knowledge. 

Are memories the same as knowledge? What he witnessed, stored in memory, is the same as books or footage, I think … For him to die and lose all that is like the burning of the library in Alexandria.

It’s just like losing a server.

Which really pissed you off when it happened because you lost all the photos you saved in it.

You mean all the porn you saved in it …

That, too.

Then it made me think of dementia. Every day losing moments like tears in the rain. Then it made me think of Cartesian duality. How we say they are not the same person as they were anymore after dementia. Same body, different mind? Or was it the mind all along, so the body becomes different when the mind becomes demented?

Do demented people dream of unicorns?

I don’t know. Probably not. I think demented people try to hang on to as much reality as possible - to demonstrate what’s real as much as possible so they can prove to others that they are not demented.

They don’t want to speak of unicorns because they don’t want to be deemed as kooks. But we’re surrounded by unicorns now.

Kind of trippy to watch “Blade Runner” in 2020 since it is set in 2019. 

Very little of its technology came true but it predicted we will be dreaming of unicorns.

A steep rise in the use of the word unicorn since 2000.

Unicorn startups. Swingers looking for unicorns. Unicorns everywhere. A unicorn selling Squatty Potty. Unicorn poop cookies. 

The unicorn as queer icon. Tattooed on Amrou Al-Kadhi’s chest.

AKA Glamrou!

I found them nakedly honest in “Life as a Unicorn: A Journey from Shame to Pride and Everything in Between.” 

A product of good therapy.

So soul baring. They would need a therapist to piece themselves after that.

Tell me a moment in your life when you were a unicorn.

I felt like a unicorn as a 16 year old freshman in college. I was that rare thing among my friends. Being young. My queerness was not what made me a unicorn. But the paradox of being a unicorn is that what makes you special is what makes you feel acutely different from others. I don’t think the longing to be treated as someone ordinary ever goes away.

How many unicorns will it take to not be a unicorn anymore?

If I go to Therapy, all of us cease to be unicorns because we are in the company of unicorns?

Exactly. Gays in a gay bar cease to be unicorns.

So true. They turn into narwhals when the work lights are turned on at 3 a.m.

Or white rhinoceroses.

Rhinoceri.

Probably what Ctesias mistook as unicorns. 

Or Unibulls.

Like the pens?

No. More real than unicorns. This biologist from Maine, Franklin Dove, surgically experimented on a calf to make two horns into one.  

That’s messed up.

Unibulls or more real than unicorns.

Stop messing with my head. I feel like Susannah York in “Images.”

Well, she got messed up by unicorns.

That’s a messed up children’s book.

Like what age group is that book supposed to be for?

“In Search of Unicorns.” That’s the title of the book.

Her inspiration are the “The Lady and Unicorn” tapestries from the Musee de Cluny. So it feels like she’s leaning into the sexual symbolism associated with unicorns. Like Tracy Chevalier did in “The Lady and the Unicorn.”

“In Search of Unicorns.” Well, search no more - she could go to Therapy. 

More like medieval Christianity symbolism. Purity, virginity-

Yes. Phallic. So she could still go to Therapy.

Do you think her head was messed up because she kept wanting to ride the unicorn? Even though it wasn’t her husband’s unicorn?

So her psyche was fractured by being horny? And she has to kill the slutty self. Possibly. 

I admired it more this time. I appreciated the music more and how effective the lo-fi tricks were. Simply achieved by doors and lighting.

And creepy narration of that children’s book.

I’m sure you can find that in a bookstore in Brooklyn.

It should be in a gift shop at the Musee de Cluny.

Yes, next to an origami unicorn.