Near Dark: (1987. dir: Kathryn Bigelow) I can't imagine a Top Ten Best Vampire Films list that didn't include this one. The 80s were tough; there was a lot to work against. Every movie had a New Wave synth-track by the likes of Giorgio Moroder or Vangelis, for a start. Often it's a huge bummer, but here the Tangerine Dream music works as a sort of mesmeric glue holding the piece together. Bigelow is young and you can see the flaws, but they're not important. They're not what you come away with. You come away with Bill Paxton, possibly in his best moment ever, revelling in the bloodshed in the "finger-lickin' good" bar massacre. And Lance Henriksen, that fantastic face photographed to perfection, his arm draped over a pay-phone, watching. And Adrian Pasdar and Jenny Wright, both impossibly sexy, as the star-crossed lovers.
Possibly the most important thing, a thing few if any other movies have ever captured (or, indeed, attempted to capture), is the quality of lives these eternal bloodsuckers lead. It is a frenetically-paced, claustrophobic existence lived in ramshackle motel rooms and stolen vehicles with blacked-out windows, driven by constant dread of the sun. These creatures are on an endless journey, like sharks, constantly moving, constantly feeding, coming back around the same bends of the highway to encounter fleeting glimpses of ancient memories. "I get back here once every fifty years," Henriksen's ex-Confederate soldier tells a motel clerk who thinks he recognises him. "Make a reservation for me."
These creatures don't get to pick their companions. Turning a human vampish is easier than killing one: "he's been bit but he ain't been bled," Jenny Wright's May tells her compadres, who now have a new vampire to train. The overarching sense with which we are left is that the vampiric life is a small, frightened, and exhausting one, without respite except in obliteration.
By any standard, in the realm of vampiric lore, this is a necessary film.
Sword of Doom: (1966. dir: Kihachi Okamoto) It's an unabashed "B" film, but every bit as enjoyable in its way as Harakiri or the great old Kurasawas. Tatsuya Nakadai is the sociopath samurai who leaves chaos in his murderous wake. The cinematography and editing are still great, but the story is not completely told. For instance, we never see the outcomes of two confrontations to which we are building up for a long time: the samurai's showdown with the Mifune character, which we assume he wins, since Mifune appears in ghost-form at the end, or, indeed, with the ostensible hero, who has been training throughout the movie for his fight with our anti-hero. Weirdly, it doesn't matter. Nakadai's beautiful face is like a photographer's dream: his haunted eyes, and the unmistakable reverie of bliss after he's accomplished a well-executed kill, are breathtaking. The horror comes in the creepy, Grand Guignol ending, when the ghosts of his victims return to drive him mad, leading into the end-battle, complete with spurting blood and severed limbs, when the psychopath samurai takes on pretty much the whole army. The choregraphy of all its fight scenes is graceful and melancholy and hypnotic.
Lifeforce: (1986. dir: Tobe Hooper) A mid-80s Golan & Globus B-epic based on the psycho-scifi novella the Space Vampires by Colin Wilson, it's certainly a failure, but an interesting one. Although Wilson is a phenomenologist whose works were crazily formative for me, his fiction has always tended towards the bullyingly misogynist, with an edge of cold viciousness which only those old-time intellectuals could muster. At its basis, this is a gender-reversed Dracula with a toe dipped into space-operatic Aliens territory, only these otherworldly predators suck your life-force away, rather than your blood. (You can see above how great the special effects are.) It's got bad dialogue, rampant fear of women, a whole covey of wonderful British actors (Peter Firth, Michael Gothard, Frank Finlay, Patrick Stewart), badly clunky editing, and not much direction at all, as far as I can see. These actors tend to travel from the po-faced and bored into hysterical convulsions while seeing very little of the spectrum in between. Really, it feels older than the 80s; it feels like it came from decades previous, which it rather did, since the source material was first published in 1976. Possibly because of the actors involved, it feels a bit like we're watching a lingering hangover from the Carnaby Street party. The end-battles, however, take place amidst a London that is burning, its denizens become maddened life-sucking zombies, and these scenes feel prescient, foretelling our own era of CGI-exact destructo-visions of the White House, Big Ben, the Eiffel Tower, ad nauseam.
Hysteria is the word for it: a masculine hysteria from the id, but too over-manipulated to ring true. The She-Vampire at the heart of the maleficience has pulled her flawless female beauty straight from the subconscious of the astronaut who found her, and so, as the image of his personal anima, must die with him in the naked embrace which Hollywood so loves. It feels like somebody read a lot of Jung, then spewed his own fear-fantasy out onto the page and tried to twist it around so that it sounded sort of official. (I'm not saying it's necessarily Wilson at fault; it's been a long time since I read the book. It might be screenwriters Dan O'Bannon of Alien genius and Don Jakoby of Arachnophobia renown, but let's lean towards Wilson until someone does the research.) Really, the misogyny is ludicrous: the main astronaut, attacking the woman currently embodying his anima, explains to the nearby official, "Despite appearances, this woman is an extreme masochist. She wants me to force the information from her. She wants me to hurt her." Oh, well, then, by all means, have at it.
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