Tag: vampire

Screening Room: ‘El Conde’ Dilutes the Horror of Pinochet

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - New, Film-Foreign, streamingLeave a comment

The new movie from Pablo Larrain (Ema, Spencer) has a decidedly different take on the horrors perpetrated by Augusto Pinochet during his reign of power in Chile.

My review is at PopMatters:

El Conde, an alternately ambitious and maddening attempt to reckon with one of the 20th century’s ugliest villains, does not take Pinochet at face value. Larraín and his frequent co-writer Guillermo Calderon do not dwell on the free market capitalist, career army officer, and power-mad dictator known by the world. Instead, they imagine Pinochet as a 250-year-old French vampire who nearly gets staked to death in the revolution. A reactionary from the jump, he wanders the world as a mercenary helping to put down revolutions in Russia and Haiti before ending up in South America under a new identity…

El Conde is on Netflix now. The trailer is here.

Quote of the Day: Richard Matheson

On By chrisbarsantiIn BooksLeave a comment

IAmLegend25028Prolific fantasy/horror/science fiction author Richard Matheson passed away last week at the age of 87. He was one of those foundational genre authors who came of professional age during the great age of the pulps and learned to write across a great slew of styles. Matheson made his bones with frequently filmed and ripped-off 1950s novels like The Shrinking Man and I Am Legend that reimagined suburban life as a place of potential horror; adaptations of his work over the years ranged from Twilight Zone to Stephen Spielberg’s debut film, Duel.

Here’s Matheson on how he came up with the idea for I Am Legend while watching the 1931 film of Dracula:

My mind drifted off, and I thought, ‘If one vampire is scary, what if the whole world is full of vampires?

Not bad as premises go. What’s more incredible is the book itself.

New in Theaters: ‘Byzantium’

On By chrisbarsantiIn Film - NewLeave a comment

Saorise Ronan deals with bloody eternity in 'Byzantium'
Saorise Ronan deals with bloody eternity in ‘Byzantium’

BYZANTIUM-PosterIt’s been a while since Neil Jordan tried his hand at the vampire game. With his newest, Byzantium, he is working on a smaller and more intimate scale than in Interview with the Vampire (Saorise Ronan and Gemma Arterton inside of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise). It’s gloomy and capital “R” Romantic; Keats, not Meyer), which could explain the limited distribution.

Byzantium opened in limited release Friday. My full review is at Film Racket; here’s part:

Just when werewolf armies, zombie hordes, and Stephenie Meyer’s affectless prose seemed to have done in the poor old vampire film, along comes this gloomy, glossy little oddity about the deathless from Neil Jordan. Like in his elegant take on Interview with the Vampire, Jordan’s vampires are a study in dichotomy; either happy to bury themselves in the bloody necessities of their survival or morally indecisive. In the meantime, they have eternity to deal with, and not a whole lot of money or options for living it…

You can watch the trailer here: