Watching Every Vampire Movie Ever Part 1: 1800s
For a while now I wanted to do something like this. Watch all of X, where X is some ridiculously big set. At the same time, I've been adding stuff I've seen over the years to my Trakt. At some point I realized that I've seen a lot of vampire media. Now, obviously, most of these were in my teenage years, but it's still a lot.
It seems every couple days I remember a new thing with vampires I watched, trying to fix my obsession. And as I'm adding these to my Trakt, I realize a lot of them probably weren't as bad as my teenage self considered them to be. I realize I kind of want to rewatch a lot of them. And hence: the match made in hell. I thought, "wouldn't it be fun to return to my teenage years and watch all of vampire media?"
But that's obviously foolish. All vampire media is an insane amount of media. Even if we just consider TV shows: Dark Shadows alone has more than 1,225 episodes. So instead, let's aim for something more doable: Every Vampire Movie Ever.
This has a nice blend of being:
- still really time consuming,
- completely useless while still retaining some bragging rights,
- a chance at becoming the next Vanity Fair Vampire Expert.
Also it'll be really nice that I will finally have something to consistently post about!
Now of course, I probably already seen most of the actually good, and most of the actually influential stuff. But even here there are things notably missing: I've never seen Blade, I've never seen Nosferatu, I've never seen Coppola's Dracula. But this time around I will have a chance to finally rectify this.
To this end, I found a list of about 1,700 movies that seems pretty comprehensive. My plan right now is to go through it and see every movie. I don't necessarily intend to do them chronologically, but at the very least I will start with it in this post.
I'm sure my plans will change, as will the general meaning of this "challenge" for me change as I go through it, but right now I'm dedicated to watch every movie on the list that I can find on the internet that has some sort of English translation.
Together, we will see some truly terrible movies, and, perhaps, if we're lucky, while embracing the direct-to-dvd slop, we will find some good stuff too. There's no day like today, so let us start by visiting the 1800s.
The House of the Devil (1896)
The first of the only two vampire movies from the 1800s is The House of the Devil. It is a French movie made in 1896, directed by Georges Méliès. Méliès is notable for going on to make A Trip to the Moon in 1902, which is the famous black and white movie from which the picture of the Moon with a face that we've all seen comes from.
Curiously, as far as I can tell, The House of the Devil doesn't appear on the list.
The film features some sort of a magical being that transforms in and out of a bat (this is its claim to being a vampire movie). It also summons stuff including people, and does various bunch of other tricks. At some point, 2 funnily clothed fellas enter the scene and he trolls them a bunch. Eventually they repel him using a cross. If you want more detail, read the Wikipedia article, I'd really hate to rehash it here.
At 3 minutes long, it is pretty long for a film of its time. The main attraction, more than any plot (what kind of a plot could one fit in 3 minutes?), is the visual tricks. From a modern perspective, they're not necessarily particularly impressive or interesting.
The set piece is quite obviously a cardboard cutout (or something like it). At one point, the actors even fall backwards on it and move it.
The Haunted Castle (1897)
The Haunted Castle is a remake of The House of the Devil from 1897, also directed by Méliès. In fact, not only is it a remake, it is the first remake. Méliès was truly an inventor.
The remake is much shorter, only having 45 seconds. The sequence of events is different, the fellas are in the scene from the beginning. The set piece seems slightly different.
The plot is once again, the bat magician trolling the fellas (or in this case, mostly just one fella). This time again teaming up with a white dressed, what I presume to be a girl, that also featured in the original. Curiously, this time, the bat magician doesn't transform from or into a bat once, which makes it questionable to put on this list.
Turns out, a "hand-colored" version of this movie exists, which is a pleasant surprise to hear, given I was afraid the version I watched was one of those AI colorized things.
Though the visual tricks are once again not particularly impressive to modern eyes, they do feel smoother than in the original.