You know when they say you can’t judge a book by its cover? Well in this case you can. While its subtitle mentions both Nosferatu and True Blood, only the romantic HBO horror comedy is on this two part cover, with vampire Bill and Sookie the psychic waitress looking longingly into each other’s eyes. The other image that shares the cover is from Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula, but not the scene of Gary Oldman as old man Drac, or rapacious wolf-thing Drac, or way cool upside down bat-thing Drac. No it’s young pimp daddy Drac making out with Winona Ryder’s Mina Murray. Gee, can you see where their priorities on the whole vampire movie question lie?
Now to be fair, maybe this is just the publisher’s way to cash in on the sexy, misunderstood, bad boy vampire thing that seems to have too many women all a twitter these days. You know, the exact thing that has taken one of the most legendary fiends of the night and changed them into utter wusses? But then I guess it could have been worse; it could have been Twilight on the cover.
And you notice that I don’t blame the authors for this. While I do think there is a bit too much coverage of the romantic side of the bloodsucking undead in this book, I guess I have to just chalk that up to a sign of the times. But to be fair, this sizable book, chock full of tons and tons of pictures taken from all the films discussed, does a fine job of covering almost all aspects of vampire cinema. In fact, I tried really hard to think of a vamp flick that this book missed covering, at least in some small way, and I couldn’t do it. Although the actual 1986 film Vamp gets pretty much a name drop and that’s it, with some of my other favorite fun undead films getting similar treatment.
No less I start sounding like I hated this book, I will say that this new fourth edition of the book is remarkably up to date, with recent films and TV shows covered like South Korea’s Thirst, the horrible Twilight parody of Vampires Suck, both the original Let the Right One In and the remake, Let Me In, and so on. While some movies get the “also ran” treatment (see Vamp above) I was very impressed with the number of movies covered.
The focus of the book ping pongs back and forth between male and female vampires and largely progresses chronologically. There’s a nice section at the start about vampires in legend and literature from all over the world, and a bit on real world blood-lovers like Countess Bathory, the “vampire of Dusseldorf”, Peter Kurten, and of course Vlad Tepes, to name only a few. An incredibly through filmography of all things bloodsucking and a selected bibliography round out this impressively complete, well written, and often times entertaining book. If you’re a fan of fangtastic fright flicks, then this is the book for you. It’s big, it’s good looking, and it has loads on lots of sexy, brooding, misunderstood vampire guys in it. *squee*
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