52 Films By Women: Tale of a Vampire (1992)

By Andrea Thompson

There are precious few films that would round out Asian American and Pacific Islander Heritage Month and be a fantastic watch on World Dracula Day, and that’s a shame. There should be more, and they should all be as fascinating as the 1992 film “Tale of a Vampire.”

It came out at an odd time. Seeing the world from the vampire’s perspective was still relatively new at the time. Sure, the book “Interview With the Vampire” was published in 1976, but the movie adaptation wouldn’t come out until 1994. Not that vampires stuck to the shadows in the meantime. They’d always been a part of cinema since its earliest days with “Nosferatu” in 1922 and maintained a steady screen presence since, mostly in slashers and general B movie fare. 

But the 1980s saw a large number of vampire movies that took the undead seriously, and that attitude carried over into the 90s, which saw the release of many films that would come to define the genre. The same year “Tale of a Vampire” crept onto screens, two hugely influential films that would come to define how vampires were depicted burst onto the screen with far more flash - Francis Ford Coppola’s “Dracula,” and the far more infamous “Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” which would soon be eclipsed by the iconic (and now very problematic) series of the same name in 1997.

So it’s hardly surprising that “Tale of a Vampire” seems to have come and gone with little fanfare, or notice in general. Written and directed by Shimako Sato, she was less inspired by Anne Rice than Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “Annabel Lee.” And “Tale” commits, both to Poe’s inherent undercurrent of dread and its bibliophilism, which it wears on its sleeve like a deranged, twisted heart, with much of the film’s plot taking place in a beautifully musty London library with texts that would make any book lover swoon.

Sato has become more known for her work in Japanese horror and the “Resident Evil” video games, but “Tale of a Vampire” was her directorial debut, which occurred after she left Japan to study film in London. According to Variety’s dismissive review of the film, “Tale” was shot over a mere four weeks on a relatively paltry budget of $375,000, and Sato almost seems to delight in her confines, fetishizing the city to a degree that is thrilling and exquisite. She doesn’t make use of the London atmosphere with its fog and shadows as create her own, infusing even the most brightly lit restaurants with unearthly dread.

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There’s a more conventional, love across the ages romance too of course, with vampire Alex (Julian Sands, in some of the creepiest work of his career) mourning his lost 19th century love as he returns to the library day after...I mean, night after night to research religious martyrs for his thesis. Ah the wonders and drawbacks of a pre-digital age. One day, he’s struck by a new hire, Anne (Suzanna Hamilton), who bears a remarkable resemblance to his lost love Virginia. 

Anne is mourning a loss of her own, and is dressed down to appear believably appealing rather than a lust object, but she still has (dare I say?) quirks like singing on her way to the cemetery at night to visit her recently departed love, reading palms, and conveniently for the film, the electricity at her place never seems to work, leaving her to make constant use of candles. No wonder Alex is quickly obsessed.

Make no mistake, obsession rather than love is what really sets the gears of “Tale of a Vampire” in motion. There’s no question that Alex is a monster rather than the gentle, sensitive loner he comes off as, and the movie is very aware of this. When Alex kills the victims he chooses at random, it’s violent, bloody, and painful for them as well as messy. How he drinks their blood is less like an elegant feeding than a clumsy attempt to drink liquid from an unwieldy jug. Even the lost love he mourns had a queasy beginning to say the least, since the film eventually reveals he met her as a young child, with their love blossoming when she became an adult.

If Alex has a redeeming quality, it’s that he seems very aware of how repulsive his needs and desires are, unlike his opponent Edgar (Kenneth Cranham), who cloaks his toxicity in righteousness. He bullies and manipulates Anne, and he confesses to consigning his wife to a fate worse than death because, as he puts it, “She dared to betray my high ideals. I had to punish her.” Shudder.

Like many a genre film directed by women, “Tale of a Vampire” is very aware of what a high price women tend to pay in struggles between powerful men, and the film ends by staying true to its coldly unblinking gaze. There’s no reassurance that good or even anyone’s better angels will triumph. Its lasting impression is that in the midst of so much darkness and toxicity, it isn’t love or any other lofty note of hope that lasts, but rather, pain.

Tale of a Vampire is streaming on Amazon.

52 Films By Women: The Velvet Vampire (1971)

By Andrea Thompson

The 1971 film “The Velvet Vampire” couldn’t be called a good film exactly, but there’s a reason it’s achieved a kind of cult status. It’s a bizarre mishmash of art and classic slasher, and it’s the kind of movie to watch and appreciate for an artist working within their limitations.

And make no mistake, Stephanie Rothman is an artist, even if the industry refused to give her much of a chance to be one. She was given a job and mentored by one of the great kings of schlock horror, Roger Corman himself. But Rothman was forced to indulge a genre that was ultimately unsatisfying to her, and was never given a chance to break out of it and realize her true filmmaking ambitions once B-movies waned in popularity.

But in 1971, Rothman was fresh off her hit film “The Student Nurses,” and decided to make a vampire film that indulged and subverted the tropes audiences were so familiar with even by then. There’s the bewitching, very sexual lady vampire, the unease of a woman whose fears are dismissed, an isolated location, and even a creepy gas station attendant whose aloofness should have been a warning.

But this is the freewheeling 1970s California, the perfect time for a sexy vampire to meet a young married couple and invite them to her gorgeously stylish abode in...the desert? It seems a strangely inhospitable place for a vampire to call home, so I suppose said couple Lee (Michael Blodgett) and Susan Ritter (Sherry E. DeBoer) don’t have much reason to be suspicious when Diane LeFanu (Celeste Yarnall, also you gotta love the tribute to Carmilla author Sheridan Le Fanu) invites them to stay for the weekend. Susan has plenty of reason to be angry and jealous though, given her husband Lee’s clear attraction to Diane, and how Diane brazenly flirts with him right in front of her. 

It’s hardly the stuff of feminist films, but the motions of “The Velvet Vampire” are exactly that, motions. Susan may be a damsel who has to be saved twice in ten minutes, but it’s Diane who saves her each time, first in a dark mine and then from a rattlesnake when she’s lying out in the sun. Diane is drawn to each human around her, from her human servant Juan (Jerry Daniels), to the unfortunate mechanic who drives out to her place one night and the woman who comes in search of him, and of course, both halves of the newly arrived married couple, but it’s Susan she’s most open with and drawn to. And it’s Susan she saves for last in a bizarre twist on the Final Girl, pursuing her even when she flees to Los Angeles.

And while Diane is shown to have her own tragic layers, it’s Susan who goes through the most changes. She is objectified, appearing topless in many scenes, but so is Lee, and it’s in a naturalistic way as she’s lying in bed with her husband, and as she begins to fall more and more under Diane’s spell, she becomes more like a fetishized doll, ironically spending less time nude and clothed in a frilly pink negligee. Like many a B-movie film, color is everything, and much of the cast almost seems to take their cue from Susan, adorning themselves in various shades of pink shortly after she does.

But much like any good vampire film, red is the color of choice, from the various sources of lighting to Diane’s gorgeous outfits, and of course, the blood of her many victims, most of whom she loves to death like a classic female vampire, and which the trailer takes care to emphasize.

It’s a good thing Diane has style, because there’s not much else to vampires in this movie. Diane may be able to go out in the sun, but other than her thirst for blood, and later, as we discover, a fear of crosses, she doesn’t seem to get much out of being a vampire other than immortality. There’s no feats of strength or healing abilities, and she gets injured quite easily. 

She also isn’t much in the brains department, but then, neither is anyone else, because that’s not really the point of “The Velvet Vampire.” What it does emphasize amidst all the schlock, plot holes, and constraints that involve both budget and story, is women turning the tables on male entitlement. Diane takes advantage of those who see her as harmless, and Susan regularly pushes back against her husband and others who seek to use her for their own ends. They might resemble each other a little too well, and it’s probably why Diane pursues Susan so far, even to her death. Bent on indulging her thirst at costs, Diane once again loves to death, it’s just that this time it’s her own.

The Velvet Vampire is streaming on Tubi, Amazon Prime, and The Criterion Channel.

52 Films By Women: Near Dark (1987)

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By Andrea Thompson

“Near Dark” is a creative kind of genre fusion that absolutely works, but also tends to be unprofitable if it's not released at the right time. Even if 1987 looked like the right year for Kathryn Bigelow's now cult film, it just wasn't familiar enough for audiences to get behind at the time, resulting in a very familiar situation: positive reviews, but not much returns at the box office.

The neo-western “Near Dark” was part of a number of serious vampire films in the 1980s. “The Lost Boys,” “Fright Night,” “Once Bitten,” “Vampire Hunter D,” and “The Hunger” are all just a small sampling of the large proliferation of films that revolved around the undead. And while the smash hit “Interview with the Vampire” wouldn't be made until 1994, the book it was based on had hit shelves in 1976, followed by “The Vampire Lestat” in 1985 and “The Queen of the Damned” in 1988 to a very appreciative audience.

“Near Dark” flips many of the genre staples from the start. The first and most obvious is it is not a young woman who is victimized by a vampire's bite, but a young man. Caleb Colton (Adrian Pasdar) is the quintessential good ol' small town boy. Hell, he even lives on a farm with his father Loy (Tim Thomerson) and sister Sarah (Marcie Leeds). One night, he meets a beautiful drifter named Mae (Jenny Wright) and gets bitten by her. He heads back home, but begins burning up in the sun. Just before he returns to the farm where he lives, the vampires Mae runs with pull up in an RV and kidnap him. During the rest of the film, Caleb is engaged in a battle for his soul. His nature now requires that he kill people to survive. “The night has its price,” Mae tells him soberly.

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Once Caleb resigns himself to staying with his kidnappers for survival purposes, the movie gets into territory that was probably too uncomfortable for audiences. Colton's struggle to live without killing is constant, and there's genuine suspense as to whether he'll kill or not. Even when he refuses, with Mae giving him blood from her wrist in lieu of killing, there's no guarantee he'll stay on a non-lethal path, not just due to his thirst for blood, but the other vampires, who insist that he kill to prove himself.

It's not just Caleb's struggle, which is all too recognizable, that probably made audiences uncomfortable. It's the vampires themselves, which also include Bill Paxton as the most psychotic of them, and Joshua John Miller as Homer, a vampire child who is actually decades old. They quickly become the other protagonists of the story along with Caleb, and they're mostly unrepentant monsters, killing the evil and the innocent alike, and bear more resemblance to the truckers in “Alien” (directed by James Cameron, whom Bigelow was married to from 1989 to 1991) than our most iconic bloodsuckers. These are blue collar vampires, with no aristocratic bearing whatsoever. For the most part, they became vampires by accident rather than being carefully chosen by a darkly handsome psychopath.

Nor are they particularly smart. Their leader, Jesse (Lance Henriksen), is charismatic, but it's hard to imagine these idiots surviving in a non-digital age, and it's also chilling to see just how easy it was for people to disappear before that age hit. This is a group of vampires who just decide to walk into a bar and kill everyone there in the most sadistic ways possible, and are nearly killed – by the police of all things. These guys may have superhuman abilities, but humans still pose a major threat since they're unable to get far enough away from the crime scene before daylight. Humans also manage to put up a credible threat later in the film's final battle.

Over thirty years later, “Near Dark” is still one of the best vampire or horror movies ever made, even if the word vampire is never uttered. Bigelow herself went on to make other films that became even bigger pop culture staples. “Near Dark” isn't just a melding of genres, it combines many of the topics Bigelow became famous for: machismo and women who are making their own lonely way in a male world. Films like “Point Break” and “The Hurt Locker” are examples of the former, while “Zero Dark Thirty” is the latter. Mae bonds with Caleb because of the loneliness and isolation inherent in her life. While she is equal to the men in her lethal family, they are clearly the ones who rule. The film was also a subversive look at the politics of the Reagan Era, which villainized the poor to make the public more comfortable with the continuing erosion of their safety net.

In their own way, the vampires of “Near Dark” are a kind of found family that embrace the very values Reagan was espousing with their loyalty and devotion to each other. But in spite of their strength, they face a constant struggle for survival, and are constantly dependent on others for it. They're essentially a struggling white working class family who mostly gets away inflicting pain and death, mainly because people who being taught that other groups were responsible for such vicious crimes. It feels even more relevant now in our current age, which makes the happy ending even more of a relief. It may be a bit too unrealistic even for a vampire movie, but with hope in ever shorter supply, the possibility of a new, better day after such horror feels like a much needed ray of hope that doesn't burn, but heals.