Vampires, Romeo and Juliet, and really sharp pointy stakes
It’s vampire hunting season again.
Since the advent of Twilight, and other cheesy vampire-romance movies, reminisce of low-quality, dismal fanfiction-like pairings where someone had a “brilliant” idea of pairing a vicious bloodsucking vampire with a misunderstood gothic social outcast... Hmm... Sounds like a Mary-Sue plotline already.
Of course it would never work, the whole mythological essence of a vampire doesn’t work for romance, as misguided as that notion is. Vampires have no reflection, ergo, you technically can’t take a picture of a vampire, ergo, there won’t be any cutesy couple photos. Then they have horrendously pasty white skin, because of all that time spent crawling in the dark. And seriously, ladies, do you really want to have sex in a coffin? It’s not that spacious in there, it’s pretty uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t recommend it if you scream loud enough to wake up the dead. That’ll be pretty embarrassing.
So there’s a little retconning of our perceptions of vampires. Suddenly, they’re youthful, charming and most importantly, they can choose to not drink the blood of the ones they love, or be consumed by some other undead-ish desire to transform their brides into eternal undeads like themselves. It sounds to me if vampires can choose not be vampires, then… Wait… The impossibilities are mind-boggling here. Does that mean I can also choose not to be human, but a three headed marathon comedian? (Don’t ask) Then can rabbits choose not to be rabbits, but wolves instead? So yay, Stephenie Meyer has somehow successfully managed to humanize vampires and turn the undead back into the living! She’s a walking Jesus!
But the consequences are earth-shattering. For one, the phrase “how to kill a vampire” has been Googled over 50 million times and rising rapidly, with the coming release of the most likely to be god-awful sequel of Twilight. Young men have been stocking up on ash stakes and learning to cook a mean garlic pesto spaghetti to keep vampires away from their girlfriends. Holy water sales have gone through the roof, and I just saw a holy water purifier for sale online, which doesn’t just removes chlorine and microbes from your tap water through reverse osmosis, but automatically blesses it too; handy for watering garden plants and keeping vampires off your property too.
Somehow, it feels that humanity is scraping the bottom of the barrel with these sort of ideas for movies. Vampire lovers, zombie strippers, werewolf attorneys, mummy babysitters, homicidal unkillable psycho gas attendants. And perhaps it just irks me that it’s these sort of movies that entertain, titillate and skew my entire world view of the right order of things. Gone are the days where man was supposed to kill vampires, and zombies are supposed to eat brains, and werewolves are supposed to get flea collars.
And it’s drama for the sake of drama. Romeo and Juliet doesn’t quite cut it anymore, star-crossed lovers can’t just be from different feuding families, but someone must now up the ante. One must be human, and the other must be a complete abomination which eats humans. But it’s the same drawn out story no matter how you carve it. If I replaced Romeo with a werewolf and Juliet with a vampire, I would get three movies about feuding werewolves and vampires entitled Underworld, Underworld 2 and Underworld 3. The originality is just astounding.
And we can also draw similarities between Twilight and Titanic, even though I am proud to say that I've never tortured myself by sitting through these two movies. For one, both movie titles begin with the letter "T". But that aside, same story, two lovers from different worlds, who could never be together, and they part at the end of the movie. It's a recycling of old movie plots. But with vampires.
It's not like everything can be made better with vampires. Think about it, how would movies be if we have things like, "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Vampires!" or "2012 and Vampires!" or "The Time Traveller's Vampire Wife". Sometimes it works better with zombies, e.g. this book right there, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. At least that one doesn't attempt to package itself as a new brilliant story, it just improves the story with the addition of zombies. But I'm sick of the same recycled crap that Hollywood churns out to feed the starving masses of hysterical pre-teen girls. Yes, guys, if you actually did watch any of the abovementioned films and enjoyed it, you're better cutting it off and going to Thailand. Have a little self-respect!
But my biggest ire is the fact that our womenfolk are swooning over these suave and charming unholy creatures of hell that goes against every law of nature there ever is. Nothing pisses me off more than making out with a girl, only to have her pull back with a loud sigh, and say, “Why can’t you be more like a vampire?”
Since the advent of Twilight, and other cheesy vampire-romance movies, reminisce of low-quality, dismal fanfiction-like pairings where someone had a “brilliant” idea of pairing a vicious bloodsucking vampire with a misunderstood gothic social outcast... Hmm... Sounds like a Mary-Sue plotline already.
Of course it would never work, the whole mythological essence of a vampire doesn’t work for romance, as misguided as that notion is. Vampires have no reflection, ergo, you technically can’t take a picture of a vampire, ergo, there won’t be any cutesy couple photos. Then they have horrendously pasty white skin, because of all that time spent crawling in the dark. And seriously, ladies, do you really want to have sex in a coffin? It’s not that spacious in there, it’s pretty uncomfortable, and I wouldn’t recommend it if you scream loud enough to wake up the dead. That’ll be pretty embarrassing.
So there’s a little retconning of our perceptions of vampires. Suddenly, they’re youthful, charming and most importantly, they can choose to not drink the blood of the ones they love, or be consumed by some other undead-ish desire to transform their brides into eternal undeads like themselves. It sounds to me if vampires can choose not be vampires, then… Wait… The impossibilities are mind-boggling here. Does that mean I can also choose not to be human, but a three headed marathon comedian? (Don’t ask) Then can rabbits choose not to be rabbits, but wolves instead? So yay, Stephenie Meyer has somehow successfully managed to humanize vampires and turn the undead back into the living! She’s a walking Jesus!
But the consequences are earth-shattering. For one, the phrase “how to kill a vampire” has been Googled over 50 million times and rising rapidly, with the coming release of the most likely to be god-awful sequel of Twilight. Young men have been stocking up on ash stakes and learning to cook a mean garlic pesto spaghetti to keep vampires away from their girlfriends. Holy water sales have gone through the roof, and I just saw a holy water purifier for sale online, which doesn’t just removes chlorine and microbes from your tap water through reverse osmosis, but automatically blesses it too; handy for watering garden plants and keeping vampires off your property too.
Somehow, it feels that humanity is scraping the bottom of the barrel with these sort of ideas for movies. Vampire lovers, zombie strippers, werewolf attorneys, mummy babysitters, homicidal unkillable psycho gas attendants. And perhaps it just irks me that it’s these sort of movies that entertain, titillate and skew my entire world view of the right order of things. Gone are the days where man was supposed to kill vampires, and zombies are supposed to eat brains, and werewolves are supposed to get flea collars.
And it’s drama for the sake of drama. Romeo and Juliet doesn’t quite cut it anymore, star-crossed lovers can’t just be from different feuding families, but someone must now up the ante. One must be human, and the other must be a complete abomination which eats humans. But it’s the same drawn out story no matter how you carve it. If I replaced Romeo with a werewolf and Juliet with a vampire, I would get three movies about feuding werewolves and vampires entitled Underworld, Underworld 2 and Underworld 3. The originality is just astounding.
And we can also draw similarities between Twilight and Titanic, even though I am proud to say that I've never tortured myself by sitting through these two movies. For one, both movie titles begin with the letter "T". But that aside, same story, two lovers from different worlds, who could never be together, and they part at the end of the movie. It's a recycling of old movie plots. But with vampires.
It's not like everything can be made better with vampires. Think about it, how would movies be if we have things like, "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs and Vampires!" or "2012 and Vampires!" or "The Time Traveller's Vampire Wife". Sometimes it works better with zombies, e.g. this book right there, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. At least that one doesn't attempt to package itself as a new brilliant story, it just improves the story with the addition of zombies. But I'm sick of the same recycled crap that Hollywood churns out to feed the starving masses of hysterical pre-teen girls. Yes, guys, if you actually did watch any of the abovementioned films and enjoyed it, you're better cutting it off and going to Thailand. Have a little self-respect!
But my biggest ire is the fact that our womenfolk are swooning over these suave and charming unholy creatures of hell that goes against every law of nature there ever is. Nothing pisses me off more than making out with a girl, only to have her pull back with a loud sigh, and say, “Why can’t you be more like a vampire?”
