Photo Illustration by Thomas Levinson/The Daily Beast/Universal/Getty
Assemble 100 Hollywood vampires in a room, and they’d have less in common than you might think. Some would resemble old-world aristocracy, others millennial rave kids. We’d find vampires who spend their days dating mortals, vampires whose job it is to kill other vampires, and more recently, vampires who are just really terrible officemates.
The film industry excels at nothing if not cycling (and recycling) material, and in the case of bloodsuckers, certain thematic archetypes have formed in the century since F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu. At first, vampires were scary. Then they were sexy. Then silly, scary again, sexy, silly, scary silly sexy…
With pop culture’s perpetual compression, the evolution accelerated to Mach speed. It was nearly fifty years from Nosferatu to Ingrid Pitt baring it all in The Vampire Lovers, and another decade until a spate of undead ’80s satire. Things went gothic with ’92’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula, violent in From Dusk till Dawn, and exploded into sexuality with the aughts’ Twilight and True Blood. Thus spins the immutable Vamp Clock, veering from horror to humor and back again. And if any actor should be struck twice by this dial, it’s clearly Nicolas Cage, who turned fanged again in last weekend’s Renfield.
