Like an Advent calendar that opens its little windows to dark forces rather than to the magic of Christmas, TCM Cinema offers, throughout the weeks leading up to Halloween, to tell the rosary of horror. We can see The Exorcist (1973), Carrie (1976), Amityville again. The House of the Devil (1979) or Night of the Living Dead (1968), but let’s focus on these pillars of horror society that are vampires.
Every Friday (including October 13), there will be a different version of the blood-sucking immortal, a sample taken over a twenty-year period, between 1983 and 2002, long after the appearance of Nosferatu the Vampire (F. W. Murnau, 1922) on the screens had fixed the vampire rites in the cinema.
This program begins with Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992), which claimed a return to Bram Stoker’s novel (1897), while taking great liberties with the text. By turns seductive and repulsive, Gary Oldman reigns over this great and big baroque film, which sinks into the past (unlike Stoker, the screenplay affirms the identity between the vampire and the legendary Vlad the Impaler) for sequences nightmarish, which allow the vampire to exceed his only evil power, making him a lost soul.
Pleasure of scaring
Two years later, Neil Jordan adapted a much more recent bestseller, Interview with the Vampire (1976), by Anne Rice. Lestat, the central character of what will become a series of novels, exercises erotic influence over his peers and his victims. The Irish director takes on with panache the perversities with which the original story appears to be his hero: played by Tom Cruise determined to shatter his image, Lestat drags in his wake a Louisiana planter (Brad Pitt) and an orphan (Kirsten Dunst) to Paris , where an unspeakable Latin seducer (Antonio Banderas) reigns. Caught in a frenzied dance of death, the characters cross the centuries betraying each other, carried by actors who rediscover in the cinema the pleasure of scaring, of impressing, without worrying about proportion.
Tony Scott (1944-2012) was also not short of strong emotions. The Predators (1983) is an icy and haunting version of the grandeurs and servitudes of immortality, which finds an ideal representation in David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve, both at the height of their power of attraction. In a New York decoration magazine, the love triangle formed by the couple of undead people tired of living and the very living specialist in aging played by Susan Sarandon dissolves in an orgy of special effects which, twenty years after the advent of digital technology, remain striking.
The coda of this tetralogy sounds like a quack: adapted from another novel by Anne Rice, The Queen of the Damned will only be remembered thanks to the last appearance of Aaliyah, the young R’n’B star who died on August 25, 2001, in a plane crash, between the end of filming and the film’s release. The rest – the resurrection of Lestat as a rockstar, the conflict between generations of vampires – is more laughable than trembling. But who’s really scared on Halloween night?
