Vampires (film)

Plot

A team of Vatican sponsored vampire hunters led by Jack Crow rids an abandoned house of vampires in the middle of New Mexico, only to be wiped out by a master vampire called Valek. Only two members of the team survive, Jack Crow and Tony Montoya as well as a prostitute named Katrina who was bitten by Valek. Crow later meets his boss, Cardinal Alba, who introduces him to Father Adam Guiteau.

After Crow reluctantly allows Guiteau to come along with him, he tells the priest some of his past, about how his father was bitten by a vampire, killed his mother and came after Jack, who ended up killing him. He then asks what it is Valek is after and Guiteau tells him that Valek is seeking an ancient relic called the Black Cross of Berziers and that Valek was once a fallen priest who was thought to have been possessed by demons. The Bérziers Cross was used in an exorcism that was cut short but the result was that Valek was forever changed into the first vampire.

Using the changing Katrina's mind, Jack, Montoya and Guiteau find out that Valek has seized the cross and they arrive at an old church to kill more vampires, but they are soon set up as Cardinal Alba sides with Valek and kidnaps Crow, revealing that his plan all along was being turned by Valek so he too can become immortal. Katrina turns into a vampire and allies herself with Valek after biting Montoya. Cardinal Alba agrees to perform a ritual using the cross which will allow vampires to walk in sunlight and be invulnerable, but Guiteau, who was in hiding, appears and kills him before he can finish the ritual. Montoya and Guiteau then rescue Crow as the sun rises, and Crow heads off to confront Valek, whom he kills by ramming the Berziers cross into his chest and exposing him to sunlight, which causes Valek to explode.

Guiteau realizes that Montoya is about to turn into a vampire now that he has been bitten by Katrina, but Crow knows that Montoya has been loyal to him and so decides to take Montoya's fate in his hands, telling Montoya that after two days he will hunt down and kill both him and Katrina. After Montoya and Katrina leave, Jack and Guiteau head off once again to kill the rest of the vampires that made it to shelter.

Production

Shortly after finishing work on Escape from L.A., John Carpenter was thinking about quitting filmmaking because "it stopped being fun". Largo Entertainment approached him with a project called Vampires, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by John Steakley. They gave him two screenplays; each by Don Jakoby and Dan Mazur, respectively. Carpenter read both screenplays and the novel, and he saw the potential for a film he'd been interested in making. "I went into my office and thought, 'It's going to be set in the American southwest and it's a western – Howard Hawks.'" Vampires gave Carpenter the chance to do a western disguised as a horror film," he said. "The story is set up like a western. It's about killers for hire. They're a western cliché. In this movie they’re paid to kill vampires." In terms of tone and look, Carpenter felt that his film was "a little more like The Wild Bunch than Hawks in its style, but the feelings and the whole ending scene is a kind of replay on Red River."

He wrote his own screenplay taking elements from the Jakoby and Mazur scripts, the book and some of his own ideas. For this film, Carpenter wanted to get away from the stereotype of gothic vampires as he said in an interview, "My vampires are savage creatures. There isn't a second of brooding loneliness in their existence. They're too busy ripping and tearing humans apart."

Carpenter cast James Woods as Jack Crow because he wanted "the vampire slayer to be as savage as the prey he’s after. James Woods is the kind of guy you'd believe could and would chew off the leg of a vampire." Woods was interested in doing the film because it was something different for him. Contrary to his reputation, Carpenter didn't find the actor difficult to work with because "we had a deal. He would give me one take as it's written and I would let him improvise...Many of his improvisations were brilliant. When I needed him to be more focused and disciplined, I had the take from the script that was straighter."

Carpenter had not seen any of Daniel Baldwin's work and had the actor read for him. He had seen Sheryl Lee on Twin Peaks and cast her based on her work on the show. Carpenter's wife and the film's producer Sandy King cast Thomas Ian Griffith because she and the director wanted "someone who looks formidable, but is also alluring. There always has to be something alluring about the evil nature of the vampire."

The MPAA took issue with the film's over-the-top violence, threatening to give it an NC-17 rating unless some of the gore was cut. King said, "We satisfied the ratings board by just cutting short of a few things that went into really gruesome stuff."

Critical reception and release

The film opened at #1 but dropped to #10 on its second week. The film grossed $20,308,772 dollars domestically on a $20 million budget, breaking even in the United States. However, it was an adequate box office success worldwide, doubling its budget and becoming the only Carpenter film of the 90's to be successful at the box office.

The film was originally released to mixed critical reviews. Liam Lacey of The Globe and Mail called it "crude, rude, nasty fun". However, The New York Times' Lawrence Van Gelder said it was "ridiculous without being awful enough to be hilarious". Roger Ebert gave the film two-and-a-half stars out of four, and noted that it "has a certain mordant humor" but was "not scary, and the plot is just one gory showdown after another." Vampires currently holds a 37% rating on Rotten Tomatoes based on 46 reviews.

Gene Siskel called the film "a high-action homage to westerns and classic horror that actually has a good story" and "a film that should put John Carpenter back on the map as a horror director and a film director in general," giving the film four stars out of four. Siskel also expressed his happiness in the fact that film starred an all-adult cast without any teenagers. On his end of the year list, he placed James Woods as his pick for his 'Best Actor' suggestion to the Oscars, and he placed the film as his 10th favorite film of 1998.

According to Carpenter, Gary Kibbe was shortlisted for the Best Cinematography at the 71st Academy Awards.

According to the original book's author John Steakley, the film contained much of his dialogue and none of his plot.