Category: Zevon Price

Day 19 of my 31 Days of Vampire Movies features brings us a more sensitive, if no less savage, sort of vampire, in the movie Tale of a Vampire.

A low budget movie from Britain starring the late Julian Sands in one of his better, if more obscure roles, Alex is a vampire pining away for his lost love Virginia, who disappeared without a trace many years ago. He now spends his days in a library, passing the long hours of his endless life, where he meets Anne, a young woman who has lost her fiance in a car crash, and bears a striking resemblance to Virginia.

Yes, its one of those stories, but its uniqueness lies in the smallness of its character’s lives. Alex and Virginia were all about grandiose love, grand gestures and declarations. Anne, by contrast, lives a small, quiet life, and while she is grieving we see she isn’t wallowing in it, just allowing it time to pass through her. Alex is drawn to her at first for her resemblance to Virginia, but comes to care about her as she is.

You can already guess this movie doesn’t have a happy ending. Alex is being pursued by his own predator, who draws Anne unwittingly into the deadly game between him and the vampire. And Alex is no saint trying to atone for his past. He is unashamedly what he is, and he kills without remorse. There are some surprising moments of gore here, as well as the death of a child, so that might be triggering for some viewers. The movie doesn’t pull its punches, and while it has a dreamlike, somewhat romantic atmosphere, again it starkly depicts the violence and cruelness Alex is capable of.

Tale of a Vampire is an obscure movie, but I recommend it if you’re looking for something in the vein of Only Lovers Left Alive. It’s dreamlike ambiance and compelling characters make it a thoughtful vampire movie.

Let’s keep the Hammer train rolling for Day 9 of 31 Days of Vampire Movies and do the follow-up to yesterday’s featured movie, Dracula 1972 A.D. I’m of course talking about The Satanic Rites of Dracula.

This movie picks up a few years after 1972 A.D. and follows Lorrimer Van Helsing and his granddaughter Jessica Van Helsing in their pursuit to eradicate Dracula from the face of the earth.

This one, yeah. It’s not good. I like it, but its far and away the worst of the Hammer Dracula movies with Lee and Cushing. You could tell both were getting tired of the roles, and Cushing’s health was still in decline after the death of his wife, which he never really recovered from. The plot is less fantasy-driven, and it’s a plot where James Bond would have been more at home than the undead Count. It never really gels the way it should, and the Black Mass scenes are not that great, especially compared to the one in Dracula 1972 A.D. There’s a lack of spark that feels like everyone is just going through the motions, like it’s 3:30 pm in the workday and everyone is over it and just wants to go home. This is the first movie on the list where I’d say it’s okay if you want to skip it, but I’m putting it here because it does hold a place in my heart because it’s the last Dracula movie featuring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee together.

If you’re a completionist, go ahead and give it a watch, but you’re not really missing anything if you let this one slide by.

Day 8 of 31 Days of Vampire Movies takes us back to the Swinging 60’s, only 2 years too late to actually be a part of the zeitgeist. Tonight we’re going back to 1972. Specifically, Dracula 1972 A.D.

It’s another Hammer outing, and the wheels were really getting ready to fall off the wagon here. Don’t get me wrong, I adore this movie. It’s cheesy in all the best ways, has a Black Mass scene worthy of the name, a Mod sensibility that’s only a bit out of date, and yes, Christopher Lee returns as Dracula.

He had already been in several other Hammer Dracula flicks by then, but you could tell the shine had started to wear off the role for him. He was famously vocal about disliking dragging Dracula into the modern times, as this movie tried to do. You could tell it was written by scene outsiders, as it treats its young cast members and their characters as almost alien creatures, their values and ways inscrutable to its more senior cast. Peter Cushing returns as a Van Helsing descendant, and plays the part with a charming, baffled granddad sort of demeanor that’s quite endearing. He doesn’t dislike the teens his granddaughter hangs out with, he just doesn’t jive with the modern times, man.

Dracula himself seems weirdly detached from the whole affair. He’s off doing his own thing, pursuing revenge against the Van Helsing family, but doesn’t really interact with the modern scene or engage with any of its conceits. There’s a stand-in character for that, Johnny Alucard (I know, I know) an acolyte of his from the Victorian era who’s bided his time until the right moment to bring Dracula back from the dead.

The Swinging 60’s scene dressing feels very dated even for the time the movie was released. It takes place in 1972, and the decade of love and freedom was already moving to the back of people’s minds as they marched into the more dour and cynical 70s. It does give a certain tragic edge to the teens, portrayed as a generation lost in itself, left behind by the future but too different to be part of the stolid, stiff upper-lip generation before.

There’s a lot to enjoy here, but to say its one of the better Hammer Dracula movies would be a lie. They tried something new, and swung for the fences while they did it, but ultimately this one ended up lost in the weeds rather than a home run. But I do recommend giving it a watch. Like I said, the Black Mass scene is batshit insane in all the best ways, over the top and cheesy but still spooky enough to be enjoyable.

Day 5 of 31 Days of Vampire Movies takes us back to the classics. This is Hammer Studio’s second outing with Dracula, only it doesn’t actually bring back Dracula, but rather Peter Cushing’s Van Helsing. I’m of course talking about The Brides of Dracula.

In this movie, Cushing’s Van Helsing finds himself facing off against one of Dracula’s heretofore unmentioned acolytes Baron Meinster, whose mother has imprisoned him in their giant castle because he hasn’t been able to keep his hands (or his teeth) off the village’s population of beautiful young ladies. Shenanigans begin when yet another beautiful, and a bit naive, young lady finds herself stranded in the village and befriended by the Baroness and taken to the castle for a late night snack for the Baron. She manages to escape, but not before the Baron tricks her into releasing him from his prison. She flees, and is rescued by Van Helsing and taken to her original destination, a girls’ boarding school where the Baron soon follows.

David Peel plays the dashing young Baron Meinster, but he’s hardly able to pick up where Christopher Lee left off in the charisma department. Peter Cushing, as always, brings his all to the role, portraying a kindly, lovelorn Professor Van Helsing as a complete gentleman who battles the undead like a true swashbuckling hero.

The Brides of Dracula doesn’t match the Horror of Dracula in plot or character (with the exception of Cushing, of course) but the setting, costuming, and ambiance are top notch. It’s a surprisingly visceral movie for the time, especially in the scene where Van Helsing brands himself with a hot iron to cauterize a bite wound given to him by the Baron. Like I said, its not the first movie in the series, but its definitely worth watching and I highly recommend it to anyone who hasn’t yet seen it.

Day 4 of 31 Days Of Vampire Movies features not the first punk rock vampire movie, nor the best (that one shows up on Day 11, stay tuned!) but one that is a perfect encapsulation of the zeitgeist of the era. That era, specifically, being 1987, and this movie being The Lost Boys.

Where to even begin on this one? 1987 was, for a brief moment in time, the 80’s-est of the 80’s decade. A year where punk crashed into rock and roll, where the neon, synth-drenched excesses of California slammed straight into the beginnings of boomer nostalgia for the 1960s, and where goth melodrama peeked out from behind the curtains in anticipation of its ascendance in the 90s.

It’s a great fucking movie, is what I’m saying. You’ve got Kiefer Sutherland playing the baddest of the bad boys, a forever-teenaged punk wreaking havoc on a seaside coastal town with his gang of motorcycle-riding vampire cronies, a wholesome family trying to rebuild their lives and relationships in the wake of a divorce, two of the infamous Coreys, taxidemery, and a sweaty lubed-up dude in a speedo playing the most bitchin’ saxophone solo this side of Gerry Rafferty’s Baker Street. (Side note, did you know the session musician who came up with that riff was only paid $75 for the gig? He was robbed.)

The Lost Boys has a great 80’s soundtrack, and its a great time. It’s funny, bloody as hell, and doesn’t apologize for even a second about what it is. You couldn’t make a movie like this any other time (believe me, they tried. Skip all of the sequels. Just pretend they don’t exist, you’ll only be half as depressed.) Best of all: the dog lives!

Who’s a Good Boy? Who’s the Best Boy?

Summer is coming to an end, and autumn is beginning to show itself in the golden crisping of the leaves and the cool fog in the early morning. Of course, its Appalachia, which means it still ends up being in the high 80s by midday and the humidity is thick enough I’m surprised I don’t see goldfish swimming by in the air. But, as the seasons begin to change, I thought it would be a good time to check in.

My last post was back in March, when I made an announcement that I had finished Zero Draft of The ReReWrite of the Damned. I had planned to let the door-stopper sit for a month, then dive into edits and to make it into a publishable book ready for an October release.

That obviously did not happen.

First, Taterhead (not his real name, but it fits him) had to have surgery on his leg, and what should have been a sedate couple of weeks with him lounging on the couch wearing a Cone of Shame ended up as a two month odyssey into a Marx Brothers’ level fiasco that involved multiple trips back to the vet to get his stitches replaced, a regimen of calm-down drugs that had no effect on him whatsoever, and finally confinement to a cage to keep the little shithead from having to have his stitches put back in for the fifth time.

Idiot Boy in Idiot Jail

We also had to make him a pair of assless chaps out of a tube sock to cover his stitches, putting my arts and crafts skills to good use. Yes, there are pictures.

It’s called Fashion, Sweetie. Look it up.

I had no idea a small dog could be this much of a handful. He is perfectly fine now, other than having a bald spot on his leg, but it was two months of round the clock care to make sure he didn’t hurt himself or rip out his stitches again. He’s part Jack Russell, and also part pit bull, so you have all the hyperactivity and frantic energy of the Russell combined with the cinder block-headed stubbornness of a pittie. Did I mention he’s 9 years old? I could not imagine going through this with him as a puppy.

It was an adventure, is what I’m saying.

So that took up two months, and a while to recover from, so my plans to begin editing in the spring fell by the wayside. Summer has a way of getting away from me with various household chores and other things that have to be done while the weather is good, so that finds me on the cusp of Autumn, a season of changes, finally getting into the nitty gritty of pulling Zero Draft into good working order.

I started working on The ReReWrite of the Damned in 2014. It was a reworking of a story I’ve been noodling with off and on for years. I actually started working on the idea when I was 13, back in the heady heydays of the early 90s. Over the years, I’d gone in a dozen different directions with it, changing plots, characters, names, you name it, until I finally got my feet under me and had more or less a plan with where I wanted it to go.

Only to figure out about halfway through that I was going to have to break the book in half, and make it into two books, to avoid having a 700,000 word monstrosity. That meant going back into the book, and figuring out what to keep versus what to cut for the next book. It also meant reworking the antagonist, and eventually realizing that I had been writing the wrong antagonist all along.

Villains, am I right? You can count on them to screw you over every way they can.

But finding this out gave me a clear through-line for the series, and helped me figure out exactly what I was trying to do with it. I already knew it was an urban fantasy series, and planned for it to be roughly 5 to 7 books, with some wiggle room if I needed it. And breaking it into two books would give the plot more room to breath and expand. I tend to get in a hurry and get ahead of myself when I write, which inevitably ends up with me freezing up because I’m trying to do too much too fast. The ADHD is strong in me.

Now that I’m editing, I still have a lot to do to make it a publish-worthy read. I need to cut about 100,000 words out of it, for one thing. I’m an unashamed over-writer, and I sometimes call my Zero Draft a ‘puke-draft.’ I barf everything I want to say all over the page, more or less stream-of-conscious style, and then I have to go back and make it pretty and coherent. If I try to do this in my head while I’m writing, I end up choking my ideas and nothing comes out. Nothing worth reading, anyway. It’s easier for me to pare the words down when I’m finished versus having to make more when I’m done.

That is also why no one sees my rough drafts.

I’m also working on the second book in the series, and have almost half of its Zero Draft completed. I need to go back and rework the beginning, and fix that whole villain situation, but I’m optimistic that this one won’t cause me nearly the headaches the first book has. (Hahaha, the Gods of Writing are laughing at me right now.)

I’ll close out by saying seasons change, and like the seasons, life changes too. No matter how rough things get, they will change in time. That goes for living, and for creative endeavors as well. I’m still trying to teach myself to accept that the work ebbs and flows, that there are full times and fallow ones, but it’s hard for me sometimes. I was brought up in that constant go-go-go where you have to push through no matter what, but that isn’t the way creativity works, and trying to make it do something it can’t or doesn’t want to do often ends up in more frustration than anything else. So again, I’m learning to listen to the changing of the seasons in my mind, to learn when to rest and lay fallow so I can return in the spring and bring the bounty that was always there, under the snow.

 

So I finished the zero draft of the ReReWrite of the Damned, also known as the Never Ending WIP. I started it in July of 2014, and my god what a journey it has been. I have struggled with this book in every possible way, trying to figure out just what I was trying to say with it, what I wanted it to do, and how to make that happen. But I did it. Today, I finished the last thing I needed to do with it and wrote those most blessed of words: THE END.

The first thing I did was sit there in numbed amazement. I’d finally done it, after all. The thing I never thought I’d actually do.

Then I went up to the counter at the little gas station/Arby’s where I usually write (don’t judge, I live in Appalachia and you make due with what you have) and told them I’d just finished the novel I’ve been working on forever. They were so happy for me, and when the manager asked me “So, what’s it about?” I literally drew a blank and could not tell her. I was still completely flustered. They have always so nice and supportive of me, I literally could not ask for a better place to write.

Once that was done, I packed up my laptop and emotional support possum plushie and drove home.

(this little cutie)

And if you don’t think I wasn’t driving home with the windows down blasting St. Elmo’s Fire as loud as my speakers could go, then I don’t know what to tell you.

So what comes next?

Well, editing, obviously. The book is a big sprawling mess, and a behemoth. I definitely have to trim the word count by a substantial amount. Which, I tend to be an overwriter, so I’m not really surprised by this. Then, rounds with beta readers, sensitivity readers, copy editing, the works. It’s going to be a long process but I am absolutely stoked to start it. Because I am one step closer to holding my finished, published book in my hands.

I’m taking the time to really let this sink in, and enjoy the dopamine hit of having completed my goal of writing a novel. Then it’s back to the word mines, to begin working on Book Two of the NeverEnding Series, because there’s no rest for the wicked, baby.

 

Vampire movies are my favorite types of movies. For a long time, the bloodsuckers were everywhere, draining the life out of every movie-goer. However, much like the beloved, and maligned, zombie, they seem to have gone through a period of dormancy. That means you might be jonesing for your next vampire movie fix while waiting for the next big bat movie not about the Caped Crusader. So I’m here to dig deep into my DVD shelves to find some of the more obscure vampire movies you might have missed to tide you over.

• Dracula 1972

I’m going to cheat a little with this first one, since it’s the most likely one you may have heard of. Starring Tall, Dark, and Gruesome himself, the great Christopher Lee, this incarnation of Dracula finds himself reawakened in London at the tail-end of the Swingin’ Sixties. If you’re looking for something with gravitas, you won’t find it here. It’s campy, overwrought, and downright corny sometimes, but if you need a movie to watch with some buddies and some beer, you can’t do much better than this one, if only for the bombastic and over the top Black Mass scene that brings back our beloved Dracula.

• To Die For (also known as Dracula: The Love Story)

If you’re looking for a more romantic vampire story, then this is a good place to start. Soaked in pure 80s cheese and glam, here you’ll find a heroine who wants something more out of life and a Dracula looking for a new start. Again, this is so 80s you’ll get high off the Aquanet fumes, but there is a powerful love story at the heart of this movie if that’s the kind of vampire story you’re looking for. It’s surprisingly gory in places, which is a delightful surprise if you like your love-stories to come with a bit of squirm.

• Daughter of Darkness

Even though Daughter of Darkness is directed by Stuart Gordon, of Reanimator fame, it’s is a Made for TV movie (are those even still a thing?), so there’s nothing too explicit here. Starring Norman Bates himself, Anthony Perkins as a vampire trying to reconnect with his half-human daughter, who had no idea of her father’s identity until after the death of her mother. Filmed in 1990, in Budapest standing in for Bucharest, the film itself is an interesting time capsule, but it is a bit of a slog in places. The characters are interesting and the story unique for its time, and the vampires here as depicted as having barbed tongues instead of fangs. It’s worth a watch for the local scenery and actors.

• Central Park Drifter (or Graveyard Shift)

Again, a movie with two names, Central Park Drifter, or Graveyard Shift, is the story of a New York taxi driver who chauffeurs people to their final destinations. This is a Canadian film, but it follows Italian Giallo standards. If you’re looking for blood, gore, 80s style nudity, and a plot that’s hinged more together by atmosphere than actual logic, this is the movie for you. There is, again, a love story at the heart of this movie, but it leans more toward erotic fantasy than sweet romance.

• Tale of a Vampire

Starring Julian Sands as sensitive yet savage vampire Alex, Tale of a Vampire follows Alex as he drifts through eternity searching for his lost love. He believes he finds her, reincarnated in a meek librarian living with the tragedy of losing her own beloved. This is an unconventional love story, relentlessly bleak as it focuses on how incompatible these two beings are, even with their similarities. There’s more to the story, of course, as things aren’t always what they seem. A low budget film that feels it at times, it’s still worth a watch for the ethereal atmosphere and dreamlike-mood the film creates.

 

So, there are my five obscure vampires movies you can fill the time with until Dracula makes his inevitable return to the big screen. It’s been a few years, but you can’t keep a good vampire in the grave for long. Our dark lover will always arise, searching for love, vengeance, or maybe just a good drink.

Well, that’s alright, we all get a little lost sometimes. Where are you? Well, this is the website of horror/urban fantasy author Zevon Price.

Who is Zevon Price, you ask? A mystery wrapped in an enigma dunked in nacho cheese sauce. But seriously, I’m an author who has been writing since I was old enough to realize crayons were for writing and drawing and not shoving up your nose. I’ve always loved horror and fantasy, and Vincent Price was my first true love. Spooky, scary, gory, surreal. I love it all and I can’t wait to share it with you!

Keep an eye on this website, as, to quote another favorite horror icon of mine:

I have such sights to show you.