Thursday, October 29, 2009

How vampires rose from myth to modern obsession


From USA Today

Compared with the neck-biting ecstacies of Twilight and True Blood, the vampires of Hollywood's past are downright chaste. Not a drop of blood was shown in the original Dracula of 1931, and it wasn't until the Hammer studio films of the 1950s that the screen flowed crimson.

Now two of horror's top film historians take a look at the cinematic roots of the vampire phenomenom.

In Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration (McFarland, 688 pp., $75, Nov. 9), a revision of a 1990 title, author Gregory William Mank explodes many of the myths about the Hungarian-born Lugosi, the screen's first Dracula.

read on

0 comments: