Friday, September 25, 2009

Better red than dead

From The Australian

Screen vampires never die, they just get more depraved or turn vegetarian

SILVER bullets, crucifixes, wooden stakes through the heart: screen vampires have faced an abundance of killers through the decades and mostly have emerged undead, ready to terrorise for another century or two. But how are they faring against the greatest vampire-killer of them all? I speak, of course, of Twilight, the behemoth book and film franchise turning these embodiments of evil into house-trained lap vamps who vant to meet your parents before escorting you on a fang-free date.

New Moon, the sequel to last year's paranormal romance Twilight, will be released in Australia in November, bringing with it a bloody war between those who can't get enough of pallid dream boy Robert Pattinson, and those who think he's a wooden stake in the vampire genre.

Fortunately the ambulatory dead are notoriously difficult to keep down and cinema's most sanitised vampire story arrives at the same time as television's most twisted. True Blood, the second season of which has become US pay-TV channel HBO's highest rating show of the year and has just started airing in Australia on Showcase, is Twilight's dark doppelganger, taking Dracula's polymorphously perverse progeny into realms outrageously depraved even for the undead.

So who will emerge victorious: Twilight's Edward Cullen, a vegetarian vamp who won't go beyond first base before interspecies marriage; or True Blood's steamy Bill Compton, a 170-something hellhound who's polite enough to recommend iron tablets but who will suck victims senseless during sex?
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