To Sleep With A Vampire

To Sleep With A Vampire
United States – 1992
Director – Adam Frieman
New Concorde Home Video, 2002, VHS
Run Time – 1 hour, 21 min.

As you now know, there are few things I find more despicable than a vampire. I am however a shallow bastard and this film stars Charlie Spradling (Ski School,Wild At Heart.) It was also executive produced by Roger Corman. According to Beverly Gray in her book Roger Corman: An Unauthorized Life there was a period when cheap skin flicks were being filmed at Corman studios during the night on the same sets as other films. For these reasons I had to see for myself, so it was worth the 2 dollar price tag.

Jacob (Scott Valentine) is the perfect example of douchey vampire, he seems to think that exaggerated frowning counts as emoting his inner sorrow. His tragedy is that he looks so much like a low-rent John Cusack that no one takes him seriously. He hates his hunger for blood so he starves himself as long as he can until he has no other choice. On top of this he longs to experience the world of the day. Talk about a snobby tragedy, pick the one thing you can’t have and covet it. Isn’t that a version of the Oedipus complex?

So to solve this problem Jacob wanders around in the slums, looking for people more pitiful than himself, people that no one will miss since no one matters but him. So logically, he seeks his next victim in a woman of the night, someone whose pain he can sense. Nina (Spradling) a stripper at a club, that despite its location in the ghetto is fully crewed and patronized exclusively by white people. Jacob’s attraction to Nina goes beyond her physical attributes though, he’s into that suffering that he sensed. More specifically, her tequila swilling, pill popping, suicidal, homeless unfit-mother suffering. This is the purest undiluted essence of modern tragedy.


But it’s clear that Jacob is interested only in what he can get from her which to him apparently is a lot. This guy is the epitome of snarky stuck up asshole. He acts like a victim and then threatens everybody around him when he doesn’t get his way. Like a schoolyard bully he’ll do whatever it takes to get what he wants whether its friendly passivity or violence. Jacob is just like the jerks I knew in highschool who had really hot girlfriends. One minute he’s giving her the puppy-dog and flowers act and the next he’s dragging her somewhere by the back of the neck. Just like those girls Nina gets the picture pretty quick and plays along to avoid the throttlings. She tries to lift his spirits with tales of her own mortal sufferings and a fake sunbath under the spotlights at the beach. For this he strips his all-black stirrup-pants vampire outfit to reveal a cornea rupturing leopard speedo.


When tooth-grinding Nosfericidal restraint in the face of his sleazy undergarments still isn’t enough to shut his whining up, Nina gives Jacob a private package-deal performance at the strip club. But he can’t drop the victim act and just doesn’t give a shit about anyone else. She’ll “never understand the emptiness of living forever,” so he throws yet another hissy fit to draw attention off of her sturdy rack and back onto himself.

In the end, Jacob gets what he needed from the first baby-frown moment, a helping hand into the great oblivion. Nina tires him out in horizontal fashion, and sends him into the great beyond, all purple sparkles and writhing; melodramatic and weepy spoiled bitch to the bitter end.

Vampires Suck

I don’t like vampires.
I think the whole genre, fiction novels, films, fanciful costumage, is contemptible. Much of this stems from my political leanings. However, even before I was politically inclined, I hated vampires. In my mind, vampires are the fantasy fiction equivalent of the affluent elite. From Bram Stoker to Vampyros Lesbos, vampires are the cream of the bad undead.

So, vampires have never interested me. I don’t care how the rich live, or how hard it is, or the “emptiness of living forever.” Mostly because I don’t believe it. Vampires are an extreme case of accumulated differential advantage. The affluent subsist on the toil and sweat of others, the surplus labor of a million unsheltered who feather their nests. It goes the same for the Nosferatu, taking from those others materially, intellectually and viscerally for their own benefit and survival, perpetually and forever.
And yet the myth of accessibility leaves the rest of us thinking we have and want access to all of that, but in truth the elite always resists infiltration. This is why vampires never want to make another vampire, not because it’s actually hard being a vampire and they don’t want anyone else to suffer. No it’s because they don’t want to share the wealth. It’s why rich mommies and daddies don’t like it when their children marry commoners and why the Gecko brothers can’t get a fair shake, and why you will never actually get to be one of the Lost Boys.

Vampires are an excuse for death to be tragic and glamorous all at the same time, why we fear and understand Gary Oldman’s lust for Wynona Ryder. They are tailor made for Goths, hence the term “goth”, derived from an hyper-idealized overly dramatic architectural style traditionally associated with vampire lore. Vampires are dramatic because there are few things more interesting to the ticket buying public than a rich person suffering hardship. And why not, they have it all, but their lives are ever so tragic. Or so we are led to believe.



Let’s face it, vampires are all about fake drama, and as Tom Cruise and Brad Pitt have taught us affluence is all about emphasizing drama where there isn’t any. The affluent can’t deal with drama because they can afford to shield themselves from it if they want to. Drama is the tired parasite of the average man because s/he lives on a razor’s edge of have/have not, you can, or you cannot. There is no drama in yes or no if it is an everyday question, only when one or the other is unusual. That’s why the affluent and vampires have to create their own thin veneer of tragedy and drama. It's the importance of dressing the part to prove you are Goth enough to verify your emotional agony.

Yeah, I get it, the oligarchy rules us all with tragic flamboyance. The distraction of our submerged desire to be one of the cool kids masks our revulsion at the abandonment of temporal value. We know we dismiss our humanity by achieving privilege. Because in our compulsion to protect it we must distance ourselves from the covetous masses lest that privilege be diluted.

Vampires are the barely-fictional personification of extreme social elitism, and hence, I have no sympathy. 200 years of fancy talking and arrogance in costume doesn’t dull the metaphor for me, give me the proletarian zombie any day.