With Vampires, John Carpenter Wanted to Make the Anti-Buffy. It Didn’t End Well

John Carpenter’s legacy as one of the leading directors of horror cinema has long been secured. When you make Halloween, The Thing, and They Live, you don’t have to put up with doubters. While the '80s was the peak of Carpenter's prowess, his oft-dismissed '90s films have a few gems among them, like the Lovecraftian In the Mouth of Madness and an intriguing, if half-baked, remake of Village of the Damned. During this decade, the vampire movie came back in style, so it was only right that Carpenter join the ranks. Unfortunately, his take on bloodsuckers is not one of his best.

Bluntly titled Vampires, this 1998 film, now available on Blu-Ray, is adapted from the novel Vampire$ by John Steakley. Carpenter was approached with the project at a time when he was considered quitting filmmaking (he'd just made the disastrous flop Escape from L.A.) and was enthusiastic about the material. A long-time fan of westerns, he decided to move the action to the American southwest and make a classic Howard Hawks-esque gunslinger tale that just happened to feature bloodsuckers.

Carpenter also wanted to get away from the vampire cliches and gothic stereotypes he felt had dominated the genre. This was the decade of Buffy, Anne Rice, and Bram Stoker’s Dracula, with vampires primarily seen as romantic anti-heroes or tragic figures. In an interview with the Calgary Sun, he complained, "Bela Lugosi terrified audiences in the 1930s, but today his vampire has become a friendly uncle and, worse still, we have cute little Buffy and her fanged friends in our living rooms each week." His vampires would be different. "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. They'd have torn Buffy's liver out before she knew what happened."

Carpenter’s vampires are certainly violent. They are merciless thugs, like the grimy outlaws of old westerns, who populate the dusty outskirts of New Mexico and think of nothing but bloodthirst and power. The big baddie is Valek, a disgraced former priest whose rebellion against the Catholic Church led him to becoming the world's first vampire. The only thing stopping him from total world domination is Jack Crow, a badass Vatican-sponsored vampire hunter played by James Woods. You can tell he’s a badass because he wears sunglasses and a leather jacket.

Vampires has some fun set-pieces, mostly rooted in Carpenter’s evident love of westerns, and it’s delightfully bloody (to the point where the MPAA demanded cuts to prevent it from receiving an NC-17 rating.) But the big issue with the film is the vampires themselves. The vampire genre thrives on using the creatures as a metaphor for whatever the artist desires to explore. Dracula, for instance, can be read as a study of death, desire, xenophobia, or even queerness. It’s a vampire’s human qualities that make them interesting. Carpenter’s vampires are just violent monsters with no personality, and the whole film just ends up being as thematically thin as its title creatures. It’s a dishearteningly shallow movie for a director who is so good at using speculative ideas to dissect grand questions about life, death, and what it means to be human.

It's also a shame that Carpenter was so dismissive of Buffy Summers because he could have learned a few things from her. Buffy’s bubbly snark and femininity was shown as 100% compatible with her slayer life. She could be both a girly girl and butt kicker. Jack Crow, by contrast, is such a strutting smarmy display of macho man nonsense that it becomes parody. He’s rude, brags about making a priest erect when beating him up, and is a total jerk to everyone he meets. There’s not much that’s actually cool about him, especially when it comes to how he treats poor half-vampire sex worker Katrina, played by Sheryl Lee from Twin Peaks (women are not treated well in this movie.)

Crow is meant to be a soulless hunter trained by the Church to be as ruthless as possible, regardless of how much pain it might cause. There’s an interesting idea in there that could have shown how a life without empathy is less human than what the vampires have. Instead, we get a lot of James Woods ad-libs intended to make him sound super rad. It could have been about the nihilism of a crooked power structure that breeds monsters out of humans and vampires alike. But by the end, the status quo remains in place and it’s all just a bit sad.

If you like your movies lean and mean (and kinda gross), Vampires has a lot of that to offer. The film underperformed commercially, possibly because Blade was released two months prior and does a lot of the same ideas in a more interesting manner. It’s hard to watch the film and not think about what a John Carpenter vampire movie would have been like had he made it during his Halloween or Escape From New York years. Carpenter wanted to make something “edgy” that would push against the vampire tropes of the time. But where Buffy feels timeless, Vampires is a relic of its late ‘90s contrarianism.

John Carpenter’s Vampires is now available on 4K Blu-ray.