Vampires and werewolves might be traditional Halloween fare but there's a whole wave of fang-flicks coming to a cinema near you. VANESSA THORPE reports
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This Halloween will be scarier than other years - and will last much longer. The entertainment industry in America and across Europe is cranked up to provide more than the usual quota of homicidal ghouls and disturbed spirits. In fact, an onslaught of terror and psychological trauma is
in store at the cinema, the television and in the bookshop, as new releases set vampire against zombie and see devastating plagues laying waste to the globe.
Film producers and critics are hailing a return to the serious business of making convincing horror this northern autumn. "There are a number of big American horror films, but we have seen some new players entering the field too," said Julian Petley, an expert in horror cinema and a professor of media and film at Brunel University, England.
"The recent trend started with a number of Spanish horror films, and now it seems that the French have joined in too. I am beginning to wonder if this has caused British film-makers to set off down this path again, too."
Guillermo del Toro, the Mexican director of the award-winning Pan's Labyrinth who is, for many, the most powerful imaginative force on the horror scene, has underlined his love of the genre by signing a vampire book deal with HarperCollins. The director, who plans to make film versions of Frankenstein and Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde in the future, is now to write his own trilogy about a vampiric virus that invades New York. His first volume, The Strain, is due next year.
But it is mainstream American cinema that will be blazing a trail for horror with the film Quarantine, out early December. It is the claustrophobic story of a group of firefighters trapped in a Los Angeles tenement after encountering a mutant strain of rabies. While a remake of the Swedish vampire hit, Let the Right One In, portrays a bullied 12-year-old boy who falls for a schoolgirl who must drink blood to survive.
Further vampires will be queuing up to amuse audiences with the release at Christmas of the feverishly awaited Twilight, adapted from Stephenie Meyer's bestselling novels. This time it is a misfit teenage girl who falls for a schoolboy vampire.
American television viewers have also fallen prey to the bloodthirsty trend in the last few weeks, with the launch of the vampire series True Blood. It's created by Alan Ball, the writer behind American Beauty and Six Feet Under, and stars Anna Paquin.
Vampires will not be having it all their own way, though. Werewolves are to have their howl too, with the release next year of The Wolf Man, starring Benicio Del Toro, Anthony Hopkins and Emily Blunt.
If not true horror, somewhat broader, disturbing and apocalyptic visions are on their way in Blindness, Fernando Meirelles's new film based on the novel by the Nobel prize-winner Jose Saramago, and in The Road, based on the novel by Cormac McCarthy.
Del Toro, the director turned horror novelist, will be entering an equally crowded publishing market. His trilogy will have to compete not only with Meyer but with Justin Cronin's trilogy, also to be published next year and also about a vampiric plague, although this time one caused by medical experiments.
These books will follow in the bloody tracks of Anne Rice's series, filmed in Interview with a Vampire, and of Elizabeth Kostova's recent vampire novel The Historian.
Dracula's influence has spread far and wide since his first encounters with the people of Whitby in Bram Stoker's 1897 novel. And for the Texas Tech University academic and pop culture pundit Rob Weiner, it is time to call a halt. "It is not that horror buffs don't still love spending quality time with Nosferatu's spawn, it's just that vampires have gone glam in recent decades, given a sexy makeover by the likes of Stephenie Meyer and Francis Ford Coppola," he said recently.
The British film critic Philip French believes that the "great period of horror" was the 30s, the era when the classic films starring Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi were made. "They weren't made by hacks, and the best ones, I think, were Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein, both made by James Whale," he said, pointing out that periods of boom time in horror correspond to periods of anxiety and change.
"These films, along with Todd Browning's Dracula, came after the Wall Street crash. They were about the Depression and fear. The second great period came in the 50s, when one could argue it was a response to the nuclear threat and the paranoia of McCarthyism."
French also points out that the enduring appeal of horror films for young directors is that they are a cheap way to get into the industry. "Like Roger Corman's horror films, they are often very cheap, but they travel internationally. One of the only expensive ones I can think of is Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, which he took a year to make. Yet one of the most profitable was The Blair Witch Project, which made a virtue of looking like a home movie."
Vampire plague stories are not always a metaphor, however, and not always even a fiction. Last August, 38 members of Venezuela's Warao tribe were killed by a plague spread by bats. The infection, thought to be a form of rabies, induced a fever and then paralysis and a pronounced fear of water.
The implicated bats are believed to have been disturbed by nearby mining works.
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