I've got a bad feeling about this.

Good morning.

Yesterday, Universal quietly dropped the news that they had acquired the Anne Rice Lestat franchise (yeah, the whole thing).  Hmmmm....

I've written about Interview with the Vampire.  In 1994, David Geffen made Interview with the Vampire.  Geffen was the most powerful gay in all media (he still is, really).  Being the most powerful gay in all media allowed him to get Neil Jordan and Stan Winston and Brad Pitt/Tom Cruise, as well as $90MM behind what is unquestionably the gayest horror franchise in history.

Now it's being made by four straight men (two of whom have neglected to include a single queer character in any one of their multiple picture franchises) and a lady studio exec.  Hmmmm....

While I try to stay on the side of love and light, this news has me more anxious than I was when all that Prop 8 business was going on.  While it's been 20 years since Tom fell in love with Brad, I don't believe for a second that a major studio would be willing to finance a 10 picture franchise around gay vampires.

Get money, Anne.  Get paid, Christopher.  I'm not mad at you, I'm mad at the dirt.

Now you'll have to excuse me, I'm going to lie down and listen to "The Art of Letting Go" on repeat.

and she was

“Humans need to tell stories … it’s through stories that we come to understand ourselves and we come to understand the world.  “

Neil Jordan is always ahead.  He made The Company of Wolves years before everyone was making knockoff fairy tale reboots.  He made the first Oscar movie about a Trans and he made the first (and, to date, only) big budget blockbuster about two gays raising a child through the dissolution of their marriage.  Twenty years after Interview with the Vampire, he has returned to the source with Byzantium.  What’s the final frontier this time?  You guessed it – Feminism.

Byzantium posits (correctly) that girls are the new gays.  Equality is the final frontier.  This is a world where female vampires are forbidden to create and Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan are being hunted for the simple fact that they're strong, independent women.  Fascinating!  Not since Beaches have I seen an exploration of two women involved in such a complicated and sensitive companionship.  Codependent?  Maybe.  Aren't all great loves codependent?  Making your way in the world today takes everything you've got.

By design, it's not hard to see Byzantium as a companion piece to Interview with the Vampire.  This is the movie that recasts Louis and Claudia to explore what happens to old souls when they try and adapt to the world today.  What does it mean for a vampire to love?  Can anyone make the choice to be compassionate and tender despite the constant nagging of an overriding, preternatural blood lust?  This movie is full of poetic philosophy juxtaposed with some gruesome gore.

Byzantium is hypnotic.  Beautiful throughout, this movie lulls you into a trance, building to a powerful and complex climax that made me want to watch it all over again.   I have no idea why Gemma Arterton isn't a huge star.  There’s a moment in the third act where she claws onto the proceedings at hand, straps them on her back and walks away with the movie with animal ferocity.  Color me impressed.

Love Never Dies

"The luckiest man who walks on this Earth is the one who finds true love."

Realizing the hypocrisy inherent to an organized religion that would have him kill hundreds in its name but refuse to grant his beloved access to Heaven, our protagonist tears into the altar like a Medieval Elizabeth Berkley. Screaming himself raw, he renounces God and vows to return from the grave to avenge his beloved’s death with all the powers of Darkness. This all happens before the credits roll.  

In honor of this most sacred of holidays, I present you with one of the great romances of all time. 
Both deliciously campy and sumptuously sincere, this year’s best Valentine is Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992).

"I have crossed oceans of time to find you."

Four hundred and thirty five years go by in a flash and Winona Ryder finds herself engaged to be married to Keanu Reeves.  She is absolutely desperate to consummate their relationship, but he’s having a hard time concentrating on his made up dialect.  He can't be expected to focus on acting as someone from abroad and Winona's vagina. So frosty Keanu goes off to Carpathia and leaves Nona in the care of her best friend, Sadie Frost.  Slutty Sadie is empowered by her wealth to choose her own suitor, whereas Nona is saddled with Keanu, miles away. Just when we think all hope is lost for poor Winona, bound to girded loins for all eternity, Gary Oldman comes to town.

At first, Mr. Oldman is just a shriveled old queen in a dressing gown - holding Keanu at bay in his hilltop castle like a latter-years Tab Hunter.  But what a difference an ocean liner and a handful of sailors can make! By the time Gary makes his way to jolly-olde London, he looks great. Young and fresh.   Desperate to shed any lingering homoeroticism, he absolutely goes to town on Sadie Frost, dressing himself up like a wolf monster and tearing into her on top of a stone sarcophagus.  Naturally, Winona watches all of this like a seasoned voyeur - but the moment Gary sees her watching him plow into her best friend, he realized he's inside the wrong girl. It's love at first sight.  

If that isn't romance, I don't know what is.

While it's obvious that Gary is up for the task of reaping Winona's lady parts to full blossom, he still goes through the motions of seducing her - taking her to the movies, getting her drunk on absinthe, etc.  Romantic. To indicate sexual awakening, Nona starts wearing her hair down and lowers her bust line. Finally feeling a connection to a man that she could never have imagined possible with Keanu, she begins to weep.  Gary turns her tears into diamonds.  

This is the only love story to ever talk about.

Naturally, once Winona starts feeling good about herself, Keanu is off in a convent in Romania suffering from a violent brain fever and insists that she leave London at once and marry him there.  How rude. Meanwhile, even though Sadie has infected a nasty blood virus from her cemetery romp with the Wolfman, that doesn't stop her from giving Nona a gigantic diamond ring - what a good friend!  Unfortunately, generous or not, 1897 wasn't the best time to be a slut and poor Sadie winds up getting her head chopped off.

Seeing what becomes of the sexually liberated, Winona runs back to Keanu.  

In a traditional marriage, she’s miserable - now keenly aware of what she shared with Gary and what’s missing with Keanu - that love without carnality is not complete.  Gary senses her deep unrest and, accordingly, he transforms himself into green mist, sneaks into her bedroom and finally consummates their forbidden love.  

Despite his protestations,Winona gives herself freely and, in the most glamorous love scene ever captured in a horror film, Winona drinks blood from his bare chest.  She is baptized in his blood. Now that's a Valentine's Day to write home about!

"I want to be what you are - see what you see - love what you love... you are my love and my life always."

"Take me away from all this death."

Of course, Keanu eventually gets wind of her infidelity and wrangles all his stoner buddies away from the Chateau Marmont long enough to go after Gary Oldman.  Poor Winona is left tearing at her bosom in the snow with nothing left to live for but the latest Black Friday sale at Saks and the odd bit part alongside pasty, gay-hating fatsos.

Beyond the legendary costumes, the antique lamps, lavish sets and all the peacock feathers, is Bram Stoker's Dracula a gay film?  Absolutely. 

Dracula is about deep and forbidden love in the face of an oppressive patriarchal society.  In 1992, vampire movies were still dangerous.  AIDS was everywhere.  To consummate a gay relationship was, in a way, flirting with mortality.  AIDS is an infection of the blood, to be a vampire was to be infected.  Sexuality equaled death.  It still does in some parts of the country.

"Our love is stronger than death."

1992 was glorious.  It was a time when Winona had the power to bring this script to Frances Ford Coppola, despite having just dropped out of The Godfather III.  It was a time when Anthony Hopkins was capable of giving an interesting performance.  It was a time when a smartly done, intellectual horror, love story made with practical effects in the old Hollywood tradition could be a blockbuster.  Sadly, this is a time long gone by.  But that doesn't mean we can't have a happy Valentine's Day, dolls.  Let's have a good one for Winona.

a scamp, a camp, and a bit of a tramp...

"I got a bad case of loving you!"

Picture it: 

Grace Jones, perennial muse of Andy Warhol, dancing naked after having been painted head to toe by Keith Haring. 

Grace Jones, pop icon, pretending to be the Queen of the Vampires.  

Grace Jones, former Bond girl and later star of Pee Wee’s Christmas Special,  chasing after Michelle Pfeiffer's kid sister and the hot guy from Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Freddy's Revenge.  

Picture a movie audacious enough to open with frat boys wearing nothing but their best bed linens and performing a ritual sacrifice.  

This, my friends, is Vamp (1986).

Robert Rusler and Chris Makepeace are two besties in a bit of a bromance who are sick and tired of life in the dorms.  They promise a local fraternity house that they can procure of strippers for their upcoming kegger in exchange for admittance.  

Faster than you can say After Hours, these upper-middle class suburbanites head off to the big bad city (chauffeured by the man formerly known as Long Duk Dong, before he was arrested by the police for crimes against his own people) to find some consensual whores.

Our protagonists happen upon a mafia-run strip club festooned with multicultural, trans vampires.  DeDee Pfeiffer is working there as a bar-wench dancer with a heart of gold. Dream big, girls! But we all know how fickle the art crowd can be.  Soon enough, Grace Jones and her albino hoards grow weary of these boys with their basic midwestern charm and they want our heroes dead (and after they sat through her boring solo performance).  How rude!

What easily could have just been a Porky's retread, Vamp takes the teen sex comedy horror film in a new, more subversive direction.  Darkly comedic, sub-textually homoerotic, shot with hyper-color saturated lighting, with Grace Jones on mute while the rest of the ensemble gives performances several shades above camp, Vamp sits comfortably in the aesthetic of queer cinema. 

"I love you, Keith - but all I can see right now is food." 

This movie was always on HBO in the late-80s. Its vampire scenes are surprisingly graphic and perversely sexual.  Violence seems to come out of nowhere when juxtaposed with the sophomoric tone of the rest of the movie and that proved deeply traumatizing to my eight year old self.   

Despite this films meandering pacing problems (it often feels like an overlong, aimless Cyndi Lauper video), I would have loved for Vamp to have been a franchise, like the American Pie movies, showcasing douchey-hot frat boys going to vampire run strip clubs all over the country.  Eventually, the series would culminate in an epic, Las Vegas showdown of good and evil where Grace Jones and Gina Gershon battle tete'a'tete - but some things can only live in the dreams of gay boys. 

Lauren Hutton's Infinite Playlist

"No that's it! We're homos! We're rump-rangers!"

I grew up with a single mom and a Nana. At some point, mom decided she wanted Nana to go away so she tried out the old lady downstairs as a babysitter. When the old lady refused to let me watch Once Bitten on HBO, I all but lost my shit! Nana stayed put and we never saw that old lady again.

It could very well be hypothesized that my obsession with all things horror and homosexual had a point of inception: the autumn release of Once Bitten in 1985. Once Bitten is the world’s first teen sex comedy to have vampires and homoeroticism strolling hand in hand like old lovers humming a Sondheim tune along a Fire Island dune!

I loved this film more than any six year old boy should have loved a Lauren Hutton vehicle. By 1988, the horror bug would have so fully infected my consciousness as to make me sneak into Return of the Living Dead: Part 2 while my mom returned things at the mall (shoving stockings in her purse when the sales ladies weren't looking), starting me on the long and bumpy journey to becoming the man I am today.

In Once Bitten, Jim Carrey is a twenty four year old high school student. He’s tall and thin and pale and Canadian and he has gorgeous hair. He has a girlfriend named Robin who is ten years older than him and a professional dancer at that.. 

Jim Carrey has been dating Robin for the past four years and he wants to have sex, but she’s not so sure yet. He confides all this in his two best gay friends who work together at a burger stand shaped like a clown. Did I mention that Jim Carrey drives an ice cream truck and they are all in high school with Karen from Will & Grace? This is a good movie.

Across town, in Hollywood, there lives a three hundred year old Vampire with an aversion to wearing bras who goes by the name of Lauren Hutton. Lauren is kept relevant by her main gay, Sebastian, who not only manages to be a racially offensive stereotype (being a servant, wearing jodhpurs) but a super-offensive gay stereotype to boot (always coming out of her closet, wearing her clothes, leering at young men). Sebastian is wonderful! 

Down in the cellar, Lauren keeps a stable of young homosexuals and a couple of hags – we learn that these are virgins she turned into vampires to stay young! We can tell when she turned them because they still dress from the period they were turned, a confederate soldier, a haight-ashbury/hippy girl; choices!

One night, Jim’s gays take him out for a night in Hollywood to take his mind off his girl troubles and to find him some consensual third-base situation. He finds Lauren Hutton. She's on the prowl because, without refreshing herself with virgin blood every once in a while, Lauren turns into Sophia Petrillo from The Golden Girls. Luckily for Lauren, Mark is a virgin. She takes him home, bites off his buttons and, the next thing you know, he’s wearing all black and can’t see his reflection! 

Girlfriend Robin knows something dark is afoot when Jim passes out at the mall, he usually lives for an Orange Julius, so she asks his best gays to check his groin for bite marks.  She's still not ready to check out his goods and this is her trauma to unpack on her own and I’m sure it’s none of our business.  

This being a gay film, what follows is a naked shower scene where Jim Carrey’s best gays try to man handle his privates. That’s followed by a big song and dance production number where Robin and Lauren compete for Jim’s affection in slutty Halloween costumes. There’s s even a self-titled theme song. This movie has it all! 

Working for a movie studio, it's not hard to see Miss Hutton's aging Vampiress in dire need of virgin blood as analogous to these creepy gay agents and producers who surround themselves with teenage boys to stay relevant. But agents don't have Miss Hutton's legendary tooth gap - just one of the infinite reasons that Once Bitten is better than real life.

If you have a six year old child at home, feel free to pop it in the DVD player, I turned out fine.

(Horror Nerd Alert: Be sure to keep an eye out for Friday the 13th Part II 's lanky ginger, Stu Charno, as "Cabin Boy Vampire" and Flowers in the Attic’s main gay, Jeb Stuart Adams, as "World War 1 Vampire"!)

Rear Window

"Your friend needs a psychiatrist, not a vampire killer!"

In high school, I had a guy best friend and a girl best friend. Clandestinely, I was deeply in love with my guy friend who, in turn, hooked up with my girl best friend.  She wound up being a lesbian a couple years later and neither of us talk to him anymore, so we all lived happily ever after. 

This is the story of Fright Night.

Fright Night is about three kids who are confused about what to do with their private parts until a couple of gays move in next door and set them right. It's like Mary Poppins or The Sound of Music only, instead of Julie Andrews, they’re set right by a gay vampire and the Queen of Old Hollywood herself, Roddy McDowall.

Charlie Brewster is the only child of a single-mom. She’s  always off working and he’s left to his own devices day after day. Usually this is confined to talking trash with his twitchy best friend, Ed, or making out with his best girl friend, Marcy D'Arcy, but all Charlie wants to do lately is snoop on the people next door. 

Charlie finds it a bit odd that his new neighbor, Jerry Dandridge (along with his “live-in carpenter"),  insists on moving-in all of his priceless antiques in after dark…but you know how private the gays can be, especially in these smaller towns. Charlie’s minor curiosity soon turns into a full-blown obsession. He starts spending all his nights eating junk food alone in his room, staring at his neighbors through binoculars. 

Maybe it’s the pressure of not passing trigonometry or being scared of having to go to second base with Marcy, but Charlie fixates until he has gays literally coming out of his closet!

When my high school best guy friend started dating and kissing girls, my shit got dark. I didn't want to talk about it because then I’d have to come out of the closet and we might not have sleepovers anymore, so I would go running on the beach late at night.  Likewise, with no beaches at hand, "Evil"Ed goes walking alone down dark alleys at night while Charlie and Marcy are off not having sex.  

Lonely and sad, Ed finds himself in the embrace of a vampire who extends his overly manicured hand and makes him full fledged gay vampire himself with the promise of never having to be an outsider again.  Good for him.

In a play for emerging Bisexual Rights, Jerry Dandridge sets his sights on Marcy D’Arcy next, appealing to her inner lesbian by staging the nightclub scene from Basic Instinct.   This straw breaks Charlie's back and sends him to the godfather of all homosexuals, Roddy McDowell, for advice and assistance. 

Roddy Mcdowall as Peter Vincent: Vampire Killer is the heart and soul of Fright Night. Besides being about tangential characters coming to terms with their sexuality through the help of some cashmere-clad vampires, Fright Night is about the divide that existed between the classic Universal and Hammer years of old Hollywood horror movie glamour and the disposable slasher films of the 1980s. 

Peter Vincent is feeling washed up and under appreciated. Kids today don’t care about how Robert Wagner and Christopher Walken killed Natalie Wood or how he coaxed Dame Elizabeth Taylor out of her great depression after Monty Clift’s accident outside her mansion. Only by helping Charlie get those pesky vampires out of town, does Peter Vincent/Roddy McDowall come to appreciate his status as the national treasure that he truly is.  I miss him.

Representation matters and growing up gay and seeing (albeit coded) gay characters in a horror movie made me feel less alone.  Fright Night is a wonderful example of the care and attention that went into horror in the 1980s and not just because three of the five men in this film weep openly. After all the anguish men have caused us over the years, that’s always a win in my book. 

I wear my sunglasses at night.

“I’m at the mercy of your sex glands, bud.”

The 1980s was an awesome time to be a gay kid with a single mom. There was positive reinforcement all around us! Dynasty, Pee-Wee’s Playhouse, Facts of Life, jelly bracelets…and, with the advent of cable television and mall culture, no matter where we lived, our chubby little fingers were on the pulse of everything! Amidst all that delicious capitalism, the whipped cream on the Entenmann’s danish of 1980s gay boy culture was the advent of the two Coreys (Feldman and Haim, respectively).

Once upon a time, a white gay named Joel Schumacher was an assistant to the wardrobe people on The Wiz.  That’s a great job.  Anyone who has a Wiz credit on their IMBD page to has me at hello. 

Joel Schumacher went on to make a slew of fair-to-middling movies in the years following his work with Miss Ross, but he also made some good ones.

Flatliners is one of the tightest thrillers ever made (I'm a sucker for a good DP). St. Elmo’s Fire, a film indelibly trapped in the year it was made for all time, answered the question “what happened to The Breakfast Club after graduation?” - it also features an extended montage wherein Demi Moore trys to kill herself by leaving the windows open on a cold day.  If that’s not extreme gay behavior, I don’t know what it! I’m even in the minority of people who think that Batman and Robin was an impressionist meditation on excess and a better film than Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins. 

With this said, at the height of ‘80s excess, Joel Schumacher made a vampire movie called The Lost Boys. While The Lost Boys is not a gay love story as much as it is about brotherly competition (a bromance), I don’t think I’m off to point out that the main character, Corey Haim, is definitely a ‘mo.

Corey Haim just moved to Santa Carla, California with his recently divorced mother, Academy Award winning character actress Dianne Weist, and his brooding brother, Michael. He spends his days changing outfits, shopping for Rob Lowe midriff posters, and reading comics (much as I like to spend my days). 

While most films use a characters’ homosexuality as his tragic flaw, Corey’s otherness keeps him safe and keenly aware of the impending doom around him.  He’s hyper-vigilante. His mother and brother are the ones who are off fucking vampires, leaving Corey to his own devices. 

I have a best friend who loses his shit if a girl pays him any interest. He’ll give her his car, his money, anything! The same can be said for Corey’s brother, Michael.  Michael is so completely dickmatized by Jamie Gertz that he finds himself involved with a group of adrenaline-junky vampires led by Kiefer Sutherland (the Julia Roberts years). 

Even though all the vampires are boys, there’s really no gay vibe in the Michael storyline (aside from their fabulous outfits and impeccably moussed hair).  Michael's descent into vampirism is a metaphor for a kid getting wrapped up with the wrong crowd to impress a girl and maybe getting in over his head with drugs. Drugs are bad. 

In a truly transgressive twist, gay Corey saves the day.  He gets Michael into rehab, saves Dianne Weist from herself, and still makes it to the mall before they close to get one of those "I love to shop" tshirts!

You can tell Joel Schumacher was a designer in his past life because The Lost Boys is stylish as fuck.  It benefits from the MTV age in that it’s super slick (shot by the DP of Taxi Driver) with a soundtrack that aged like a fine Bordeaux.  Everyone from the actors to the set designers was on the same page, tonally, which is elusive. Initially this was meant to be a Richard Donner film but he passed for fear that the finished product would be a Fright Night retread and thank Goddess he did.  Without Joel Schumacher, we wouldn’t have this diamond of a film that manages to be something super specific to its era and really queer. 

When I was a little boy, I used to want nothing more than an older brother who was taller than me and who'd take me shopping with his girlfriend and turn out to be a vampire who would lie on top of me at night sometimes.  I’m blaming the The Lost Boys for this.  What a gift.