Top 10 Vampires That Aren't Really Vampires
9. The Great Vampire, Doctor Who, "State of Decay." The Great Vampire was originally defeated by Time Lord President Rassilon, and buried under a giant spaceship that the Fourth Doctor ends up using as a massive stake through the heart. This serial was postponed a few years because of an actual Count Dracula series on TV at the time. The BBC clearly did not trust the public to understand that Doctor Who is fiction whereas Dracula is serious BBC drama.
8. The Vampires in Buffy The Vampire Slayer. What??? She's a vampire slayer. She slays vampires. How can Buffy not be about vampires? Because the show is an allegory for teen growth and angst. Which means in reality, Joss Whedon has taken home movies of your high school years, put them on the small screen, and cleverly superimposed supernatural creatures in place of bullies, pimples, and bad dates. That's right, Buffy fans have blotted out high school so well, their subconscious mind has made up anything anything to not to sit through it again. (Just kidding, I love Buffy).
6. The Salt Vampire from Star Trek: "The Man Trap." It doesn't eat blood. It eats salt. Who wants a vampire story about seasonings and condiments?!
5. Dracula from Dracula: Dead and Loving It. Should, in fact, be called Leslie Nielson Does Frank Drebbin in a Bela Lugosi Cape and Accent and Loving It While Critics Pan It. This Mel Brooks "spoof" -- I use the term loosely, because it's just not that funny (even though I love Mel Brooks) -- just, well, sucked.
4. Gordon Gekko from Oliver Stone's Wall Street. When Thomas Foster wrote, "As long as people act toward their fellows in exploitative and selfish ways, the vampire will be with us," he may have had this film in mind. Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko embodies this idea, and the film's message about greed infecting everyone around money presaged real-life events on Wall Street over two decades later.
3. Mitt Romney's sons: In a recent NPR interview, reporter Alix Speigel interviewed Glenn Schellenberg, who studies the psychology of music at the University of Toronto, about the emotional evolution of pop music and the presentation of "unambiguous happiness" to the public. In one tangential aside, Speigel made the following observation: "I will say that after I hung up with Schellenberg, I read a story in the newspaper about Mitt Romney. The story was about his five handsome sons and how at the beginning of this campaign, his handlers tried to keep them out of public view." Fortunately, the next sentence didn't mention sunlight, but one has to wonder sometimes...
2. (This space represent the mirror that you are looking into at this very moment. You are in an M. Night Shyamalan movie with Haley Joel Osment and are unaware that you are, in fact, a vampire. Remember, stories about ghosts and vampires are never only about ghosts and vampires. Don't spoil the surprise!)
By Adam Throne