Brendan FehrLeading

LA Times: Vampires-Forsaken Mentioned

Thanks to Janet for this. Incidentally, the guy who wrote this article used to be my former managing editor at Zap2it before he left.

Calendar; Entertainment Desk
Cover Story The Resurrection of the Undead With their eerie ability to change according to the times, vampire filmsreturn. In a sense, they never really went away.
HUGH HART

12/21/2000
Los Angeles Times
Home Edition
Page F-6
Copyright 2000 / The Times Mirror Company
Dracula is back. So is Count Orlock. And Lestat. Plus Nick the slacker
and Queen Akasha and Jeri Ryan as a bloodsucking concubine. Call them
what you will, dress them in jeans or tuxedos or gowns with plunging
necklines, vampires are once again in the air, swarming their way to
darkened cinemas this Christmas season and well into next year.

Not that they’ve ever really gone away. Francis Ford Coppola’s sumptuous “Bram Stoker’s Dracula” set the bar for technical artistry, winning three Oscars back in 1992; horror meisters John Carpenter and Stephen King have paid homage to the genre; actors including Gary Oldman, Nicolas Cage, Tom Cruise and Susan Sarandon have all felt the urge to sink their teeth into vampire roles; and even cute-as-a-baby-bat Jonathan Lipnicki donned a black cape to play a vampire’s best friend this fall in “The Little Vampire.”

The vampire legend has been reworked so many times–nearly 200 movies and counting–you’d think filmmakers would want to drive a stake through any story pitch that included “fangs,” “garlic” and “porcelain-skinned neck” in the same sentence.

Instead, at the box office, vampires manage to remain forever young.

* “The Forsaken” (Screen Gems, April 2001). Inspired in part by a
real-life gang of Florida teenagers who believed they were vampires,
this contemporary story tracks the journey of Nick, an “infected”
hitchhiker ( Brendan Fehr from the WB TV series ” Roswell “) who
wanders Arizona’s back roads in search of a 400-year-old predator.