Everything Old is New Again! The Dark Shadows Film is Locked, Loaded, and Looking Good!

Some of you may know that I'm a fan of the classic Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows.  I loved the original show, the films that spawned, the 1991 reboot, the books, the comics...if it's Dark Shadows, I've enjoyed it at some point.
There'd been talk of a new feature film reboot for years, but the project was stuck in turnaround for so long that I kind of brushed it off.  But then, late last year, there was new buzz.  And as 2011 came in and picked up steam, there was more buzz, and then outright news.  Johnny Depp, a life-long DS fan, was attached to play his dream role of Barnabas Collins!  Tim Burton, another fan of the show, to direct from a script by that most ghoulish of the hot young novelists, Seth Grahame-Smith!  And then came a flood of casting news that was, by turns, thrilling and worrying, strange and perfect.

Hungry Like the Wahrwilf Wuhrwulf Werewolf

(A companion piece to my earlier article about vampires...)

It is no surprise that, when humanity began to romanticize the vampire, the werewolf would also be enthusiastically reimagined and reinvented.
Where once the two sorts of creature were on something of an equal footing, being night-walking terrors that one wouldn't want to tangle with, they are now rather like opposite sides of the same coin flipped in the dark of a moonlit night.  The vampire is now most often seen as the slick, sophisticated monster, a gentleman (or woman) out for blood, seducing their victims along the way.  The werewolf, on the other hand, is ever the animal, a person transformed, whether through chance, fate, or will, into a ravening beast.

Why Vampires are OHMIGOD SOOO Romantic.

(This post started life as a set of comments on the blog of a friend who just doesn't understand why people so romanticize a bunch of walking corpses.  It was really an attempt to explain why they are romanticized when, face it...they're just dead people who drink blood.)

Vampires have long been romanticized.  However, if one reads up on some of the more ancient, classic vampire legends, particularly those from Eastern Europe, it quickly becomes clear that a vampire isn't a beautiful, romantic creature; it's a freaking WALKING CORPSE!  As one scholar put it, originally, being bitten by a vampire was about as romantic as being bitten by your dead Uncle Boris.

The concept of the vampire as more than just a walking corpse came about because, as well as being immortal, they were well-nigh invulnerable (fire was bad...and decapitation...but most other stuff was just a scratch. Oh, and staking wasn't originally to kill them...it was to pin them down so you COULD kill them...so you had to drive the stake ALL THE WAY THROUGH.) Invulnerability=you don't rot=you are eternally young/the way you were, which is a very attractive prospect to some.