Welcome to the Century of the Vampire, an ongoing weekly feature where Goonhammer managing editor Jonathan Bernhardt watches some piece of vampire media, probably a movie but maybe eventually television will get a spot in here too, and talks about it at some length in the context of both its own value as a piece of art and as a representation of the weird undead guys that dominate western pop culture who aren’t (usually) zombies.
Last week, Bernhardt reviewed the 2025 Ryan Coogler film, Sinners. Today, Bernhardt looks at the 1998 John Carpenter film, Vampires.
There’s some good stuff in here, but man, they make you fucking work for it, and it’s stuff you can find somewhere else. There are a lot of reasons people aren’t in any significant rush to tell you about John Carpenter’s Vampires.
Theatrically it was just released as Vampires, based on a novel called Vampire$, and the film kinda-sorta follows its general outline — the novel, as the dollar sign stylization might tip you, focuses on vampire-hunting as a for-profit enterprise performed by contractors who are essentially militarized pest exterminators; in the novel’s world, vampires are real and known to the public, and their existence has been subsumed into the logic of capitalism, their damages reflected in insurance rates and their hunting and murder priced out as a wage-labor service. There’s something mildly interesting there, but after broadly gesturing at these concepts during the first twenty minutes, the film forgets about them for the much more standard and genre-digestible “our heroes are secret dirtbag servants of the Catholic Church, hunting vampires in a shadow war that has gone on down through history” that would be seen in later genre work like Van Helsing (2004) and which this movie echoes from the TV version of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, which had been on the air for more than a year when this film released.
And boy howdy are they dirtbags. Our two male leads are balding, rail-thin and grimacing scarecrow James Woods and sweaty, jowly, and perpetually leering Daniel Baldwin; Woods is a year off from Disney’s Hercules, and that will remain the role that defines him. He’s not a thriller lead; he’s not an action lead — Carpenter knew this, and this is part of why he cast him, because he didn’t want a guy who looked like Arnold. He also wasn’t his first choice. Woods’s Jack Crow manages to feel authentic to the sort of disposable piece of shit you pay off the books to go do violence in the American Southwest when he’s slapping around women, beating up priests, and throwing around slurs, but when the tragic backstory crap starts up, none of it works. I’m willing to bet none of it worked in 1998, either, because a glance at his resume says this is the last time he got to lead a film. Baldwin’s character, Tony Montoya, spends most of the first hour waving around an oversized big boy revolver, sleeping off hard liquor, and doing various rapist shit to Katrina (Sheryl Lee), a vampire-bitten sex worker that the two men kidnap; once he himself gets bitten it actually turns him into a more sympathetic character, and Baldwin’s performance consequently becomes less authentic and more wooden.
It’s not necessary for a movie’s characters to be likeable for it to be good, and “the characters aren’t likeable” isn’t in and of itself a complete piece of critique. You have to do something with it, or not do something with it as the case may be, in order to complete the loop. And here it’s just straight-forwardly the case that Jack Crow is the badass hard-edged heroic anti-hero — Montoya is too, with the caveat that he’s doomed, bitten by Katrina about an hour into the movie (this is what it takes for him to stop slapping her around and stripping her naked, and to call her by her name instead of exclusively “bitch” and “whore”). These are roles that ask for, “Well, he’s a loose cannon, but he gets the job done” — Carpenter’s no stranger to this kind of protagonist. Instead the roles land on, “Well, here’s this fucking guy again.” This particular Baldwin’s just a mope; the film wants Alec, it gets Daniel, it suffers for it every time he’s on screen. Woods, at least, turns in a good menacing violent thug performance and is compelling when he’s smacking a priest upside the head with a landline phone. But leading a biker-themed tactical team of vampire hunters in jeans and a black leather jacket, carrying a crossbow? Carpenter should have held out for another Kurt Russell reunion. (The observation that these guys suck ass isn’t some exclusive sign of my enlightened, soft modern sensibilities; contemporary reviews complained about it and excused it by saying not liking them was the point in the same dialectic that exists today, because no bit of discourse is ever really new.)
The other reason the film struggles is because it’s just not put together very well as a story. Katrina’s psychic visions of the original vampire master Valek bludgeon the plot forward as necessary from one location to the next; there’s a lot of physical travel across New Mexico in ways that gesture at Carpenter’s desire to have Vampires be a backdoor neo-western but in practice just kind of waste time. The basic structure is that you’ll see Valek do something and have it explained to you a scene or two later, usually after James Woods batters the priest: Katrina’s bite slowly turns Montoya into a vampire, though she isn’t yet a vampire herself; the Church knows the location of the plot macguffin that Valek wants, so when he kidnaps some random priest and has him point to the map, he’s getting that piece of information he’s supposedly searched for over five centuries but was discovered off-screen; there’s seven vampire elders just hanging out under the desert sand for him to resurrect as minibosses for the final showdown. To the extent this film keeps any momentum through the non-gore sequences, it’s entirely based on how compelling you find Crow terrorizing Father Guiteau (Tim Guinee) over and over again in between check-ins on the vampire master’s rampage. The uninteresting and expected third act twist that explains all the apparent plot holes from the first eighty minutes is that the head vampire-fighting archbishop is in league with the vampires, and so on and so forth. No one gets a happy ending here.
However! There is good stuff in this movie. It’s a John Carpenter movie after all. The script might be bad, the casting might be poor, and the plot and lore might be forgettable, but you’re gonna get some blood and guts. Carpenter has no interest in vampires that conveniently turn into CGI dust when you stab a stake through their heart, and unlike in Dust Till Dawn, there’s no convention that makes vampires suddenly more vulnerable to having a table leg lightly backhanded into their chest. You need to get a really sharp stake and a hammer and drive that bad boy home, and then you gotta cut off the vampire’s head, and between both those things it gets real gnarly, real quick. The master vampires also reserve bites for people they actually want to turn into their servants; otherwise they’re more than willing to just slaughter their way through groups of partygoers or monks or any other humans at hand by lopping off limbs, snapping necks, throwing people into spikes, or in the case of the Catlin, the first vampire hunter to die (played by Mark Boone, Jr., who most will remember as Detective Flass from Batman Begins), memorably split in half by a lethal karate chop.
The action is serviceable for its time, meaning it’s not so great; no one’s ever going to mistake Woods or Baldwin for kinetically-gifted actors, and the servant vampires, which are amusingly called “goons” as a term of art by the hunters, have an entirely leap-based sort of offense to them. They’ll do a big supernatural hop, landing either on or, bafflingly, in front of whoever it is they’re trying to attack or bite, and then everyone sort of tussles around for a moment before the vampire either throws their victim into a wall or the ceiling or hops away. But there are a lot of fun props in the vampire hunter toolkit for Carpenter to deploy, from Crow’s silver pneumatic harpoon crossbow, to these big polearms wired up with cross spears at the top and UV lights wired to a squeeze handle on the grip, to all manner of prop guns and body armor that Carpenter probably still had lying around from the Escape movies. They have a great hunter SWAT van that we only really get to see in action the opening sequence of the film (done up with a logo and everything, because the film was still toying with the idea that these guys were private security contractors but for vampires), but Carpenter seized on the idea of using harpoons and winches and a Jeep to drag vampires screaming out into the sun to explode, and that has a fun enough payoff once the film gets down to it in the final action sequences. The fire effects are particularly good in that practical way Carpenter always nails; he does specially-formulated chemical burns to make sure the flames are always sickly green or too-red whenever one of the vampires goes up in sunlight, reserving mundane orange wood-burning fire for when buildings are set alight.
You should see it if you like John Carpenter’s whole deal; you’ll have to put up with more James Woods and Daniel Baldwin than you’d like in 2025, but it has a charmingly World of Darkness feel to it that other vampire media from the decade sometimes lacked — here, less Vampire: The Masquerade and more Hunter: The Reckoning. It’s not, like, a good movie, but we’ve been spoiled recently in this column with actually good vampire movies. A lot of them land where Vampires does instead, except this has an actual master of horror effects at the helm.
Next week, we finish off this slate of Nineties films with Nadja (1994), and then it’s on to…anime vampires.
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