Interview with a Vampire

Film genre is the category while the genre film is an individual film that possibly fits into the category. We see this all the time when we rent videos—they are not alphabetized but categorized by genre mainly. Genre is static in that a 1930s Western and a 2000s Western is similar. It is dynamic in that the changes that have evolved over 70 years mean something a little bit different. You can’t say better because, like all things, you need the originals to work upon.

The theory of types is just a theory of rules. Notice that there are thousands of different Western movies yet relatively few rules that you could list that makes a film a Western. And even in that regard, there is no set list of rules to work off. There is no checklist that says, “You gotta have a guy in a black hat.” Genres evolve because an audience expects them to.

The horror genre saw a movie in the 1990s actually list out the rules of a slasher film. Wes Craven’s Scream poked fun at the movies that he himself helped to promote and create with the Nightmare on Elm Street series, along with other film series (not Craven’s) Friday the 13th and Halloween. Remarkably, the “rules” listed in Scream are incredibly close to the plotlines of a majority of those movies. Scream, then, evolved the genre by poking fun at it, listing the rules that it itself was playing by directly to the audience, and then twisted them to give the audience something new. You could not have listed the rules in the first slasher flick.

Once pressed, it is hard to list the main genres of movies. I think of drama, musicals, comedy, Western, horror, sci-fi. But isn’t a Western just a drama in the Old West? Is The Apple Dumpling Gang a comedy or a Western? Now, I have seen a lot of genre name-combining. The HBO series Six Feet Under I have seen in print as a “dramedy,” a dark comedy-drama about life in a mortician’s house.

Human beings have to categorize things to understand them. I always think of teaching school. I teach English, which includes the two big subjects reading and writing. Don’t they read in science? Don’t they write papers in history? Human beings, in order to talk about a movie or internalize it, have to go into a theater with the mindset of comedy or drama. How many times have you rented a movie together and expressed what you were in the mood for? Genre then is the main category that humans use to differentiate the basic elements of a movie. We would file The Addams Family in the comedy section even though it has horror genre principles. Something about the rules of comedy win out. Conversely, the movie Critters is a sci-fi movie even though it has comedic elements. Alien is still sci-fi even though the bare bones plot is more representative of horror. The Addams Family can be comedy because we have so internalized the rules of the horror genre that we can make them funny.

Interview with a Vampire is a type of movie that comes about because we need something new in the genre of vampire movies. The 1931 Dracula put me to sleep; it just isn’t scary by modern standards. Interview with a Vampire has the feel of a 20/20 interview and therefore seems believable, almost historic. The central character may be Brad Pitt’s character because it is his story, though the actual protagonist is the Christian Slater character because he is hearing these events and causing them to move forward, not to mention the fact that the ending definitely puts him as the protagonist in that he gets his wish. The audience learns that he did not learn from the story that Brad Pitt told and now has to go through it himself. Interview with a Vampire has a vampire as the “good guy.” He is characterized as having morals and feelings, especially in opposition of the frightening Tom Cruise character. Brad Pitt’s character is how we the audience would hope we ourselves would act if this happened to us.

Dracula was one of those horror movies where we were once scared by simply saying “vampire.” The genre has evolved, for better or worse. Interview with a Vampire gave vampires “feelings” and motives, and special effects where we see more blood helped to scare us. From this could come Blade (even though the comic book character was created in the 1970s) where our definite hero IS a vampire. Special effects in the Blade trilogy are almost gross, sickening the audience as a vampire sucking human blood should sicken us.