John Carpenter’s Vampires (1998) – WTF Happened to This Adaptation?
John Carpenter is one of our favorites of all time. Even his lesser stuff is fun to watch, or you get to see a glimpse of what could have been. He has a decade of work that is full of the best that horror and sci-fi have to offer as well as things later like the best Lovecraft adaptation that isn’t actually an adaptation. Speaking of which, the man has directed quite a few adaptations in his career. From the non-literal like the previously mentioned In the Mouth of Madness or even Assault on Precinct 13 being a loose adaptation of Rio Bravo to the very famous adaptations of Village of the Damned and of course The Thing, the man has made his mark on adapting. One that doesn’t get talked about as much, both as a movie itself and the fact that it’s an adaptation is John Carpenter’s Vampires from 1998. It’s his last movie of the 20th century and some say it’s his last good movie, period. But how faithful is it to its 1990 novel? Hook your crossbows up to the tow wench as we find out what happened to this adaptation.
The Movie
This movie has a lot more of a story than you’d expect. From multiple proposed stars and directors to John Carpenter making this his last stand of a movie, Vampires had a rocky road to get to the silver screen. The book Vampire$ (yes, with a dollar sign) came out in 1990 and by 1992, Largo Entertainment had bought the rights to adapting it. While Carpenter was in the running to direct the movie early on along with Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, and Ron Underwood, the first attached director on the project was Razorback and Highlander director Russell Mulcahy. That movie actually could have been pretty cool and was set to feature Dolph Lundgren as the main hero and potentially Willem Dafoe as the main vampire antagonist, but it wasn’t to be. Conflicts on which script to use and the general vision of the film would see Mulcahy leave and take his star with him. Lundgren and the director would make Silent Trigger together that actually incorporated parts of the shooting script that their Vampires would have been. Personally, as Razorback is one of my favorite giant monster and Ozploitation movies out there, I would have loved to see this version.
After that exodus, John Carpenter was approached again by Largo, but he was in a rut. After the experience of Escape from LA made him feel that filmmaking just wasn’t fun anymore, he was ready to retire. The studio gave him two scripts to mull over, and he also read the book. He ended up choosing the script written by Don Jakoby but due to the budget being slashed from 60 million to 20 million, he had to rewrite much of it himself, as many of the scenes would now be unfilmable due to lack of funds. Some of the ideas that had to be put aside included a vampire pope which, maybe that’s best left to the wayside. The reason he chose it was because it felt just as much a western as a horror movie which was a blend he was smitten with making. He had done homages to westerns before with Assault on Precinct 13 being a modern Howard Hawks tale and Big Trouble in Little China featuring a faux John Wayne allusion in Kurt Russell’s Jack Burton, but he had never been able to mix horror and westerns together.
His script did take ideas from Jakoby and Dan Mazur as well as from brainstorming sessions from his frequent collaborator Michael DeLuca who co wrote In the Mouth of Madness with Carpenter. Jakoby has a small but fun list of credits including Blue Thunder, Lifeforce, and Arachnophobia. Mazur, while uncredited here, also wrote the wonderfully 90s Night of the Scarecrow. For the cast, Carpenter considered some heavy hitters for main character Jack Crow including Kurt Russell, Clint Eastwood, Bill Paxton, and Al Pacino. Those are all very different movies, but he ended up settling on James Woods, who he worked well with. Woods would shoot the scene as written but then ask for another take with improvisation, which they both liked. While Lundgren was approached about coming back to play Valek, he declined, and producer Sandy King pushed for Thomas Ian Griffith for his brooding physicality. Sheryl Lee was cast based on Twin Peaks and even though Alec Baldwin had signed on as a huge fan of the director, he had to drop out and recommended his brother Daniel.
Tim Guinee, Maximilian Schell, Gregory Sierra, Mark Boone Junior, Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa, and a bunch of other Carpenter character actor regulars also appear and even special effects wiz Greg Nicotero, who did the effects on this film, took over as director for a few days when Carpenter walked off set, presumably to smoke weed and play video games. While the movie opened at number one at the box office, it eventually only made back its 20-million-dollar budget and was very split by critics. It did, however, make a killing on home video with an additional 42 million in rentals and sales. This continues today, as you can get a wonderful version from our friends at Scream Factory. The movie did somehow get two sequels with the Bon Jovi led Los Muertos and 2005’s Vampires: The Turning. Yes. Look it up.
The Book
Vampire$ was the second novel by author John Steakley after his first book Armor in 1984. Born in July of 1951 in Cleburne, Texas, Steakley was the son of a car dealership owner and received a BA in English from Southern Methodist University in Texas. He lived in Hollywood and South America in brief stints but spent the majority of his life in his home state, where he would eventually become a decent golfer and lived with his wife, whom he married in 1988, until his death from liver cancer in 2010. While he started out with a dream of being an actor, this shifted to being a science fiction writer. He published a few short stories in various magazines in the early 80s before getting his first and only 1 of 2 novels published in 1984. Armor is a sci-fi action book that follows humanity’s war against an insect race and has a focus on the effects of war on the human mind.
Interestingly enough, the main characters of Armor have the same names as the main characters of his second novel Vampire$ which came out in 1990. Felix and Jack are similar characters in both works and there are other subtle hints throughout this novel that suggest maybe they are alternate versions, even if the copyright of the book outright says otherwise. While this book would be adapted into a semi-popular movie, Armor never would get the attention the author thought it deserved and spent a long time trying to finish a sequel to Armor but wasn’t able to get it together. There really isn’t a ton out there on the man but it’s nice to talk about him and maybe get a few more people to read his works.
What is the same?
Jack Crow and his team of vampire hunters that work mostly for the Vatican are celebrating at a hotel after destroying a nest of vampires when a “Master” vampire comes to the hotel and kills everyone on the team except for Jack and his right-hand person. A high-ranking Vatican official assigns Father Adam to Jack’s mission to stop the Master Vampire with a final confrontation taking place.
What is different?
There really isn’t a lot in common between the book and the movie, apart from the name of the main character and his occupation. While the book and the movie follow a group of vampire hunters who are paid mostly by the Vatican, the plot changes quite a lot. Daniel Baldwin plays the second in command in the movie named Tony Montoya while the book second in command is Catlin. While they are the only two to live through the motel attack in both, the dynamic changes as Montoya also flees with a prostitute who ends up biting him and he slowly turns into a vampire. Catlin actually lives in the book and is never separate from Jack until a pivotal scene. The book sees Jack completely rebuild his team instead of just traveling with Tony and Father Adam and that team figures out silver is incredibly deadly to vampires. There is also an older weaponsmith named Carl who creates a vampire detector, and I saw him as a sort of Whistler-like character from the Blade movies.
There is no other team in the movie and the ending sees Jack and Father Adam kill the master vampire while Montoya flees with his fully turned love interest, knowing Jack will hunt him down. This was drastically changed from the book where Crow is depressed by losing most of two teams and goes to a hotel to be taken by the undead. Felix, who is another version of the Daniel Baldwin character, Catlin, and Father Adam go to rescue him, but Jack is taken away by the master vampire that killed his team and Father Adam is killed. Vampires are a much bigger threat in the book as well. While still scary in the movie, they can seemingly be overpowered by a few humans whereas the book ones are lightning fast and brutally strong, to say nothing of the master level ones. The book ends with Felix building a new team for the Vatican to hunt vampires, named the kind of silly Vampires Inc, after he stops a now vampiric Jack from killing the pope. This is almost certainly where the vampire pope came from in one of the early scripts.
Legacy
John Carpenter’s Vampires is undoubtedly more popular and well known than John Steakley’s Vampire$ with a dollar sign. I don’t know how I feel about this as 13-year-old Andrew thought the movie was the coolest thing ever and while I still enjoy it, this viewing fell flatter. It doesn’t hold water with Carpenters’ best but it’s also much better than some of his worst. It’s fun but I think the novel brought more new things to the table while bucking the trend of the romanticized vampire we were watching and reading about during that time. The movie will always hold a special place in my heart, and I will watch it more than I read the novel, but I think the book is better and hope that more people will read it. Next time you need a Vatican sponsored team of vampire hunters to take care of a problem, let me suggest the book team of Vampires Inc rather than the mahogany inducing team of the movie.
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