Challenging the Vampire

Not all vampires grow fangs and sleep in coffins.

Occasionally, they're socially adjusted enough to have girlfriends and aspire to stardom, which is one way of describing the vampirism of a new film titled "Immortal." Created by two recent graduates of the University of North Carolina system, the film is done in a way that Francis Ford Coppola, Bram Stoker and Anne Rice probably never considered.

Walt Bost and Steve White met in the fall of 1993 while working together at Chapel Hill's Chelsea Theater. Their friendship and their common interest in filmmaking prompted them to begin thinking about a collaboration. "We talked about doing something really small together," Bost says. "It just kept getting bigger and bigger."

Inspired by the release of "Interview with the Vampire," Bost and White decided to make their project a full-length feature film and capitalize on the huge appeal of vampire movies. "Vampire movies are always around and people are always going to see them," Bost says.

The catch, however, was that they weren't willing to use the industry standard vampire-movie formula. "The movie's not really about a vampire," Bost explains.

"When we decided to do a vampire picture we really wanted to do something different from what has always been done. We wanted to make our audiences think. We wanted it to say something," Bost says.

From the opening scene, the movie clearly focuses on one theme: addiction. "No one had really addressed a vampire-thing like an addiction," says Bost. "No one had ever explored the person that was the vampire and gone through what it was like, how it felt."

The vampire, a college-aged guy named Dex Drags, isn't out to infect the apparent protagonist with his blood lust. Instead, he becomes the protagonist. And in place of the standard responsibilities of being a vampire, such as sprouting teeth, vanishing from mirrors and having a general inability to deal with light, he's faced with an even greater burden: He must get rid of his addiction to blood.

The film premiered at the Plaza Theater in Chapel Hill on Sept. 16, drawing a full house. After a two-week run, the creators are now trying to negotiate other local showings. The ultimate goal, says Bost, is to enter the film in the Sundance Film Festival and have it distributed through video.

The filmmakers say they are confident about the movie's potential for success because vampire movies appeal to everyone. They are popular, Bost observes, because they involve a legend that addresses some of the things we deal with in everyday life. "The better myths find success because they do kind of touch on things that we as human beings run into," White says.

But by moving almost completely away from the conventions of the genre, White and Bost are walking a fine line. A vampire who doesn't have fangs and who walks around in broad daylight significantly defies the myth that White claims gives vampire movies their appeal.

If Dex breaks the vampire mold completely, he calls into question whether or not the vampire character is even necessary. His addiction is extremely credible, but his vampirism loses something when it no longer has the characteristics we expect from a vampire movie. It's not that we believe in vampires while watching "Dracula," for example, but there are certain characteristics we expect and for which we grant credibility, suspending our disbelief.

White explains that the was one they were willing to take.

"We struggled with that a lot during the writing process," White says. "If we would have delivered the goods, it would have fulfilled the genre but it wouldn't have served the story we're trying to tell. It's kind of an anti-vampire movie."

The movie chronicles a portion of Dex's life in which he realizes why he is a vampire--it's hereditary--and attempts to stop his need for blood. Unlike other cinematic vampires, Dex can overcome his addiction simply by going through the process of withdrawal common to all addictions.

"[Addicts] have to go through this struggle for themselves and decide for themselves what is right," Bost notes. "The only person who can change is the person themselves. He has to have the will to beat it."

Adds White: "Even though we illustrate it with a horror movie convention, we tried to focus on some of the things an addict goes through. We tried to show that there's a struggle going on here." And in that context, it works: Dex's addiction is convincing; he seems like a real addict, and the movie's creators were very careful to pattern his addiction after that of a drug habit or alcoholism.

The movie's actual plot is nevertheless confusing at times, partially because Dex is such an atypical vampire, and partially because it isn't always clear what's going on in each scene. Bost and White acknowledge the potential for confusion, but say they didn't place a large priority on making the plot completely obvious.

Says Bost: "We didn't want to spoon feed them the story."

White agrees. "I guess it becomes an issue of, `you don't explain it, the audience fills it in.'"

Still, the more the audience has to fill in, the less the audience is going to buy into what's going on. Bost acknowledges several occasions in which the subtleties of the movie aren't understood by the audience. "There are some things that are intended and they don't get," he says.

An intentional lack of dialogue also serves to keep the audience guessing, both about plot and about the nature of the characters.

"You're supposed to convey [the story] through pictures, through shots," Bost says. "I didn't want to tell the story of someone talking."

He points to dialogue-heavy movies like those by Quentin Tarantino, as what a movie shouldn't be. "[His movies have] all this meaningless dialogue. I think his movies are just people talking."

But dialogue is crucial because it engages the audience and adds depth and meaning to the film. Even if a movie's images are really astounding, it's not likely that they will hold the audience's attention the way that dialogue will. The audience, in this case, is given little motivation to become heavily invested in the plot and characters--a direct result of the film's heavy reliance on images and lack of stimulating dialogue.

While the film's abundant footage of Dex's band and other local performers may reduce the need for dialogue, at the same time, it slows the movie down. "Immortal" seems, at times, like a drawn-out music video because so much time was devoted to extended shots of these bands.

The dependence upon music and images also cripples character development. It seems almost impossible to get to know the characters because they vocalize their thoughts so rarely. Virtually all of the leading characters fit automatically into stereotypical roles: the neurotic girlfriend, the crazy old man and the "Beavis and Butthead" band members.

The character who falls victim to the most egregious stereotyping is Linda, Dex's girlfriend. She's a feminist's worst nightmare. She screams and whines at Dex for not paying attention to her. She does little by herself other than wait for Dex to call. Her concerns about their relationship are easily brushed aside--she seems overly willing to forgive him for his behavior. She's supposed to own the bar where Dex's band plays, but she does nothing at all to command respect.

According to White and Bost, though, it's not a caricature. "She's in love with him, [so] she puts up with his crap," Bost says. "It's like one of those guys--they treat women pretty shittily but they treat them nicely enough to keep it going on."

He continues by adding, "I don't want people to look at it and study the characters real well. Linda to us is just someone who's in love with Dex."

White explains that writing Linda's character wasn't a big priority. "We didn't spend that much time on her other than when she was with Dex," he says. "A lot of things like that I would say I blame the writers. It is difficult for a first-time writer, especially male writers, to develop a female character."

Perhaps Linda's character would be easy to brush aside, but several other characters are similarly stereotypical. One of the band members, for example, seems constantly furious with Dex. As a result, his hot-headedness is the only characteristic with which we become familiar. It's nearly impossible to know whether or not he really has any investment in the band. We don't know what his motivations are, and we don't know what he has at stake.

In addition, the manner in which the band interacts plays very heavily on the "Beavis and Butthead" version of teenage boys. Sometimes their horseplay is convincing, but it's all there is to their characters. No one is really like Beavis and Butthead; no one is that one-dimensional.

"It's not a real serious film," Bost says. "I guess most people take the movie really lightly."

Dex is one of the few exceptions to the plague of poor character development. Even without lots of dialogue, the movie is so Dex-centric the audience understands that he is a character to be taken seriously. "We spent a ton of time on Dex, obviously," White explains. "We knew what we were going to take him through. We wanted people to like him even though he was sort of a monster."

Dex's serious characterization, however, fuels a fundamental contradiction within the movie. The fact that he is an addict and a murderer conflicts with the frivolous nature of many of the other characters. As a result, the audience has difficulty determining which aspects to take seriously and which aspects to consider humorous.

One of the most explicit examples of this contradiction is a scene in which Dex kills an audience member at the bar where his band plays. Later, when he arrives at his friend's house, bloodied and bewildered by his actions, Matt, a fellow band member yells at him: "He was from Sony, you asshole!" The audience laughs, but this discounts the fact that Dex's need for blood has driven him to kill yet another person.

The conflict between seriousness and humor is very much a function of the differences between the two creators. `Steve and I are like yin and yang," Bost says of their interactions. "When we came together with our ideas, they were totally different."

Bost explains he has the more serious personality and White says he favors using humor. "It came out somewhere in the middle of everything," Bost says. "When we clashed together, we just worked it out. It's just a mix of us."

As first time writers and producers, Bost and White say that the movie was an invaluable learning experience. Knowledge gained from the making of this film likely will act as a springboard for other filmmaking endeavors and has been the source of countless other ideas, White says.

They acknowledge that the film is not perfect, but emphasize that their limited resources made it difficult to be perfectionists. "We tried to make it an honest portrayal of things," White says. "Every decision that was madeÉwas right at the time."