Vampires (1998)

John Carpenter's Vampires arrives from 1998 with a hangover, a shotgun, and no interest in improving anyone's moral education. Adapted from John Steakley's novel, it follows James Woods as Jack Crow, a Vatican-funded slayer who leads a crew of mercenaries through the New Mexico desert in pursuit of a master vampire named Valek. The cast is white and male to a degree that suggests a casting call posted at a bowling alley. Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa and Gregory Sierra appear in minor supporting roles, present but unremarked upon. Nothing in the film's construction indicates an interest in representation as a project. The vampire hunters are paid killers, a western cliché Carpenter has acknowledged chasing, and the film never pauses to interrogate the economics of that arrangement.

Sheryl Lee's Katrina, a prostitute bitten during the motel massacre, becomes a psychic tracking device and a victim of her own transformation. She is not granted agency, and the film does not pretend to offer her any. There is no feminist argument here, no critique of the men who use her. LGBTQ themes are absent entirely. So are racial themes, which the film declines to engage despite its southwestern setting. The Catholic Church functions as a bureaucratic employer of violence, and the film has no interest in what that might say about capital or faith. It is, in the end, a movie about staking things.

Environmental concerns do not surface. Body positivity does not surface. Neurodivergence does not surface. Valek's backstory, a disgraced priest who rebelled against the church, is invented vampire mythology, not a reframing of real history. As for sermonizing, the film has none. It is too busy with gore, tequila, and the mechanical winch used to drag vampires into daylight. The picture opened at number one, made its money, and spawned two direct-to-video sequels nobody asked for. We are left with a lean, mean, and ideologically inert piece of genre filmmaking, which is its own kind of honesty.