vampire playlist 🦇

A watchlist, a playlist, a reading, and a mood board.

Note: In addition to monthly essays I like to sprinkle in some pop-up newsletters to share curated recommendations along with a brief note. I care deeply about free access to information so if you see this emoji, 🔗 it means I found a link where you can watch the movie, read the book, or listen to the music for free and maybe even without a login. If you struggle to gain access to anything I mention — especially texts — just DM.

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

Because I am Catholic, I am obsessed with vampires.¹

Catholic writers like Bram Stoker and Anne Rice wrote into vampirism the Church’s every anxiety around sin, contamination, vulnerability, purity and pleasure. The vampire’s shadow grew taller and darker as modernity evolved into late capitalism. The vampire is undying, eternal but damned. The Catholic Church is also undying, potentially eternal and damned, too. Both are committed to the climactic consumption of blood, and both have powers of conversion. In the end, Catholicism envisions us all as simultaneously vulnerable to being consumed by and becoming vampires.

In A Geology of Media (2014) Jussi Parikka notes that, “Bram Stoker’s Dracula, itself based on an earlier catalogue of fictions, shift the question of material and substrate to the body.” Parikka pays closer attention to dirt’s role within Stoker’s cosmology of vampirism and describes how, “Dracula’s viral code is enacted at the interface with his substrate, the freshly-dug earth which is transported to London and distributed around the capital; this infection vector.”²

In 1993’s Vampire: An Uneasy Essay on the Undead in Film (🔗), Jalal Toufic writes that “smart weapons that home in on their targets on their own, smart cars, smart houses… bring to mind the doors that open on their own in vampire films.” So much of the seamlessness, omnipresence, and sheer power of contemporary technology is articulated through the language of the omnipotent God of the Catholics. But perhaps the 19th century version of this bloodthirsty creature — with its powers of seduction, extractive appetite, and immortally Earth-bound — offers a tighter comparison. Maybe we’re not inching towards godliness, but turning deeper into vampirism.

Mark Fisher’s most-popular essay makes use of the Vampire Castle to describe the “bourgeois perversion” of Twitter’s “moralizing left,” flimsy internet “leftists” that suck “the energy of these movements.” The Vampire Castle plays the victim to appear “marginal and oppositional” all the while concealing its own privileged status. It relies on “all the infernal strategies, dark pathologies and psychological torture instruments Christianity invented.” But what I find most interesting about this essay is how Fisher rightly situates these dark impulses and dishonest moves, not within a monstrous outsider, but within the castle itself.

The vampire is like a shadow, complementary in its darkness and truthful in its outline. The vampire is like the back of the hand, an other side that is always with us. In stories about vampires, good and evil contaminate each other. Blood runs and spills, it sullies and purifies. Both in art and mythology, vampires complicate the dichotomies of good and evil, pure and impure.

If film is the first “distinctively mediatic art form,”³ the vampire film is always telling an ongoing history of film itself: 1922’s Nosferatu (🔗) was one of the first horror films ever made and 1932’s Vampyr (🔗) cemented is as genre for filmmaker’s keen on exploring the medium’s ability to create phantasms and multidimensional beings. In 1992, Coppola’s vampire tragedy sets the scene of Mina and the Count’s first meeting within an London cinematheque where audiences are experiencing the phantasmagoria of early cinema for the first time. From 1922 to this year’s forthcoming Nosferatu remake, the vampire’s outstretched hand extends along the history of cinema itself, the mark of a now-century of inventive figurative economies — where shadows, bite-marks, and tilled soil stand in for the body (or bodies) of a singular (or is it?) monster.

And so, I don’t think it’s possible to call yourself a book or film lover without getting nerdy about vampire stories. I hope this vampire-themed letter awakens your lust. If you still want more, I made a semi-related zine earlier this year all about blood and technology — you can request a free PDF here.

Daughters of Darkness (1971)

🩸 watchlist: my favorite vampire movies

Fascination (1979) 🔗
Pornographers like director Jean Rollin can, in fact, be trusted to make great arthouse cinema about three-ways.

Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
I still think of the opening line from IndieWire’s 2013 review of the film’s Cannes premier: “From the very first opening titles, written in a Germanic font… (it may be the only time in Cannes that a film got a big laugh for a typeface).” Also, these are only cinematic vampires to take advantage of immortality to learn a bunch of languages and develop casual engineering skills.

Daughter of Darkness (1971) 🔗
My favorite Delphine Seyrig. Bisexual countess, a lost married couple. Elegant costumes and set designs.

Velvet Vampire (1971)
A vampire movie set in sunny Arizona. Bisexual countess, a lost married couple. Elegant costumes and set designs.

Thirst (2009)
A premise out of my own dreams: Priest is turned into a vampire and is ravaged by lust. The execution, in true Park Chan Wok fashion, unlike anything I could ever imagine.

Blood for Dracula (1974)
The best Dracula ever performed. The best set design. Pornographic, campy and funny as hell. Starring one of Andy Warhol’s favorite studs as a very unconvincing straight hunk.

The Hunger (1983)
My favorite opening sequence from cinematic history: David Bowie and Catherine Deneuve hunting for a third while Bauhaus performs “Bela Lugosi’s Dead.” Susan Sarandon is their eventual third.

Once Bitten (1965)
Stunning 80s glamour, Valley Girl parodies, and Jim Carrey as the last virgin in Los Angeles.

Vampire Hunter D: Bloodlust (2000) 🔗
Sumptuous imagery that combines gothic horror, anime and sci-fi action.

Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)
Vampire Monica Bellucci, submissive Keanu Reeves, monster-fucking, Winona’s terrible British accent and stellar costuming.

Blade (1988)
We Stan Wesley Snipes in this house. Includes a mythic blood rave set to original music by New Order.

left: Daughters of Darkness (1971). right: Velvet Vampire (1971)

🩸 a playlist in themes

Hauntingly romantic: “Dido’s Lament” by Armen Ra (all of Ra’s theremin music is as beautiful as it is haunting) and “Sola Gratia” by SQÜRL (Jim Jarmusch’s “enthusiastically marginal” rock band).

Sinful:“Tear You Apart” by She Wants Revenge; “Bang Bang Bang Bang” by Soho Dolls; and “Closer to God” by Nine Inch Nails (an even sexier version of “Closer,” if you can imagine).

I just love the name: “Lesbian Vampires from Outer Space” by Scary Bitches

Synthy and aggressive: "Buddy Ryo” by Kenshuke Ushio; “Glass” by Blood Cultures; and “Tenebrae” from the Original Motion Picture soundtrack

(All the songs are playlisted on Spotify and YouTube, in the order in which they are listed above.)

Fascination (1979)

🩸mood board

I made an Are.na board compiling moments in pop culture that depict blood raves. It includes scenes from “Devilman Crybaby” and Blade, archival footage from Michael Alig’s cursed “Blood Feast” parties, and the twin opening sequences from The Hunger and Lady Gaga’s season of “American Horror Story.”

🩸 closing link dump

Let me put you onto Sherlock Holmes vs. Dracula, it’s basically fan fiction and it’s been delightful to read a handful of pages every October. The cover alone. 🤌🏽 — from Atmos, “Sanguine and Sacred: The Functions of Blood in the Body,” an essay about blood and other animals — from the Cleveland Review of Books, “When Technology Bleeds” — It’s the perfect time to revisit Alexander McQueen’s most-vampiric show — from Tank Magazine, “The Quick and the Dead,” on the daddy evils in Buffy the Vampire Slayer — Brief History of Vampires by the V&A.

1. I should clarify: There are no former Catholics, only increasingly bad ones. I am a very, very bad one at that.

2. Here, Parikka wants us to also think about rare earth minerals for our computers and rechargeable batteries, fossil fuel for our engines, and petrochemicals for plastics, adhesives, and synthetic fabrics.

3. Jameson, Fredric. Postmodernism: or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. p.68.