An Underrated Vampire Horror Movie Is Now Streaming On Netflix
In 2023, we’ve seen just about every kind of zombie, superhero, and vampire movie you could imagine, but if you’re willing to take a trip back to 1998, then John Carpenter’s Vampires comes with strong recommendation.
Currently streaming on Netflix, Vampires plays out more like a modern Western than your typical vampire movie, and this stylistic decision makes it worthy of your viewing. Based on the John Steakley novel of the same name, Vampires is gritty, boasts a linear plot, and is violent in a way that one could expect from a John Carpenter film.
John Carpenter’s Vampires wastes no time establishing its story, and we’re introduced to John “Jack” Crow (James Woods), the leader of a Vatican-sponsored group of vampire-hunting mercenaries. Working alongside Crow is his right-hand-man Tony Montoya (Daniel Baldwin), and the two work tirelessly using wooden stakes, machine guns, and modified crossbows to take out legions of undead vampires.
John Carpenter’s Vampires was so unrelenting in its delivery that the MPAA almost gave the film an NC-17 rating.
But after what would be considered a successful raid of an abandoned house in New Mexico, Crow has reason to believe that a more powerful vampire master is lurking somewhere in the shadows, and needs to be stopped before more victims are claimed.
While prematurely celebrating their conquest by getting drunk and hanging out with prostitutes, their motel is raided by Jan Valek, the lead Vampire, and the primary antagonist in John Carpenter’s Vampires.
Valek wastes no time biting a prostitute named Katrina, and murdering Crow’s clan of vampire hunters. Though Crow and Montoya survive, they’re left without a team, so Crow has to consult his superior cardinal, Alba, and come up with a new plan of action.
Crow has reason to believe that Katrina has a growing psychic link with Valek after being bitten, so he tasks Montoya with guarding her after they burn down the motel. It’s at this point in John Carpenter’s Vampires that we learn more about Valek and his intentions.
John Carpenter’s Vampires is a unique experiment that blends your classic vampire story with Western motifs.
Valek was a disgraced priest who led a rebellion against the Catholic Church, and it’s revealed that he’s looking for an ancient relic known as the “Black Cross.” With the Black Cross comes power in the form of being able to walk in the daylight, which heightens the suspense in John Carpenter’s Vampires. From this point forward, we’re met with over-the-top action sequences that will make Die Hard look like Twilight.
Speaking of violence, John Carpenter’s Vampires was so unrelenting in its delivery that the MPAA almost gave the film an NC-17 rating. But through the use of clever editing, only 20 seconds of run time that were particularly gory were cut out.
Critically speaking, John Carpenter’s Vampires sits in cult-movie status with a 42 percent critical rating on Rotten Tomatoes. But don’t let the rating fool you, because the neo-Western action horror genre is very much its own niche, and Vampires shouldn’t really be compared to other films because it is not like other films by any stretch of the imagination.
The critics who gave favorable reviews all agree that it’s not only Carpenter’s most violent film, but also one of his best.
Commercially speaking, John Carpenter’s Vampires fared quite well at the box office. Domestically Vampires pulled in $20.3 million at the box office against its budget of $20 million.
Though there’s no official worldwide box office number, Carpenter stated that the film was financially successful in overseas markets, especially in Japan. On the back end, Vampires brought in an additional $42 million on video rental and purchase sales, making it Carpenter’s only financially successful film of the 90s.
The critics who gave favorable reviews all agree that it’s not only Carpenter’s most violent film, but also one of his best.
John Carpenter’s Vampires is a unique experiment that blends your classic vampire story with Western motifs. The end result is a ridiculous adventure full of epic showdowns. But at the end of the day, Vampires’ is also extremely campy in its delivery, making the gore somewhat palatable.
If you want to have an over-the-top violent vampire marathon, we’d strongly advise watching John Carpenter’s Vampires back-to-back with 2012’s Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, which is set during the civil war, and also boasts a comedic amount of violence while playing it straight. Throw in Nicolas Cage‘s Vampire’s Kiss for good measure, and you can probably run the clock out before anybody asks you to throw on Twilight.
