VAMPIRES

		Article by E.C. McMullen Jr.
VAMPIRES MOVIE REVIEW JOHN CARPENTER John Carpenter's VAMPIRES - 1998 USA Release: Oct. 30, 1998 Spooky Tooth Productions, Inc., Storm King Productions, JVC Entertainment, Inc., Largo Entertainment, Columbia Pictures Rating: USA: R

1998 In Context

The release of VAMPIRES would not be the first time that a John Carpenter movie took an audience hit as a result of being released at the wrong time.

John Carpenter said as much in explaining the disastrous audience response to his movie THE THING*, during the 1982 Summer of Spielberg, when Steven released his family-friendly One-Two punch of POLTERGEIST then E.T.: The Extraterrestrial in June, which effectively obliterated the potential sumer box office of all R-rated adult movies released that month, including Paul Schrader's CAT PEOPLE and Ridley Scott's BLADE RUNNER.

So let's dig deep into the grave of 1998 and the release of John Carpenter's VAMPIRES.

Deep Dig

1998 was quite a year to be celebrating the forces of authority. The success of a movie often has as much to do with the audience mindset in that era as it does the quality of the movie itself.

While the story attempts to separate "Good Catholic" hierarchy from Bad or even Evil Catholic leadership, the fact remains that the movie heroes are in service to the Vatican.

Jack Crow is not only the Hero of the movie, but he's also a boozing, prostitute bedding party boy, as well as a sanctified Catholic warrior. Bear in mind that VAMPIRES was shot in the summer of 1997.

That year in a Dallas, Texas court, Rudolph Kos, a priest that the church leadership long knew, on file - since 1992 - as a "classic textbook pedophile", was convicted and given a life prison sentence.

Bishop Charles Victor Grahmann admitted under oath that he didn't bother to read the results of the church's ordered therapist diagnosis for Kos. Charlie further admitted that he continued to allow Kos access to children, where the violent rapes continued. All rapes are violent by nature but many pedophiles in the diocese disguised their rapes as some twisted form of blessed "love" and "care", the deceptive type author Eve Ensler (in her book and play, The Vagina Monologues) glowingly referred to as "Good Rape". Not Kos, apparently. He used rape as a punishment for "transgressions".

Rudolph wanted to leave scars on the children's bodies as well as their minds, resulting in the suicide of at least one of his victims.

Further, Bishop Grahmann wrote an apology stating in part, "To the victims and their families, I once again want to apologize on behalf of the diocese. Based on what we know now, the decisions made concerning Rudy Kos were errors in human judgment. I regret very much what happened, and I am deeply sorry for your pain."

In July of 1998, while fully acknowledging their culpability on nearly every point of the prosecutor's contention, and despite his apology, Grahmann and the Catholic Diocese successfully appealed the jury's 1997 verdict, allowing them to cut the victim's court awarded $120 million down to a quarter of the original judgement.

But how did they win this appeal? While admitting to the culpability of "human error", Grahmann, as representative of the Catholic Church, refused to admit to any legal "responsibility". This despite the fact that Grahmann admitted to enabling Kos to continue his reign of terror.

It's our fault but not our responsibility.

The church further pleaded that the settlement was so onerous that they would have to cut back on their Charity Work and Scholarships. One of the examples of their Charity work that the church gave was on behalf of children, and among the ones they listed, that would suffer from the amount of the settlement were the "Child programs" that allowed priests like Kos - he was part of a group bust - easy access to children with a minimum of witnesses and a maximum of privacy/secrecy.

Grahmann wasn't appealing Kos' punishment, but his own responsibility for allowing Kos to continue despite a paper trail spanning decades of warnings and evidence that the church was fully aware of.

This national scandal on top of a scandal On Top of a Scandal happened in July, 1998.

Columbia Pictures chose to release John Carpenter's VAMPIRES three months later1, where a vampire Horror movie, directed by a living Master of Horror, won the October weekend at #1.

1Only 2 months after a 52 year old President Bill Clinton admitted on television - two days before his birthday - that he had lied to the nation for months and his sex abuse scandal(s) were not a "Vast Right-wing conspiracy" as his wife Hillary announced, but in fact he did have an affair in the Whitehouse with a 22-year old unpaid intern.

That audience realized that the Heroes of VAMPIRES were a bunch of booze-fueled, Hooker happy Catholics, breaking all the rules and commandments of the authority that protected them (heavy comparisons to the pedophile priests, the Clinton presidency, and Bill's deathly inept military handling of Iraq and their Weapons of Mass Destruction that same year).

The box office drop off was steep as VAMPIRES fell to #8 the following weekend. Easy to believe that a summer dominated by sex scandal news cycles involving entrenched and powerful religious and political authority figures abusing young people, had something to do with that.

Carpenter's movie, like another movie called Wag The Dog, and the Catholic and Clinton scandals in 1997 and 1998, had nothing to do with the scandals with the possible exception of the minds of the audience at that precise moment in time.

This article copyright 2020 E.C.McMullen Jr.

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