Howdy friends, Evan here once more, to talk about the fifth segment of our anthology, Lisa the Vampire. Obviously, this is our take on the vampire genre (what gave it away?), as well as our tribute to 70s cinema. It follows Lisa, a callow party girl who brings home a strange man from a club, and awakens the next morning to find herself suddenly averse to sunlight and sporting two little marks on her neck. She has one day to either feed or accept withering away into dust.
I co-wrote this segment with Jenn, I directed and she dp’d.
We chose a 70s aesthetic for this entry because that decade was a pretty interesting time for vampire fiction. In the realm of literature, we were treated to both Stephen King’s ‘Salem’s Lot and Anne Rice’s hugely influential Interview with the Vampire; in theaters, as the gothic tradition was fading from popularity, there were a lot of updated and/or experimental takes on the genre, like Vampire Circus, Captain Kronos – Vampire Hunter, Legend of the Seven Golden Vampires, Count Yorga – Vampire, Blackula, Martin, John Badham’s version of Dracula, and far too many others to list; and on television, we saw the brief run of Kolchak: The Night Stalker, two memorable made-for-tv adaptations of Dracula (one with Jack Palance, the other with Louis Jourdan), and Tobe Hooper’s adaptation of the aforementioned Salem’s Lot (now missing the first apostrophe).
Also, we really wanted to do something with warm, saturated colors, some split-screen, and a bunch of zooms. Gotta have some fun, right?!
The original idea for Lisa the Vampire pre-dates 5 Faces of Hell by about a decade; it’s the only segment that was conceived before Jenn and I had even met. I first wrote up an outline in 2007, with the intention that Justin Bloch (who worked on several other 5 Faces segments) would direct. We were kicking around a lot of ideas at the time, and that one just got lost in the shuffle until I dug it up again last year.
That original outline was pretty different from the script Jenn and I ended up writing. It had a lot more characters and locations (the finished version has a cast of four, and limits its action to one house), and was going to be much more straight-faced and melodramatic. When I pitched Jenn the idea of using it for 5 Faces, I was concerned that it couldn’t be turned into a comedy, particularly because of the rather disturbing ending. However, Jenn immediately came up with a way not only to salvage the ending, but to make it one of the best (if darkest) jokes in the movie.
While writing, we quickly latched onto the idea of casting Lauren Elyse Buckley as Lisa. This is the seventh project we’ve worked on with Lauren, and we’ve been consistently impressed by both her range and the nuance she brings to her performances, so we knew she would be well able to handle both the comedy and Lisa’s inner conflict. Plus, as a fellow Buffy the Vampire Slayer fan, Lauren was pretty excited to be offered the lead role in a vampire story.
#horror #horrormovies #vampire #buffythevampireslayer #dracula #vampirecircus #thenightstalker #salemslot #tobehooper #horrorcomedy #womeninhorror #womeninfilm
