The Vampire Film by Jeffrey Weinstock

Author:Jeffrey Weinstock
Format: epub
Tags: PER004030, Performing Arts/Film & Video/History & Criticism, PER004000, Performing Arts/Film and Video/General
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2012-05-28T16:00:00+00:00

Van Helsing

Science in Van Helsing is clearly presented as just such a double-edged sword, if alas a dull one. Van Helsing indeed is interesting not so much for what it originates, as for what it appropriates. The film (like the equally ridiculous The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen which came out one year before Van Helsing and fascinatingly features the character Mina Harker (Peta Wilson) as an unapologetic vampire) is a postmodern patchwork quilt composed of threads taken from a variety of novels and other movies. Despite boasting the talents of Hugh Jackman playing the title role of Abraham Van Helsing and Kate Beckinsale as his potential love interest, the film has trouble rising above its absurd plot, poor writing, poorer accents and, in general, so much tortured effort to be cool that it degenerates quickly into camp. Nonetheless, as a James Bond-meets-Dracula pastiche, it vividly illustrates the contemporary action vampire movie trend in which technology itself takes centre stage.

In brief, Dracula needs the Frankenstein monster as a sort of living battery to vivify his monstrous progeny, which are born simply dead rather than undead. Abraham Van Helsing – who it appears is also the Archangel Gabriel but can’t remember it (angels apparently being prone to amnesia) – is there to stop him, which can only be accomplished by Van Helsing transforming into a werewolf (angels apparently being susceptible to werewolf venom).

Both in terms of style and content, technology is the movie’s real star. On the level of style, the film – directed by Stephen Sommers who also directed the Mummy films with Brendan Fraser starting in 1990 – is clearly in love with computer-generated special effects. After contending with the wholly CGI generated Mr Hyde (appropriated wholesale, it seems, from The League of Extraordinary Gentleman in which Hyde becomes an important player and, bizarrely, a force for good), Van Helsing must face Dracula’s brides as they swoop from the sky and transform from harpies into exotically-garbed seductresses in the blink of an eye and who, Blade-like, turn instantly to dust when staked through the heart. As the film progresses, men transform into werewolves and vice versa; Dracula takes an Escher-esque walk on the ceiling; and all of the major characters perform a variety of physically-implausible or down-right impossible feats of derring-do. Indeed, the body itself is reconceived as plastic and malleable in Van Helsing – something to be stretched and transformed through the use of special effects.

Yet beyond the CGI love affair of the film in which not only the vampires but all the characters are constructed and transformed by special effects, technology itself becomes a conscious theme of the film. Part of the vampire movie formula, as mentioned above, is determining how to combat the vampire and equipping oneself with the necessary tools to do the job. The vampire genre thus implies a certain level of technological sophistication. Van Helsing however highlights this aspect of the formula and takes it to parodic levels. Van Helsing, one discovers early on,

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