James Woods stars in this gritty low budget flick about a team of mercenary vampire hunters. The standard vampire tropes all apply. However, this seems to be a reactionary attempt to return the vampire to the realm of the monstrous, out of the clutches of the romanticized ‘it sucks to be immortal’ soap opera realm that Anne Rice ingeniously opened up with Interview with The Vampire, and others have been watering down ever since.

John Carpenter’s vampires are nasty, and the men that hunt them are pretty nasty themselves. The one vampire mythology point that the author really nailed in this was the complicity of the Catholic Church. Indeed, in this vampire reality, the creatures were created by the Catholic Church and their hunters were contracted by the same church which seeks to erase its sin. This is not ‘catholic bashing’ but rooted in the history of the medieval church. In A. D. 1215, Pope Innocent III called the Fourth Lateran Council, at which it was agreed that “The body and blood of Jesus Christ are truly contained under the appearance of bread and wine in the sacrament of the altar, the bread being transubstantiated into the body and the wine into blood.”

Catholicism has always been a blood-fetish cult and it is therefore authentically evoked as a factor where potential mythic vampire origins are concerned.