Good Morning Friends! This morning I am going to continue this “season of spoop” series where I dive into some of my favorite movies in horror subgenres. Earlier this week I gave you my rundown of zombie films, and today I am going to talk about the much sexier undead… Vampires. This list was shockingly hard to narrow down because I kept fiddling with one or two places swapping movies in and out of the list until I finally landed on the ten that I am happy with. Suffice it to say that vampires and vampire hunters are well-trodden ground when it comes to horror films. As someone who spent countless hours playing Vampire the Masquerade, this topic is very near and dear to my heart… so I hope you won’t ram a stake through it.
Again these are not necessarily in any particular order but I will be closing out the list with a few of my absolute favorites.
Bram Stoker’s Dracula
Much like a Zombie list has to include Night of the Living Dead, a Vampire list must pay homage to the original Bram Stoker tale that largely canonized the mythos for western society. There are many versions of this tale in cinema form, but it is highly unlikely there will ever be one quite so baroquely lavish as the 1992 rendition by Francis Ford Coppola. I have a feeling that this film was a bisexual awakening for many as it just exudes raw passion at times. If you ever have the chance you should totally check out the Mike Mignola comic adaptation from the short-lived Tops Comics imprint because it brings really plays with the over-the-top designs that this film brought forward.
John Carpenter’s Dracula
With Vampires comes the presence of hunters and hunter-focused movies. There are so many phenomenal ones, but one of my personal favorites has always been Vampires from 1998. Growing up Catholic, there has always been a certain amount of romance about thinking about the Vatican as a force that sanctions monster hunters. At its core, this is a prime John Carpenter film, and it has the same quirky irreverent flavor that his protagonists often do. I also have this thing for the whole concept of roaming packs of vampires preying on the outskirts of society.
Fright Night
I love this film, and honestly, I am surprised it does not get talked about more often. There was a not-amazing remake some years ago featuring Colin Farrell and the late Anton Yelchin, but for me, the best version is the 1985 rendition. Vampires in suburbia is another interesting trope, and this movie carries that out beautifully as bad things are happening under the nose of your average small-town folks. The special effects do not hold up to modern scrutiny… but it was a simpler time. I remember NOW Comics had a phenomenal run of Fright Night comics that originally retold the movie and then picked up continuing the tale from that point forward.
Underworld
I think the hardest part of the list was trying to determine which Underworld and Blade films I might include, and ultimately I landed on ONLY including the first Underworld film and unfortunately completely skipping Blade. For me, the film series will forever be connected because they are this latex-suit industrial-metal Matrix-infused Vampire action. While I enjoy all of the Underworld films collectively, I think the first one is still the best because it does not require you to watch the previous films to understand. As the series continued it felt more and more derivative, and while this was great for existing fans… the whole hierarchy of the Vampire and Lycan worlds and which period of time we happened to be in got a little fuzzy. Still a great series if you have never watched them, thought not exactly what I would consider a scary viewing experience.
Night Watch
I went back and forth on whether or not to include this film, because while Vampires absolutely play heavily into the unfinished trilogy, it is more akin to a Russian Nightbreed than anything else. Not knowing where else I might fit this movie however led me to slot it into the Vampire list. This is one of the most creative and lavish visions of the conflict between the forces of light and the forces of darkness. It very much comes across as a dark faerie tale as opposed to something clinging to the western Dracula tradition, and honestly… that makes it so much more compelling. As I said before this is part of an unfinished trilogy of movies but if you enjoy this I would highly suggest checking out Day Watch as well. Dusk Watch sadly seems to be completely dead in the water.
What We Do In The Shadows
Yes, this is a comedy, but it is also one of the best Vampire films ever created. There are a number of “funny” vampire films, but most of them are pure shit. This however is high art and has so many absolute genius performances. This has also turned into a series on FX that is in its fourth season. Taika Watiti is brilliant as always but my favorite will always be Matt Berry’s Laszlo Cravensworth. I am a huge fan of Garth Marenghi’s Darkplace so I am just generally partial to Matt Berry characters. Definitely start with the movie and if you enjoy it, then consume the series posthaste.
Interview With The Vampire
I am a product of my age and this movie was released during my freshman year in college. I had read several of the Anne Rice books and was still deeply into Vampire the Masquerade, so you know this movie meant quite a lot to me. I still don’t exactly agree with Tom Cruise as Lestat but whatever… the movie was still enjoyable. I’ve not had a chance to watch any of the new series that retells the tale, but it is on my list of things to do over the “season of spoop”. Brad Pitt as Louis is still delectable. I used to roleplay as a vampire on Undernet IRC and I was deeply into the family dynamic of these stories, and wish I still was in contact with the folks who used to roleplay as my “childer”.
Innocent Blood
This film does not get near the attention it deserves. Another aspect of Vampires that I have always loved is the ones who only feed on those who deserve to die. This is a tale of mob violence told through the vignette of a huntress slowly taking down “the family”. There are aspects that do not hold up… like the special effects but this comes from the pedigree of being directed by John Landis. The movie also has a bit of a buddy cop meets rom-com vibe as our vampire joins forces with a cop to take down some accidental vampire mobsters. Unfortunately, I don’t think it is currently on any of the streaming services, and you will have to digitally rent it. It has been years since I have seen it so I might need to track down the DVD.
Lost Boys
This movie came out when I was eleven and I probably did not actually get to watch it until I was twelve or thirteen… but when I did it heavily influenced pretty much everything about me going forward. This is the film that made me completely hooked on Vampires. I was convinced as a kid that the comics shown in this movie were real, and went on a quest to try and find them… only to find out that they were simply props but that lots of other horror comics existed. This movie is VERY 80s, but I completely love the style of the vampires and the cool lair that they live in. This is probably the only movie that had “The Two Coreys” that still hold up today. I remember having a massive crush on Star… as did pretty much everyone. I think the Grandpa however will always be the best character. Phenomenal movie and maybe an even better soundtrack. Cry Little Sister is a truly iconic theme song.
Near Dark
This is the best vampire film you have ever seen… or at least very few have actually seen it. This film absolutely is in contention for my favorite vampire film. What if I were to tell you that there was a Vampire film that included the best actors from Aliens, and was set here in Oklahoma? This tale goes in a lot of interesting directions but largely follows the story of a fledgling being inducted into this little tribe. Instead of relying on fangs, these vampires have to use more conventional methods of feeding off their victims like slicing them open with a razor. Instead of staying in one place, they travel around the country in a blacked-out RV to protect themselves from sunlight. The feel of the movie is deeply compatible with a roaming band of Kindred and I’ve always thought something like this would work extremely well for a Vampire the Masquerade setting. I think Shudder now owns the streaming rights to the film and I consider this a must-watch for anyone interested in Vampires because it is such a unique feeling take on the genre.
More To Come
Like I said at the start this one was really hard to narrow down to ten. There are so many great vampire films out there, and I am sure I have missed many of your favorites. Feel free to contest my decisions in the comments below. I am not sure where I am going from here, but maybe slasher films are the next sub-genre I tackle. As I am piecing things together in my head, there is absolutely a category of horror films that defy categorization. Not sure what I will do with those if I decide to tackle them at all.
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We have an official date for the New World Brimstone Sands update and with it, we have been sorting out our thoughts regarding the planned reroll. I thought I would update you fine folks that read my blog in case you also want to join along in this nonsense. Essentially Brimstone Sands includes an entire new endgame region of the map, the new Greatsword weapon, a brand new starter experience, and significant improvements to the questing, leveling, and crafting processes. I spent quite a bit of time on the PTR and got to around level 45 before backing off and deciding to wait for the patch to drop.
One of the things that I feel like you need to understand going into this is that I do not take my planned re-roll lightly. At present, I have 868.9 total hours of gameplay in New World with 767.3 on the live server and 101.6 on the PTR. I have three trade skills leveled all of the ways up to 200 and all of my harvesting and refining professions have gone past 200 and are into the aptitude cache levels. I have every strength-based weapon capped at level 20 and every piece of armor at 600 expertise or higher and every strength-based weapon at 600 expertise or higher. I’ve also crafted myself a full set of Heavy Void Bent armor and could pretty much tackle any content in the game. Essentially I will be walking away from a lot of work.
The new player experience for the game has improved so much, that I am actually giddy at the thought of walking away from all of that… and starting over from scratch. I had so much fun playing around on the PTR and experiencing the new quest lines and the flow of the content, that it really does present the game in a completely different light. I know my early focus is going to be getting my crafting up, specifically armoring and weapon crafting so I can start making end-game gear. Essentially it is a do-over because I now understand how a lot of the systems work and can be a bit more efficient in my processes. Additionally, there is the chance for all of us to finally end up on the same server… which was a huge reason why so many bounced at launch. The fragmentation of communities was awful.
There have been a staggering number of changes that have gone into the game since launch, and if you have not been playing through them… it honestly might be shocking just how much has changed. I am not going to cover them all, especially when one of my favorite New World creators has done an excellent job doing it for me. However the quality of life and flow of the game is much improved, and little things like dungeon keys or quests requiring you to run with a group of players on that step of the chain gating your process are a thing of the past. Additionally, storage and travel are largely not a problem either, meaning you can get out into the world and freely explore rather than feeling chained to either Everfall or Windsward.
Contemplating a return has caused me to put in a lot of thought regarding WHERE to return. You can only have one character on each World Set, and since a large number of us are now on Valhalla due to server mergers that lockout Arkadia Eta pending we don’t delete characters. While I am amped about a reroll, I don’t want to go so far as to delete my OG main. Additionally, there are new servers being created that don’t allow for transfers but given that there might be people who want to join in the fun later and transfer a character… I don’t want to lock out that possibility. This has me eyeing the Arkadia Zeta World Set and more specifically Themiscyra. It is currently the smallest in that world set, and as such, I am hoping will be able to survive relatively queueless any returning and new players looking for a home.
When mergers do happen it will also mean we will be collapsed more than likely into Eden, which is the largest server in that world set. I figure while leveling trades and such we would do better to be on a server with less competition. There isn’t going to be a lot that you can’t simply go out into the world and get for yourself, and given how prevalent reagents are these days and that you start collecting your endgame reagents at level 1… you should not need to hit the market boards too terribly hard. Since leveling no longer relies solely on the town board quests, that is less of an issue as well. Towns in general seem to be easier to upgrade and maintain so I feel by the time we need them, there will be plenty of Tier 5 crafting machines available and the cross-town storage will allow you to move wherever you need to for those combines.
So there you have it… on October 18th when the new patch drops I will be re-rolling on Themiscyra aka the Wonder Woman server… though DC spells the island name differently. If you want to join in the nonsense, hit me up and let me know. We have no aspirations of holding territory and largely plan on being entirely focused on the PVE game. I think the hardest-core shenanigans we will get up to are some dungeons, especially now that they don’t cost anything to run. Our biggest hope is just to be able to hang out and play with a group of people reliably on the same server. New World appears to be on a rebound trajectory and I am hoping that they can pull this off.
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Good Morning Friends! I realize that the listicle is pretty much the lowest form of internet content, but excuse me while I engage in it. It is now the official month of “spoop” and as a result, I have been involved in several conversations already about horror film suggestions. First off… I consume a lot of horror films and it honestly might be my favorite genre. All of these discussions have made me realize that I have never devoted much effort to talk about the horror films that I really enjoy. Since I consume so many, it was going to be near impossible to create a superset of “favorites” but instead, I am deciding to break it up into sub-genres. Since I’ve always been a big fan of Zombies even before the Walking Dead spawned the popularization of the genre, I figured I would start here for my first in this series.
These are in no particular order and include serious films as well as more satire-based comedic horror.
Shaun of the Dead
I am not really sure what to say. This is maybe the best comedic horror film that has ever existed. Not only do you have the high art of an Edgar Wright film that is meticulously edited to the soundtrack, but also you have some of the best Simon Pegg gags. Let’s go to the Winchester, have a nice cold pint, and wait for this all to blow over.
Blood Quantum
I literally just watched this for the first time this weekend and it has already made its way to the list. It is a pretty interesting spin on the Zombie film genre, as it centers around a first nations reservation in Quebec. Essentially in this version of the zombie lore, Indigenous folks are immune to turning from bites… but they are of course not immune to being eaten. I highly suggest you track down this film and watch it over this spoop season, very good.
Little Monsters
Be warned this should not be confused with the similarly named Howie Mandel nightmare-fueled children’s tale from the 80s. This film came out in 2019 and gives us another excellent comedy zombie film genre tale of a deadbeat uncle who finally shows some focus and tries to save his nephew from a zombie-filled field trip to a petting zoo. Lupita Nyong’o steals the show with her portrayal of Miss Caroline the teacher willing to do anything to protect her flock of students, while also trying desperately to keep them calm.
Train to Busan
This is quite possibly my single favorite zombie film and is in pretty heavy contention among my favorite horror films. Be warned this is a South Korean film, which will require “reading the movie” with subtitles but it is well worth it. I largely lump this and the 2020 sequel Peninsula as a combined experience, and both should absolutely be watched. One of the most fast-paced films you will watch as the action picks up almost immediately and then never really stops until the conclusion of the film. Peninsula on the other hand is a bit more pensive but still contains a lot of furious zombie-killing action.
Fido
This is a gem from the early days of Netflix when we used to have to maintain our streaming movies in one giant queue. Fido is another comedic zombie film set in a world after the zombie apocalypse where things have reverted back to an almost 1950s existence. In this world, they utilize zombies as a form of slave labor, through electronic collars that turn them docile. However, events happen that lead to this going horribly wrong in this tale about a boy and his dog… except that dog is actually a zombie.
Night of the Living Dead Animated
If we are going to talk about zombie films, we have to give some respect to the original George Romero classic Night of the Living Dead. In 2021 my favorite version was released where they used the original audio… but crafted a full cell style animation movie on top of it. This version specifically masks some of the failings of the first… like the zombies maybe not really looking great compared to modern standards. This is now my preferred method for revisiting this classic, and if you have never watched it… I consider it required viewing for understanding how the genre evolved.
Zombieland
This movie is just a fun ride. One could think of this as the American version of Shaun of the Dead and then get into the whole debate about which is the best version of The Office. I think Zombieland stands on its own two feet however and it will be worth the watch. I’ve always been a big Bill Murray fan, and he nails his role in this film… as himself. It is just a fun road trip film with the key differentiator from that genre being that they are trying to avoid getting eaten in the process.
Land of the Dead
There have been a lot of sequels to the original Night of the Living Dead, but my favorite of these is Land of the Dead from 2005. Romero has always been less than subtle with the political armature that he builds his stories upon. “Land” is maybe the least subtle as the wealthy continue to live a life much like they did prior to the apocalypse in a gilded tower that is serviced by the struggling masses in a shanty town that has formed at its base. It features John Leguizamo in an excellent non-comedic role and Dennis Hopper as the maniacal ruler of this haven for “the haves”. From a sheer zombie lore standpoint, it plays with the normal rules of engagement quite a bit in interesting ways.
The Girl with all the Gifts
This is one of the most interesting additions to the zombie genre. It presents a relatively unique version of a zombie, and if you have never seen the film I won’t spoil the conclusion of how it works. Basically, the story centers around a military base where they are attempting to educate and care for a number of children that have been infected. With proper precautions, they appear to be normal children… but once those precautions fail they turn into ravening zombies with superhuman agility. This protected state however does not last forever, and the fall of this base is largely the start of our tale.
28 Days Later
28 Days Later is part of an unfinished trilogy and gave us the rabid “rage zombie” archetype that dominated so many other zombie films for a decade. The first film is by far the best, but I still greatly enjoyed the follow-up 28 Weeks Later. The intro is very reminiscent of The Walking Dead where a man wakes up from a coma in a world gone very wrong and tries to figure out how to survive. Danny Boyle of Transporting fame brings us his specific spin on the zombie genre, and it is rather good. I hope at some point they finish the trilogy with I would guess 28 Years Later pending they follow the pattern set by the first two films. I am not holding my breath however because it has seemingly been in preproduction hell for years.
More to Come
I am honestly not sure how many of these I have in me, but I am pretty sure at a minimum I will do one over Vampire films, Demonic films, and Slasher films. I MIGHT have a Werewolf or Ghosts one in me as well, but we will have to see how these all come together. Hopefully, you enjoyed the list, and if there is a zombie film that you feel I overlooked please drop it down in the comments below. I could have likely filled two “top ten lists” with Zombie films however because there are so many that I have greatly enjoyed.
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Good Morning Friends! This morning’s post is going to document a bit of a personal crusade I have been on for the last few years. In September of 2020, YouTube debuted the Shorts medium, which is a portrait mode video format that can have a maximum duration of sixty seconds. It seems that the idea was with Tik Tok eating their lunch with younger demographics… they would attempt to rebrand themselves into something that was more phone friendly. This was fine and I mostly was able to ignore it, until Google started pushing hard for existing content creators to start using the format. Overnight it seemed like many sites that I had previously followed were releasing more short content than they were long-form video, and as such, I started looking for ways to block it.
The YouTube home page has the ability to hide the shorts content for 30 days at a time, and I was mostly okay with this. However, there was seemingly no way to actually block it in my subscription feed. I am not sure how most people consume YouTube, but I tend to treat it like it was an RSS feed and much like consuming a blog roll, my default mode was to flip over to my subscriptions tab to see what was new from the various creators that I might be interested in. It has annoyed me to no end that in the middle of my 16:9 feed would appear these oddball vertical videos, breaking up the visual harmony of the screen. This isn’t that bad, but there have been days where the majority of a screen would be consumed by shorts that I could do nothing to remove.
I searched for some sort of addon to remove them for me. The closest thing I was able to find was this Mozilla Plugin that reported blocking shorts. I had a few problems, firstly I was not sure if I wanted to give a random plugin full access to my YouTube data. Additionally, as I have highlighted in green above, the plugin requires that you turn on autoplay in order for it to work. I really do not like YouTube autoplaying because I have the bad habit of just letting it run on in the background for hours. My core method of consuming youtube is as a podcast, with it either playing in the background or on another screen while I am doing something else. So while I don’t doubt the author of this plugin has pure intentions, it is also the only one they have ever published it is hard to view a track record. Basically, I decided against using it and continued my search.
Yesterday I hit a particular spot where I was frustrated by the fact that YouTube was not accepting my “hide for 30 days” on shorts from the home page. This prompted me to do some more searching and I must have varied my terms because I actually found something interesting. I found a filter list created for an addon that I have used for ages called uBlock Origin. Over on the website LetsBlock.it a user had uploaded a set of filters designed to remove shorts entirely from YouTube. Essentially you open settings for uBlock Origin and paste the script from the webpage linked into your “My Filters” tab. Upon closing out of the settings and refreshing YouTube, the changes will apply, and if working as intended… you should no longer see shorts of any kind. It seems to have some side effects of also hiding Shorts content from google searching as well. I am perfectly fine with that, but you might at least be aware of that.
Now I can consume my subscription feed without seeing those little YouTube Shorts speedbumps in the middle of it. I get that this is probably an entirely “me” thing, but just in case there were others out there eternally annoyed by this format, I would share how I removed them. I think mostly for me it is a side effect that I do not consume video content on my phone. This is combined with the fact that even when I do watch the occasional video clip on my phone… I do so without headphones and keep my phone on silent mode permanently. I really do not like my devices making noise, and since I am not a part of the orchard I never got used to wearing wireless earbuds all the time. That means my primary source of YouTube is while sitting at a 16:9 screen with headphones on, often while playing a game and it runs in the background.
Now with one dragon slain… I move my attention to Instagram. Unfortunately, this seems to be a tougher nut to crack, but I would love to find an easy way to block stories, reels, suggested content… and of course ads. Instagram is a platform for idly flipping through pictures that my friends have posted, and I use it exclusively for that. However, I seem to spend most of my time being served content that is not from any of the people I am following. Stories are easy enough to ignore, but I am never going to actually consume them regularly. Reels have the same problem as Shorts of being an attempt to turn Instagram into Tik Tok. However based on the limited research I have done, there isn’t an easy way to intercept this and filter things out as the Instagram UI is serving up ALL of the content from the same servers and largely treating it all the same. Oh well… I have to have a mission to keep me going and this will be one that I can chew on for awhile.
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