Skip to main content

Adapting to the Great Vampire Invasion

I was reading the back of the DVD case of the copy of the 1988 (I believe it was) vampire movie The Lost Boys that I had bought. It said that the movie had a novel adaptation (unless the movie was adapted from the novel, like the case was with I am Legend, AKA Omega Man in the 70s, AKA The Last Man on Earth in the 60s). I never knew about that. Although whether it beats even Twilight, that I don't know. All I know is that this movie beats the Twilight movies anytime! If you don't believe me, then go rent a copy at your local video rental store or check out a copy at your local public library. Or you can purchase a copy for only five bucks if you look for it at Walmart or Target (where I got mine).

And today at a comic book store in Davis I bought the first issue of a 4 issue series of Marvel Comics' adaptation of Dracula. I haven't actually read the comic book yet, but I've read the novel at least twice and according to the illustrations it looks like it stays true to the original story. Now are their any interpretive twists in the storyline? (In which every adaptation needs at least to a very small extent because if they didn't have that what's the purpose of adapting the story? Although in comic books and graphic novels the illustrations themselves do a big portion of this.) I'll let you know when I get done reading this mini series which has been collected from portions of a magazine from back in the '70s called Dracula Lives! which was also published by Marvel.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Book-To-Movie: ‘The Hound of the Baskervilles’

Credit: Wikimedia Commons I apologise for posting outside our regular post-day which is late Saturday night/early Sunday morning. However, I got behind on several things last week and so had to postpone the post to today.  I’ve been a reader of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes books ever since I was 11. What I’ve always liked so much about the series is that, like a good horror story, the stories often take place in dark settings and involve bizarre cases. Conan Doyle’s novel, “The Hound of the Baskervilles”, definitely contains these elements. It’s a detective story that crosses over into the gothic horror genre. Several movie adaptations of the novel have been made that go as far back as a 1915 German silent film. In 1959 Hammer Studios released a version starring Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee. As much as I’m a fan of the Hammer horror films, I have not seen that one yet. The only one that I’ve seen so far is the 1939 adaptation starring that other big name in classic Bri

Book-To-Movie: ‘I Am Legend’

A vampire similar to the ones in 2008's "I Am Legend" which starred Will Smith. Credit: Pixabay.com It’s time for another Book-To-Movie review! In a Book-To-Movie, I review a book and its movie adaptations. This month’s book and its movies based on it is I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. While vampires were no longer in in the American pop culture of the the 1950s, science fiction horror in general was. So Matheson’s I Am Legend brought the scientificising of vampires into the pulp literary scene of that era. Not too long after, in the early ‘60s, the first of three book-to-movie adaptions appeared and was renamed The Last Man On Earth which starred Vincent Price. The other two were The Omega Man starring Charlton Heston in the ‘70s and I Am Legend starring Will Smith in the 2001s. Even though each one debunked the myth of the vampire as a supernatural being, each had its own depiction of the creature. ‘I Am Legend’, The Book Set in a near post-apocalyptic fu

Book-To-Movie: Stephen King’s 'The Raft'

Credit: Pixabay.com It's the third Saturday of the month and so that means it's time for another Book-To-Movie ! In a Book-To-Movie we review a book and its movie adaptation. One of the reasons I as a horror fan don’t read a lot of Stephen King’s work is because most of it consists of novels that go more than 400 pages. I have a short attention span when it comes to reading, ironically since I consider myself an avid reader, and so I normally won’t read a work that is much more than the equivalent to a 350-page mass market paperback. The other reason why I don’t read a lot of King’s work is that, as literary scholars will tell you, a lot of his writing is poor. However, he does have some good writing in his works, especially his earlier stuff, including his short horror tales. So if I read anything by Stephen King it’s usually his short stories or novellas. One of his collections I’ve read is Skeleton Crew which includes some of his good, or at least better, fi