'Buffy' star is still out for blood

Juliet Landau (Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is at work on two crowdfunded feature docs about vampires

(WIREIMAGE)

Are they verminous and vicious creatures who carry “a whiff of doomsday” (as one early critic wrote of Nosferatu) or are they misunderstood, romantic heroes? No one seems able to make up their mind about vampires.

Juliet Landau (Drusilla from Buffy the Vampire Slayer) is currently at work on two crowdfunded feature docs that will come at the bloodsuckers from very different angles and may help us understand the lure of the vampire a little better.

A Place Among the Dead is the type of film likely to give Dracula and co a bad name. Landau’s collaborators on the film include forensics experts and a detective in the LAPD. The film explores what happens when people take the fantasy of vampirism too far.

“Right now, in the US, there are around ten active serial murder cases where the killers are murdering in the style of a vampire,” Landau lets slips a very macabre nugget of information. “There are killers at loose in America who are leaving bite marks on their victims.”

Thankfully, this is not the only vampire movie that Landau is hatching. Buffy fans and admirers of old Hammer or Universal horror films are likely to respond more warmly to its companion piece, A Place Among the Undead.

Landau’s earliest memories of vampire films was when she was a kid, watching Bela Lugosi as Dracula on TV. Her own father, Martin Landau, went to play Lugosi in Tim Burton’s Ed Wood, in which she also appeared.

“When I was working on Buffy later, director Joss (Whedon) created such a brilliant world. Getting him to work with him on that project and since then, hanging out with creatives – actors, directors, writers – I’ve had the best conversations,” Landau reflects. “That’s where my real fascination with vampires began.”

Vampires nowadays have moved out off the shadows and much more into the mainstream, In today’s film and TV culture, all sorts of people are telling vampire stories for all sorts of reasons. Landau has already spoken to many of them. “We’ve interviewed Tim Burton, Joss Whedon, Willem Dafoe, Anne Rice, Robert Patrick, Charlaine Harris, who wrote the books that True Blood is based on, and some of the original Hammer actors, Madelene Smith and Caroline Munro,” Landau lists some of her contributors.

Vampirism, she suggests, allows these artists to look at the human condition from all sorts of different perspectives. “For instance, Joss Whedon, when he created Buffy, used the metaphor of vampirism to explore high school as a nightmare. In Dark Shadows, Tim Burton wanted to explore the dysfunctional family. Anne Rice says she wrote Interview with a Vampire when her daughter had died in order to create a child character, a vampire, that lived forever. Her daughter died of leukaemia, a blood disease. You talk to Kevin Grevioux, who created Underworld, and he says he created that whole franchise based on his experiences with interracial dating. Joss Whedon in Angel was looking at addiction.”

There you have it. The vampire movie is a shapeshifting genre that can deal with grief, illness, lust, violence, longing and injustice. Vampirism can be a metaphor for just about anything.

I put it to Landau that some vampire fans, especially Buffy lovers, can prey on the show’s stars just as fervently as the vampires themselves home in on the necks of their victims. “I find it wonderful interacting with fans. The fans, especially the Buffy and Angel fans, are so supportive, excited and moved by the material,” the actress protests.

For Juliet Landau’s crowdfunding page: www.indiegogo.com/projects/a-place-among-the-undead#/