Trailer
Plot summary
Jack Crow leads a team of vampire hunters sponsored by the Vatican. His crew storms an abandoned New Mexico house in daylight and destroys nine vampires, but the nest's master is missing. That night, as the team celebrates at a motel with prostitutes, the master vampire Jan Valek appears, kills the hunters and bites one of the women, Katrina. Crow and his lieutenant Tony Montoya escape with her. Because Valek knew Crow's name, Crow takes it as a sign that the vampires are planning something bigger. Cardinal Alba gives him an archivist, Father Adam Guiteau, and Crow sets out to find what Valek is searching for.
Cast
- David Rowdenas Bambi
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Vampires (1998)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Vampires was to be made for $60 million, but the budget was slashed to $20 million at the last minute, so John Carpenter wrote his own screenplay from the Don Jakoby and Dan Mazur scripts, the book and his own ideas, with writer Michael De Luca.
- Midway through production, John Carpenter left the film over creative interference, and special make-up effects artist Greg Nicotero took over for a few days until Carpenter was persuaded back.
- The MPAA took issue with the film's over-the-top violence and threatened an NC-17 rating unless some gore was cut; about 20 seconds of footage was ultimately removed.
- Carpenter considered Clint Eastwood, Kurt Russell, Bill Paxton, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci and R. Lee Ermey for Jack Crow before casting James Woods; the studio rejected Ermey as lacking the star power to front a blockbuster.
- Alec Baldwin, a fan of Carpenter's work, was cast in the role of Montoya but quickly dropped out and recommended his brother Daniel, whom Carpenter had read for the part without knowing his work.
- Dolph Lundgren had been cast as the lead vampire hunter Jack Crow, and Willem Dafoe was being eyed for a secondary part, likely the antagonist vampire Valek.
- Conflicts between Russell Mulcahy and the studio forced him to leave Vampires before filming began, taking Dolph Lundgren with him; the pair immediately made Silent Trigger, which borrowed elements from the unused Vampires scripts.
- Vampires was John Carpenter's only financially successful film of the 1990s and, to date, the last financially successful film he has directed.
