Comments on: Love Bomb Blog-a-thon

By: benz

benz — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 21:11:09 +0000

Stephen - Wow I just saw The Thief of Baghdad. That’s a great one. I love theaters that do creepy silent films on Halloween. There’s one in San Francisco that would do Nosferatu with a live band. The band released a CD recently. It’s called something like “Into the Land of Phantoms” and is really excellent.

inkgrrl - That sounds like a really cool class. I’m curious what they had to say about “Les Vampires” in relation to vampires in general.

By: inkgrrl

inkgrrl — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 17:00:07 +0000

I had a college course in the history of vampires and their portrayal in Western literature and other media, and Les Vampires was featured prominently… I loved every bit of it we were shown - glad to see it’s something we can get on DVD now. (Why yes, I have been living under a rock, tyvm!)

By: Stephen Blackmoore

Stephen Blackmoore — Tue, 18 Mar 2008 19:54:20 +0000

Before the restored print of this went into release on DVD it was shown at a silent movie theatre in El Segundo (south of Los Angeles) where they do live accompaniment for silent movies on a full size Wurlitzer organ (pipes and drums and cymbals and assorted noisemakers all along the back stage wall). They do The Phantom of The Opera every year at Halloween (with the color sequence during the Mask of The Red Death scene) and, if I’m lucky they’ll show Thief of Baghdad.

Anyway, they showed the whole thing over the course of a day. The WHOLE thing. What, 10? 15 hours? And I sat through every amazing, surreal, skewed, insane frame of it. The seats in that place aren’t designed for people and my ass was numb after about five hours, but it was worth it.

One of the things I’ve loved about Les Vampires is how it pulls in the events of the day, like poison gas, which was going on pretty much right outside Paris during the war while they were filming it.

It’s a great series and I can’t recommend it enough.