or: Dracula Untold

If most vampire stories are about the paranoia of the other, fear of a strange man from the East who charms the pants off your wife and sucks the blood from her veins, this is about the vampire we know, the favorite uncle who turns out to be a monster. Fittingly, Uncle Charlie is given a lot more shading, character-wise, than more conventional vampires usually get - one thing I'd never really noticed before is how compulsive he is, and how helpless he seems in getting those compulsions under control (watch the way he knocks back those two drinks in the Til Two bar, just to hold himself together in the presence of such temptation), how perhaps his head injury as a kid didn't just make him a non-conformist but maybe a psychotic killer as well.

In typical Hitchcock fashion he's charming and sophisticated, nobody ever gave a better speech in Santa Rosa than Uncle Charlie did, and even though a merciful few of us in the audience are likely to be related to a serial killer, the pain of finding out a relative or friend is a monster, ruled by terrible compulsions that you don't feel like you can tell anybody about for fear of breaking everybody's hearts or just creating a big and painful mess is too, too, too commonplace. That's the thing about vampires in the real world - you don't have to invite them in, they show up all on their own.