There’s a fine line between paying homage to a certain style and blatantly plagiarizing someone else’s material for your own benefit. This second approach used to be very common in the world of low-budget filmmaking, with money hungry producers attempting to cash in on popular trends by remaking the same handful of successful movies over and over again, albeit with worse production value and less experienced actors.
Sometimes, however, a filmmaker would come along and manage to recognize why a certain idea was trending, with this brave artist then attempting to seamlessly implement these elements into their own work. This is precisely what happened with Full Moon Pictures’ Ted Nicoloau, co-creator of the Subspecies franchise. The director may have ended his initial trilogy of vampire movies with a swan song concerning the demise of old-fashioned horror cinema, but he would return three years later with a bizarre gothic romance set in the same universe but telling a completely different kind of story.
Naturally, I’m referring to the unfairly maligned Vampire Journals, the black sheep of the Subspecies franchise that has more in common with Anne Rice’s particular brand of undead literature than anything we previously saw in the Radu movies. However, despite alienating both fans and critics with this different approach to genre filmmaking, Journals has a lot more up its stylish sleeves than you may initially realize. That’s why I’d like to invite readers to join me once again as we continue our deep dive into the Subspecies series!
As I mentioned in the last retrospective on 1993’s Bloodlust, by that point it was more or less accepted that the antiquated Nosferatu of yesteryear were on their way out. From Tom Cruise’s memorable take on Lestat to Gary Oldman’s Dracula and his understandable seduction of Winona Ryder as Mina Harker to undead sex symbols like Kiefer Sutherland in The Lost Boys, the sexual nature of the vampire was now their greatest weapon when it came to getting butts into seats.
Leaving Radu Behind
With Nicolaou and the folks at Full Moon having already established a forward operating base in Romania after joining forces with the locals to produce the Radu trilogy, producer Charles Band saw no reason to stop making vampire movies just because they’d run out of story. That’s where the idea of a tonally distinct spin-off came from, with Band challenging Nicolaou to helm a sexier and more elegant take on vampires that could appeal to the Anne Rice and Vampire: The Masquerade crowd more than aging genre fans who pined for the golden years of Hammer Horror.
Like previous films in the series, Vampire Journals, which was obviously meant to sound like Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, benefited from plenty of local cooperation as the filmmakers enlisted Romanian actors, music students and even an entire working casino in order to bring their hyperreal re-imagining of Bucharest to life. However, Nicolaou decided to approach the project differently this time around, with the director making use of exaggerated lighting and over-the-top art direction that would make the film look much more blatantly theatrical than its predecessors.
In the finished film, which was released in 1997, we follow the vengeful vampire Zachary (David Gunn) as he embarks on a murderous quest to take down the vampire lord Ash (Jonathon Morris) after he becomes obsessed with Sofia (Kirsten Cerre), an American musician performing in Romania. Along the way, Zachary is forced to navigate the internal politics of Ash’s vampiric household, with his quest unearthing long-concealed grudges among the lord’s treacherous fledglings.
While there is a brief mention of Radu here as Ash’s unseen sire, this new story only barely connects to the main Subspecies franchise. Not only is there no word of the rest of the Vladislav legacy, but even the undead rules have been updated to be more in line with more popular depictions of vampiric lore. Thankfully, most of these changes were made in the interest of telling a larger and more intriguing story with more moving parts.
The Franchise’s Most Visually Ambitious Entry
At times, watching Vampire Journals feels a lot like speed-running a horror-tinged telenovela, with the expanded cast of side-characters, like the diabolical Cassandra, gleefully played by Romanian actress Ilinca Goya, making the undead world feel more alive than ever. While I actually like our stylish new protagonist and his heroic mission even if he’s not particularly good at his job, Jonathon Morris was so perfectly cast as the antagonist that I often found myself rooting for Ash despite his cruel antics.
This is also the best-looking Subspecies film by a wide margin, with Nicolaou and his team expertly combining the architectural beauty of Romania with gothic sets and carefully framed cinematography in ways that harken back to Baroque paintings. Of course, Ted still engages in plenty of Expressionism-inspired shadow-play when it comes to the vampires’ powers, and I appreciate that the film’s romantic elements don’t make it any less violent than previous entries in the franchise.
Vampire Journals may have been made for a very different kind of horror fan when compared to the original Subspecies trilogy, but it’s no less entertaining because of that. Sure, the lack of Radu makes the endeavor less charming (and one wonders why they felt the need to connect these films in the first place), but the gorgeous cinematography and overwhelmingly gothic atmosphere still make this a satisfying low-budget alternative to the other classy vampire movies of the 90s.
Besides, knowing that Radu would eventually return for more Subspecies shenanigans makes Vampire Journals feel more like a much-appreciated detour into a completely different style of filmmaking rather than a betrayal of everything that made the series such a hit with fans. That being said, Radu’s inevitable return is a story for another time, so suffice to say that this underrated spin-off is still worth a watch nearly thirty years later – so long as you can avoid comparing it to its scarier predecessors.