Home Movie News Does the New Slayers Movie Bring the Vampire Genre Back to Life?

Does the New Slayers Movie Bring the Vampire Genre Back to Life?

by Jason Smith

Does the New Slayers Movie Bring the Vampire Genre Back to Life?

Vampires have been part of popular culture ever since Nosferatu terrified early cinema fans in the 1920s. Since then, we’ve seen just about every type of vampire film imaginable, from the sublimely horrifying to the insanely funny.

With a century of on-screen vampires to draw inspiration from, can the new Slayers movie provide something fresh for us to sink our teeth into, or will it shrivel up when exposed to sunlight and critics?

https://youtu.be/8KegXg5sNZw

About Slayers

Described as a comedy horror, Slayers is about a group of high-profile social media influencers who receive invites to the mansion of mysterious billionaire Steven Rektor who is played by Adam Ambruso).

Once they arrive there, they find that it was a trap and that it’s actually a vampire’s lair. The only way to escape appears to be by combining old-fashioned vampire-slaying knowledge with modern gaming skills.

Slayers was directed by K. Asher Levin and the stars include the likes of Kara Hayward, Jack Donnelly, and Thomas Jane, who plays the vampire hunter Eliot Jones.  There are some good jokes to be found in here but many reviewers have pointed out that the overall plot and script aren’t particularly impressive. The group of influencers are poorly characterized, with the movie taking cheap shots at the shallowness of social media rather than trying to look at any deeper issues.

How It Fits into the Vampire Theme

This movie isn’t likely to lead to a massive revival of the vampire genre but it’s fair to say that the vampire theme has never gone away anyway, with new movies, games, and TV series coming out regularly over the years. The images of Dracula in his coffin or a bat swooping in front of a castle are now such a big part of pop culture that it’s hard to imagine vampires ever disappearing.

We can see these blood-sucking creatures turning up in games too, with 2018’s Vampyr and Darkwatch from 2005 among the best-loved titles. Vampires have also even made it into casinos, with popular slots like Immortal Romance by Microgaming as one of the top real money slots. The best casinos like Rizk and LeoVegas all have several vampire-themed slots.

Slayers wasn’t the only vampire movie released in 2022, as The Invitation came out a few months earlier. Played more as a straight horror movie based on Dracula, it features Nathalie Emmanuel as New York artist Evie, who’s invited to England to meet a branch of her family she never knew existed. It received mixed reviews, although Emmanuel’s performance was praised and was a hit at cinemas across the planet.

It’s clear that even industrial quantities of garlic won’t be enough to drive vampires off our screens. They’ve been making us shiver with delight and fear for decades, and there are plenty of ways left for movie directors and game creators to breathe life into the genre. While Slayers isn’t the best example of a vampire adventure, its release in 2022 reminds us that there’s still a lot of life left in this theme.

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