Vampires (film) - Production

Production

Shortly after finishing work on Escape from L.A., John Carpenter was thinking about quitting filmmaking because “it stopped being fun”. Largo Entertainment approached him with a project called Vampires, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by John Steakley. They gave him two screenplays – one by Don Jakoby and the other by Dan Mazur. Carpenter read them both and the novel and saw the potential for a film he'd been interested in making. I went into my office and thought, 'It's going to be set in the American southwest and it's a western – Howard Hawks.’” Vampires gave Carpenter the chance to do a western disguised as a horror film," he said. "The story is set up like a western. It's about killers for hire. They're a western cliché. In this movie they’re paid to kill vampires." In terms of tone and look, Carpenter felt that his film was "a little more like The Wild Bunch than Hawks in its style, but the feelings and the whole ending scene is a kind of replay on Red River."

He wrote his own screenplay taking elements from the Jakoby and Mazur scripts, the book and some of his own ideas. For this film, Carpenter wanted to get away from the stereotype of gothic vampires as he said in an interview, "My vampires are savage creatures. There isn’t a second of brooding loneliness in their existence. They’re too busy ripping and tearing humans apart."

Carpenter cast James Woods as Jack Crow because he wanted "the vampire slayer to be as savage as the prey he’s after. James Woods is the kind of guy you’d believe could and would chew off the leg of a vampire." Woods was interested in doing the film because it was something different for him. Contrary to his reputation, Carpenter didn’t find the actor difficult to work with because "we had a deal. He would give me one take as it’s written and I would let him improvise...Many of his improvisations were brilliant. When I needed him to be more focused and disciplined, I had the take from the script that was straighter."

Carpenter had not seen any of Daniel Baldwin's work and had the actor read for him. He had seen Sheryl Lee on Twin Peaks and cast her based on her work on the show. Carpenter's wife and the film's producer Sandy King cast Thomas Ian Griffith because she and the director wanted "someone who looks formidable, but is also alluring. There always has to be something alluring about the evil nature of the vampire."

The MPAA took issue with the film’s over-the-top violence, threatening to give it an NC-17 rating unless some of the gore was cut. King said, "We satisfied the ratings board by just cutting short of a few things that went into really gruesome stuff."