FILM / Glenn Danzig and the Psychosexual Balancing Act of Vampire Media / Lane Chasek
Image © Cleopatra Entertainment | El Diablo Pictures
I always knew Glenn Danzig as a burnt-out rockstar. Meanwhile, my teenage cousin knows Danzig as “the kitty litter meme guy.” (Apparently, a few years ago, some paparazzi snapped a photograph of long-haired, beefy-shouldered Glenn Danzig carrying a massive box of kitty litter in a supermarket parking lot. This picture is supposedly so funny that it inspired hundreds of image macros.) And now it seems we’ll have to remember him as a terrible filmmaker as well.
I went into Danzig’s latest feature film, Death Rider in the House of Vampires, knowing only that 1) it was a Glenn Danzig production and 2) it featured Danny Trejo. I wasn’t expecting a vampire film on par with Bram Stoker’s Dracula, but I was at least expecting a fun, bloody, and (possibly, hopefully) sexy flick about cowboy vampires. With Danny Trejo. How could a movie with Danny Trejo not be fun? But Death Rider, though it was plenty bloody, was neither fun nor sexy. Even Danny Trejo failed to make Death Rider enjoyable. (Danny Trejo’s sole contribution to this film is to appear in the first five minutes, vaguely threaten the protagonist by calling him “gringo” about a hundred times, then get promptly knocked out by the protagonist’s fast-motion fist and getting tied to the ground to be burned alive by the rising sun. It’s a brief scene, and I imagine the reason it’s so brief is because Danzig couldn’t afford to pay Trejo for more than two minutes of screen time.)
For those lucky enough to have not seen Death Rider, allow me to summarize—the titular Death Rider, a vampire outlaw who dresses in all-black, infiltrates a saloon/brothel filled with other vampire outlaws (along with vampire prostitutes, vampire monks, vampire barkeeps, the vaguely-European main antagonist Count Holiday, as well as Glenn Danzig himself as a vampire named, of all things, Bad Bathory) in order to kill as many vampires as vampirically possible, while also finding time to have sex with some prostitutes along the way. Why is Rider doing any of this? As a vampire himself, why is he killing his own kind? We learn toward the end of the film that Rider’s sister was turned into a vampire back in the day and that Rider may be seeking some sort of revenge, but that’s all we get in terms of character motivation or backstory. Otherwise, the film consists of long, glacially-paced scenes that attempt to be sexy, gratuitously violent, or some combination of the two. Danzig succeeds at the violent part. The sexy part—not so much.
Danzig attempts to create a Louis L’Amour-flavored vampire narrative, combining the ham-fisted dialogue and violence of the American Western with the psychosexual themes that come pre-packaged in most vampire-centric media. Since Dracula, the vampire has acted as a metaphor for emerging (and suppressed) sexuality—the animalistic, seductive id that intrudes on the rational, “civilized” realm of the ego and super-ego. It’s trite and Freudian, but it works. It’s one of the simplest ways to sell the idea of sex to people when they aren’t in the mood for (or aren’t allowed to access) straight up pornography—especially teens. Say what you will about the Twilight novels, but Stephenie Meyer and the production team behind the film adaptations knew how to cater to the young, straight, female gaze. And though not as popular nowadays, the comic series Vampirella sold a dangerous, forbidden brand of sexuality catered to the young, straight, male gaze.
And you could argue that Death Rider is made with an older male gaze in mind, but I think that’s being generous. This film was made by Glenn Danzig, for Glenn Danzig. I won’t go so far as to read Death Rider’s blending of sex and violence as a reflection of Danzig’s own desires, but I will say that he fails to find equilibrium between the two. The film emphasizes violence more than sex and seems to expect that the audience will find torture and death scenes just as pleasurable as sex scenes. For a movie about vampires, there are surprisingly few scenes depicting vampires sucking the blood of young virgins (which, while clichéd, still effectively juxtaposes the violent and the erotic), and instead we’re treated to torture porn. One of the film’s more memorable scenes is one in which a vampire prostitute is dragged out of the brothel by a group of vampire monks, begging for her life as they tie her to a cross Jesus-style. And as the sun rises on the desert plain, we’re treated to the sight of this woman’s skin bursting into flames as she moans and screams until she’s reduced to a pile of ash and bones. I can just imagine Danzig behind the camera, directing her to sound like she’s burning in agony while also orgasming to death. On one level, the scene acts as a disgusting faux-snuff film that only a psychopathic misogynist could get off to; but on another level, the mid-2000s Syfy-channel flame effects made me giggle. It’s like a Martian landed on Earth, watched a bunch of cheap pornos, Spaghetti Westerns, and vampire flicks, and then tried to create a movie that would appeal to Earthlings—it’s hilariously inept at its best, off-putting at its worst.
This film can’t even manage simple world building. Again, say what you will about the Twilight series, but Meyer did a competent job at depicting how vampires could integrate into mainstream society while still concealing their true identities in a small Northwestern town. True Blood took it even further, with vampires hiding themselves away for centuries before finally “coming out of the casket” to the world. The world of vampires in these franchises is a concealed one, an underground world that exists parallel to the human world while still managing to intersect with it. This intersection between the real and the fantastic makes it easier for audiences to not only fear the vampires they watch, but lust after them as well.
Instead of embedding itself in the real world, Death Rider takes place almost entirely in a brothel that stands in the middle of the desert without a human soul in sight. In fact, other than a handful of human prostitutes, there aren’t any human characters who are named. We get no impression that these vampires interact in any meaningful way with humans save for sinking their fangs into the neck of an occasional human woman. Save for costumes and character archetypes, there’s nothing that connects the plot and characters of Death Rider to the events and settings of the Old West. It’s less like watching a Western and more like watching a bunch of actors and actresses wearing Party City vampire fangs while re-enacting barroom scenes from Gunsmoke.
Yet as bad as Death Rider was, I couldn’t help but feel sorry for Danzig after it was over. Because he tried.
I won’t claim to be the biggest Danzig fan because I’m not. Like most people in my age group (i.e., Gen Z brats who were born in the mid-to-late 90s and grew up playing too many video games) I only knew him as that dude who sang “Mother” on Guitar Hero II. Danzig hasn’t been relevant in a long time, and you can tell he’s trying to reinvent himself as not just a rockstar, but a B-movie auteur as well. Danzig wrote the bland, repetitive script for Death Rider probably imagining it would become a cult classic, but thus far, it’s received hardly any critical attention or even attention from general audiences. As of writing this, Death Rider hasn’t cracked a hundred viewer scores on any review sites.
Despite the relative lack of interest in his film, Danzig is already hinting that he might make a sequel. And if he does, what will his legacy be? Before now, he could have gone down in history as an aging rockstar who left good enough alone and rested on his laurels; but now he may be remembered as that rockstar who became a terrible filmmaker. Or maybe history will be kinder to Glenn Danzig. Maybe he’ll be fondly remembered as that scary-looking guy carrying a massive box of kitty litter through a Kroger parking lot. One can only hope.
Lane Chasek is the author of the nonfiction novel Hugo Ball and the Fate of the Universe, the poetry collection A Cat is not a Dog, and the forthcoming chapbook Dad During Deer Season. Lane's work has been featured or is forthcoming in Broke Bohemian, Hobart, Taco Bell Quarterly, North Dakota Quarterly, perhappened, among others.
