My Journey pt2
I have always been fascinated by the old, black-and-white movies of suspense, mystery, and horror. My Mom, introduced me to the genres, while huddled together sipping hot chocolate, a blanket over our laps. Cold days were specially designed for “spooky movies,” she’d say. So I’ve watched a lot of monster movies, particularly those schlocky Hammer films.
But even with all my experience with vampire and monster movies, asking, “How/why would the hero show up,” forced me to really think, as I didn’t want to follow tradition or repeat anything cliche. In versions of the Dracula story, Dr. Von Helsing is introduced to the count socially or is consulted by the family when odd things happen. In the movie Fright Night, the hero is a big fan of classic vampire horror movies, so when he sees two guys carry a coffin into the basement of the house next door, his interest is piqued. In John Carpenter’s vampire movie, the hero is part of a secret organization that has been hunting vampires for hundreds of years. Blade sees a half-vampire, hunting the creatures, in order to avenge his mother. (And there are more!)
The solution came to me (no spoilers), but not easily. It took me months of thinking myself into brick walls before I found something different and unique. It also answered a nagging problem of where the monster came from. After all, a vampire doesn’t just appear from the ether, in a modern setting. There must be a reason for the old legends that gave way to novels like Dracula, then nothing for centuries, until his sudden appearance and threat to our modern world.
The next thing to tackle, however, was how to kill the vampire. Again, I was reluctant to do anything that had been done before, no matter how cool the villain’s ending. I had to come up with something unique, something never done before, something modern…. I had it! It was perfect, modern, and wonderfully unique! (Again, no spoilers!) My method for killing off the vampire told me where the hero was likely to come from, as they needed access to things to which normal people wouldn’t have access. But it was clumsy and I couldn’t get the idea to really work well. Although the next breakthrough didn’t take months, I still spent quite a bit of time working out, as I had to find a way to enable my villain’s ending without stumbling over the details and making a mess of an otherwise good ending.
*CAVEAT: I realize I talk around a lot of subjects and questions, without revealing details. This may be very frustrating, but only for those that have not read the book. If you’ve read the book, you know to what I am referring. the following entry (pt3) DOES contain spoilers. So, if you haven’t read the book, please skip it.
More to follow…