EMBRACE OF THE VAMPIRE (2013): DTMWaGL #44
Also: go Phillies go Phillies go Phillies go Phillies
Hello friends! As you are absolutely aware, it is Halloween, bringing an end to what we all decided to call “spooky season.” Lifetime movies are all generally kind of spooky, if you consider the creeping terror of being vulnerable because you are alive “spooky,” but most of them are based in some kind of reality. Not this one, though! Not EMBRACE OF THE VAMPIRE, freed from our reality, generally agreed-upon vampire lore, and its own Lifetime-Movie-Club-supplied synopsis: “an 18-year-old college freshman is seduced by a handsome vampire lover who introduces her to a dark world of carnal desires.” Spoiler, that is not the plot of this movie! I think it was the plot of the movie this is a remake of, which came out in 1995 and starred Alyssa Milano, and which I did not know about1 until halfway through writing this newsletter. I feel extremely foolish. But regardless, I will tell you the plot of this movie, I’ll tell you so much about it. (Content warnings for general vampire business, hazing, hallucinations, and everyone being super horny for a professor. Also the pictures in this one are really bad! Sorry!)
Our story begins in the town? region? whatever of “Ludovica, Eastern Europe, 1735,” where a young woman is being held down on a table. She does not wish to be held down on the table, as one wouldn’t. A mysterious cloaked person arrives at the house, brandishes a cross at the woman, and then draws a long cut down the captive woman’s forearm with a silver knife. She whispers some words (including “nosferatu”) in, presumably, Ludovica Eastern European, and pours a potion into the cut, which hisses and smokes alarmingly. Unfortunately, her efforts to heal or help or whatever this woman are cut short when a full-on vampire shows up and bites the shit out of the person who was holding the woman down. I wonder who these people are!
Well, anyway! We’re in the present day now, accompanying a young blonde woman named Charlotte as she arrives, dragging a large duffel bag and absolutely zero backstory or personality, at an exceptionally beautiful college campus in the mountains of British Columbia. Charlotte meets her freshman roommate Nicole, a normal person with roots in the area. Charlotte tells Nicole she’s here on a fencing scholarship, and Nicole is like, “oh my horrible friend Eliza is on the fencing team! She’s the worst, you’ll hate her.” Nicole is also friends with the guy who runs the coffeeshop where Charlotte is interviewing for a job. She describes the coffeeshop guy, Chris, as “super nice” and as we meet him, he does indeed seem super nice. Charlotte seems baffled by the concept of a uniform for baristas, but thinking about it now, she just seems baffled by literally every single thing she encounters. She’s Rappaccini’s daughter, but instead of poisonous plants it’s fencing.
After she crushes her job interview by asserting that she knows how to make coffee, Charlotte has a meeting with the dean or something. Dr. Duncan has extremely light-colored eyes and hastily draws the blinds in his office, explaining that he just had laser surgery. I think, “oh, this man is a vampire,” but honestly, having watched this whole movie, I am not 100% sure. I think probably he just had laser surgery and has weird eyes. This perhaps-vampire explains the terms of Charlotte’s scholarship to her, and it seems like it is not actually a fencing scholarship at all, but something called the “Trust Scholarship,” for which she needs to maintain a 3.5 GPA. Charlotte promises that she’s up to it, she has to be because there’s nothing for her to go back to. Yeah dude, I know.
While walking across campus at night, Charlotte crosses paths with a guy wearing a hoodie, which, of course, means he’s evil. She has a brief vision of the guy with blood all over his face, falls down, and then rises to smack this guy in the face. “Watch yourself, Charlotte,” says the man, whose face is not covered in blood. How does he know who she is? He’s the fencing coach, he has precognitive abilities about all his swordswomen. When Charlotte gets back to her room, Nicole is hanging out with her awful friend Eliza, who informs Charlotte that the old fencing coach had an accident and is now “dead as disco”, just like an 18-year-old in 2013 would say. Charlotte says she just met the new guy actually, and Eliza is like, “I HEAR HE’S HOT, CONFIRM/DENY.” He’s okay. Nicole invites Charlotte to the party they’re heading out to, which explains their truly horrible tiny outfits, and Charlotte declines, much to Eliza’s disgust. “Oh, she’s a virgin,” she sneers. True, but also maybe she didn’t want to go to a party with the tripping hazard of someone wearing suspenders down around her legs, Eliza.
Alone in her dorm, which by the way has an en suite bathroom and kitchenette, Eliza fitfully dozes with a textbook about mythology and monsters on her lap. She maybe-dreams about a man coming into her room and trying to kiss her while also maybe-dreaming of the scene from Ludovica in 1735. It’s so weird how her dream has the same camera angle and lighting as the thing we saw earlier! In her dream, someone approaches the man fondling Charlotte and stabs him in the back, and then Charlotte wakes up screaming in some kind of rock garden in the hallway outside her room. She quickly stands up and is like, “haha did you guys hear that noise? So crazy, right? I wonder what that was! Ha ha!” and returns to her room, where Nicole is smooching the guy she brought home from the party. Ope! Charlotte has been wandering all night, she thought it was fine! It’s fine. Nicole escorts this random guy, who does not even get one line, out of the room, because it’s morning and she and Charlotte have mythology class. Nicole, who is topless, also wants Charlotte to know the coffeeshop guy, Chris, thought she was cute. Charlotte thinks this is good, but Nicole declares, “Cute is death, we gotta work on that.”
On the way to class, Nicole asks Charlotte if she’s like….okay? She saw all Charlotte’s prescription bottles in the bathroom. Charlotte says she has a hereditary blood disorder called, according to the captions, “basobalicemia,” a word that does not have any Google results, and which is so far off from any word that exists that Google politely inquires if I meant “baseballism.” No, I didn’t, that shit is corny. Some more tentative googling indicates she might have said “beta-thalassemia”? Anyway, Charlotte has her basobalicemia under control, but her mom died from it, and she doesn’t really have any other family. She does have a necklace passed down from her mom, and we the savvy viewer note that it is the same necklace that the girl on the table in the opening scene was wearing. I wonder what that means!
Because they are in college, they have to go to at least one class. This one is about monsters and mythology and it is taught by Professor Cole, who is also the fencing coach. It really is a very small college. I’d like to make fun of taking a fuckoff class like “Monsters and Mythology” in your freshman year, but I don’t know, the one year I went to college I took a class called “Drugs and Society” where we watched the movie The Panic in Needle Park. As Professor Cole drones on about our Draculas, ourselves, Dr. Duncan (maybe a vampire? probably not) looks on from the staircase in the back of the room. Sure, there’s a staircase in the back of the classroom, why not. Nicole is extremely horny for the professor, maybe because their names are so similar. That must be it, he is not that handsome.
Charlotte has her first day of work at the coffeeshop, Zephyr Cafe, and it gets off to a great start when she tries to snap her boss Chris’s hand off for the crime of trying to pick a piece of lint off her shoulder. The great start continues when the woman who owns the occult shop down the street comes in for her usual tea. There’s a whole thing about how this woman, Daciana, will want to watch Charlotte add the milk to her tea, that seems like it might come back around, but of course it does not. Also, the movie pronounces the name “dah-see-ah-na” but an actual Romanian person would pronounce it “dah-chee-ah-na,” you can trust me, I do Romanian on Duolingo. Ask me why! Daciana notices Charlotte’s necklace, telling her it’s bloodstone, and reaches out to fondle it while saying some “[non-English speech]” that Charlotte doesn’t understand. Daciana informs Charlotte that she has to come see her at her shop right away, she has some non-English speech to share with her.
Back on the ludicrously gorgeous campus, Charlotte has her first fencing practice. She meets the team captain, who is a real b-word about being addressed as “Captain” like this is the army. Fencing: more like the army than other sports, but still not the army. Cole has Charlotte spar with a girl named Sarah and then the dastardly Eliza, and Charlotte beats them both. Honestly though, there’s no reason I should be telling you any of the fencing business. None of this is important to the vampire stuff. Fencing isn’t spooky just because you wear a mask and have a weapon.
After practice, Charlotte bumps into Chris, who brought her her share of the tips today as an excuse to see her. That’s nice! What a nice boy. I bet he loves the Descendants. She also runs into Dr. Duncan, who watched her practice and says some weirdly threatening stuff about Charlotte keeping her focus where it should be. Sir! Sir. Are you a vampire or what. Charlotte goes back to her dorm and has some more visions, Daciana and snakes or whatever, and takes a handful of pills. She’s got that blood disorder that makes you hallucinate.
Charlotte’s fitful sleep of vampire dreams is interrupted when she is kidnapped for hazing purposes by the captain of the fencing team and her minions. There is a very long scene of girls being forced to drink vodka and strip while the captain yells fencing trivia questions at them and calls them the r-slur, twice. I am truly shocked that you can say that on the Lifetime Movie Club app and also that someone put this in their vampire movie from 2013. Sarah, the girl who fenced with Charlotte the other day, shows some sympathy for our heroine (?), who is pure of heart and does not drink or enjoy being called the r-word. After the interminable hazing is over, Sarah and Charlotte walk drunkenly back to their dorms, and a maintenance guy hollers at them to be careful, in the way men like to holler at girls as a threat that isn’t a threat. They laugh, and as they walk away, the maintenance guy gets the absolute dickens stabbed out of him with his own garbage stick. Stabbed so much! Charlotte and Sarah don’t notice because they are too busy making out. All the reviews of this movie on IMDb mention “a lesbian scene,” hubba hubba, but in this version, Sarah lifts Charlotte’s nightgown up and then suddenly it’s morning. Charlotte wakes up alone at 10:22 a.m., hungover and with a nasty red splotch under her bloodstone necklace.
Charlotte books it to monster class and misses part of Cole’s lecture about dragons and Frankensteins. Have you ever thought about how, like, maybe we’re the real monsters? And that when we talk about our fears, we also talk about….our desires? It’s a real make-you-think. Charlotte finds this so compelling that she dozes off thinking about smooching Professor Cole, and when she wakes up in an empty classroom he scolds her about living up to her potential. It doesn’t get any better when she goes to work and drops a tray because she has a vision of coffee mugs filled with mealworms (the favorite snack of my chickens and also, maybe, vampires??) and is sent home by Nice Chris. When Charlotte gets home, Nicole informs her that some intense lady with a weird name brought her a book. Thanks, Daciana! Charlotte can resell it at the campus bookstore when the semester is over, for a shiny penny.
Chris is still attempting to court Charlotte for some reason, possibly because in the 1995 version of this movie they absolutely fucked and he can feel that residual energy, and he comes to campus to invite her camping this weekend. It’ll be really chill! A bunch of us are going! Nicole is going! Have you seen how beautiful it is here, look around! Charlotte says she’ll think about it, Chris kisses her, Eliza sees this happen and you just know she’s going to be a huge bitch about it.
And indeed, Eliza decides to make this a “She’s All That” thing where Chris is trying to deflower a virgin for points for a contest that she has definitely not just made up. Why is any of this happening! Who is the vampire! Is it Dr. Duncan? Is it Eliza? Is it the girl Charlotte made out with last night? Is it Chris, he seems nice, like a vampire would? No questions, there’s fencing practice! Some girls go at each other with little swords, et cetera. After practice, Sarah tries to smooch Charlotte again, but Charlotte does not really remember spending the night with her, on account of all the vodka and fencing trivia, and pulls away. Aw, come on. Then, Charlotte is the last person in the locker room…..or is she? She hears some weird voices in the showers, and when she investigates them she sees herself covered in blood from the showerhead. The next thing she knows, she’s outside, dressed, being shaken awake by Dr. Duncan. He tells her they need to talk but she’s like, ha ha! guess I fainted, in a normal person way! I have baseballism or whatever! and goes back to her dorm to hallucinate some more. She’s fine.
At the next fencing practice, Charlotte is uncharacteristically sloppy, and Cole holds her after he lets everyone else hit the showers. You know who the only person holding back Charlotte from her true fencing potential is? You’ll never guess: it’s Charlotte. Yeah, she says, she’s going through some things. Cole goes off on an extended metaphor about how swords are made, we all saw Kill Bill, we know, but he’s talking softer, telling her that she’s at the point where she’s soft and moldable, like steel just before it sets, and he’s leaning in, and then he kisses her. At this moment, Eliza pokes her head in but she keeps her mouth shut. Charlotte pushes him away and tries to slap him, but he grabs her wrist. Ah, see, this was a lesson about operating on instinct! This isn’t sexual harassment, it’s a lesson. Cole tells Charlotte to pick up her sword and they thrust at each other (it’s not hot) until Cole nicks Charlotte’s neck and tells her to leave. Now! Oh gosh I think Cole might be the vampire? They did just Embrace and all.
Before a meeting with Charlotte, Dr. Duncan (vampire odds decreasing) talks to someone about a missing maintenance worker. Haven’t seen him for two days, hope no one stabbed him to death with his garbage stick! Ha ha, that’s not the kind of thing that happens here, anyway let me meet with this student here so she can notice a spot on my neck where I cut myself shaving and have a meltdown about it. Duncan tries to suggest that Charlotte takes a break from fencing, just to take something off her plate, but she refuses. It’s all she has of her mother, other than a blood disorder and a garish necklace. She tries to tell Duncan about the weird dreams or visions or whatever that she’s been having, but when he asks if they’re violent or sexual, she’s like, oh, never mind, I do not want to discuss this with you and your weird eyes, goodbye!
Charlotte stomps off to Zephyr Cafe to tell off Chris. Yes she is in a bad mood, no she will not be coming on the camping trip, yes she does believe Eliza has her best interests at heart for some reason, and she knows he is being deceitful. I’m pretty sure he’s not even a vampire, we don’t have to spend any time on this.
After a brief stopover at the dorm, where she finds Nicole and Eliza drinking cosmos (??) in the kitchenette (???), Charlotte returns to the fencing gym to sit on the floor and read her monster textbook.2 Cole finds her there and apologizes for his behavior, which, yes, you kissed a student and then cut her with a sword, my friend. Charlotte says it's fine actually, it was good for her to get mad, to feel something. Cole pulls her in for a hug and they almost kiss again, but, like everything kind of interesting in this movie, it was a dream. Charlotte awakens on the gym floor alone and goes back to her dorm. I don't think she got any monster studying done at all, she's going to fail her monsters midterm. She looks at the photo of her and her mom on her nightstand and notices that her mom is wearing a pentagram charm on her bracelet, and remembers seeing a pentagram in Daciana's store window. You may say, "wait, has Charlotte never seen a pentagram before?" but remember: Charlotte has never seen anything before.
While Charlotte thinks about pentagrams, Duncan goes to Cole’s absurd log-cabin-ass house. It has an elaborately carved front door and there are swords everywhere. I understand he’s a fencing coach but you have to leave your work at work, you know? Duncan is here to tell Cole that a student has accused him of having an inappropriate relationship with Charlotte. Cole has never heard of something so absurd, hang on, let me get you a glass of water, don’t like, let your guard down while you look around my weird house or anything, ha ha. Duncan does let his guard down while he looks around Cole’s weird house, and then Cole drops down from the damn ceiling and bites Duncan on the neck. Finally. Finally!!!!
Charlotte visits Daciana because she has a compelling Romanian accent that makes her seem like she knows what’s up. Daciana acts like she’s going to read Charlotte’s palm but then slices a cut down it instead and collects the blood in a little bowl, like the kind you’d eat fancy olives out of, the kind that used to come free for the table but now they’re $8. Then Daciana sets the blood on fire. “Well, well, well, look who has nosferatu sânge,” she says, and launches into a convoluted explanation of, listen, I wrote it all down and I don’t understand it. Charlotte is descended from the woman from the first scene, whose mother was the vampire who showed up and bit that guy. The potion being poured into her arm by Daciana’s ancestor uhhhh something something transforms the blood to protect the offspring? And now this is a bloodline of vampire hunters? And the guy Charlotte’s ancestor bit was Cole? So, Cole’s bloodline is Charlotte’s bloodline’s enemy? I don’t know. The important thing is that Charlotte is a virgin (whatever she did with Sarah doesn’t count apparently because vampire rules are heteronormative), and if Cole can convince a virgin from her bloodline to give herself to him willingly, then he can become a human. Charlotte is like, okay, so I fuck this guy who we all agree is kind of hot, then he’s human, and I don’t have these dreams anymore, what’s the downside? Well, the downside is that hell is real and she’s going to spend eternity there. Charlotte draws the line here and declares that this whole thing is absurd, she can’t possibly be a vampire hunter, she’s merely an 18-year-old college freshman failing to be seduced by a handsome vampire lover into a dark world of carnal desires. Oh, yeah, then why is her bloodstone necklace burning her skin? Riddle me that, says Daciana. Charlotte does not care to be riddled, and leaves.
When she gets back to campus, she learns that Duncan was found dead last night, attacked by an animal or something. A vampire is a kind of animal. Nicole tells her that she and Chris were really worried when Charlotte didn’t come home last night, and Charlotte is so sure that Chris was worried, he just cares about his little deflowering game. Nicole cannot believe that Charlotte believed whatever bullshit Eliza told her, and that conflict is resolved so quickly you almost think, “gosh that shouldn’t have been in this movie in the first place.” Seeing how stressed her roommate is, Nicole suggests that Charlotte kind of chill out and take a break, and Charlotte responds by dropping a water glass, cutting her hand on it, and demanding to know if that’s real blood or a hallucination, so clearly she’s doing fine, Nicole. Lay off. Charlotte asks if she can still come camping with them, and sure she can.
So a bunch of teens go camping while a vampire is actively hunting one of them. Nowhere safer than the woods of British Columbia, The X-Files taught me that. They hang out around a campfire until they pair off into makeout partners, and Charlotte and Chris wander into the woods rather than watch some guy grope Eliza’s boobs for like a thousand hours. But oh no, Cole is watching them! In the woods! With his vampire eyes! And after Charlotte and Chris go off and start making out on the forest floor, Cole bites Eliza’s neck and drinks her blood! This movie with “vampire” in the title finally remembered that there’s a vampire in it and he is very busy now. So busy that when Charlotte asks Chris to “make love” to her, Cole is there to swoop Chris into the treetops with a screech. Goodbye, Chris, you were truly the nicest of us all.
In the morning, after being released from what is now a crime scene, Charlotte walks back to her dorm and finally looks at the book Daciana dropped off half a movie ago. There’s some good stuff in there! There’s also some good stuff in Charlotte’s nightstand, like: a big wooden cross that she tucks into her Ugg boot as she sets off to Cole’s log mansion. She creeps around this weird house and grabs a wooden spear off a rack, carrying it around with her until finally, thank you, Cole shows up and is like “hello.” He whooshes around for funsies for a minute before grabbing a sword and preparing to duel Charlotte. Maybe he was a bad weird fencing coach on purpose, setting up this moment so he could win, because he very quickly just disarms Charlotte and pushes her against a wall by the neck. He just wants to be human! It’s not fair! He had to kill Charlotte’s friends (well, Eliza), because of what Charlotte’s family did to him! It’s not faaaaiiirrrrrrrruhhh, she needs to sleep with himmmm. Cole kisses Charlotte, and she kisses back, and they lie down. “Show me the monster,” she says, and I say, “is the monster his dick?” but no, she means “show me the teeth and the veins and whatever vampires look like in this movie.” She tells him he’s beautiful, and they kiss some more, until she pulls out the big cross and shoves it in his chest. He screams and bites her neck but Charlotte scrambles away and pulls the curtain open, letting the sunlight stream over Cole, absolutely incinerating him immediately.
Listen, I assumed he could be in the sun because doesn’t he teach a 9 a.m. class? How does that….work? We don’t have to worry about that anymore, because he’s extremely dead. Charlotte watches him burn, bleeding from the neck, and that’s….how it ends. Is she okay? Is she a full-on vampire now? Is this addressed in the unrated cut I could have rented for two dollars but chose not to because that’s not the Lifetime Movie Club experience? Probably not, I am sure that just has more tits in it, but whew. Abrupt! Happy Halloween, I guess, go Phillies, fuck the Astros, bye!
Upon further reflection, I believe EMBRACE OF THE VAMPIRE (1995) to be the “lesbian vampire movie with Alyssa Milano in it” that a man in front of me in the Wrigley Field bleachers circa 2008 was describing in great detail to his friends. This man kept leaning back into my knees, so I put my freshly sharpened scorekeeping pencil between them, and the next time he leaned back he got stabbed a little bit and looked at me and said, “OW?” and I told him to learn some fucking manners. Then they left in the 9th because the Cubs were down 4 with 2 outs, and the Cubs came back and won it in 12. Incredible game! Cubs cut their magic number to 1 and I stabbed a guy.
Quest University, the school where they filmed this, which is indeed a school and not, as indicated by the room setup and general vibe, a conference center and extended-stay hotel, is the kind where you take one intensive class for three weeks at a time, so maybe monster class really is Charlotte’s only class. It is certainly the only one we see her taking.