This is the least haunting image I can find from the film I started watching last night: the male lead trapped in an attic while bloodthirsty savages (vampires like you haven’t seen them before, see below) claw and pry the windows. I started watching it but quickly realized this was not a film for Jillian to watch alone, at night. So I’ll save it for next week’s trip to Québec City, where no doubt I’ll watch it even more alone, at night.

The snowbound “Alaskan” landscape is stunning, though the darkened town was filmed on a sound stage in New Zealand. Note to self: more footage for Snow Stories. Another snow covered landscape signaling despair, doom, and entrapment. There is no explanation so far for why the townspeople can’t simply drive away.

These vampires are more closely related in demeanor and appearance to the furious and faster frame rate zombies of recent films like 28 Days Later, 28 Weeks Later, Land of the Dead etc, than to debonair and handsome Hollywood vampires played by Gary Oldman and Antonio Banderas. That’s a relief.

They resemble the original Nosferatu, or even the blind post-human cave dwellers in The Descent - batlike, with razor teeth.

Gone is the slow courtship, the stealth, the dark beauty… these vampires are messy, blood covered, and undeniably inhuman deadly monsters.

pictured above: 30 Days of Night, and Nosferatu.

I am officially too old for one box of candles, Yippee! But who wants to ruin a perfectly beautiful cake with gazillions of candles and fire? This may be the only cake I have had with my name and a heart (thank you Beckley), and the Capricorn is eternally practical.
Here is a link to my friend and fellow artist Jo-Anne Balcaen’s website, in Montréal. We were born on the exact same day, in the same year. Happy birthday Jo-Anne!