The Strain ( Guillermo Del Toro - David Semel - Keith Gordon )

Starring
Corey Stoll
David Bradley
Jim Watson,
Kevin Durand
Mía Maestro
Ben Hyland
Jonathan Hyde
Richard Sammel

A Boeing 767 arrives at JFK. All lights are out. All communication channels have gone quiet. Crews on the ground are lost for answers, but an alert goes out to the CDC. Dr. Ephraim  Goodweather, head of their Canary project, a rapid-response team that investigates biological threats, gets the call and boards the plane. What he finds makes his blood run cold. 

So begins a battle of mammoth proportions as the vampiric virus that has infected New York begins to spill out into the streets. Dr. Ephraim must now find a way to stop the contagion and save his city.

Horacio Quiroga: The Feather Pillow

Alicia's entire honeymoon gave her hot and cold shivers. A blonde, angelic, and timid young girl, the childish fancies she had dreamed about being a bride had been chilled by her husband's rough character. She loved him very much, nonetheless, although sometimes she gave a light shudder when, as they returned home through the streets together at night, she cast a furtive glance at the impressive stature of her Jordan, who had been silent for an hour. He, for his part, loved her profoundly but never let it be seen.

For three months--they had been married in April--they lived in a special kind of bliss.

Doubtless she would have wished less severity in the rigorous sky of love, more expansive and less cautious tenderness, but her husband's impassive manner always restrained her.

The house in which they lived influenced her chills and shuddering to no small degree. The whiteness of the silent patio--friezes, columns, and marble statues--produced the wintry impression of an enchanted palace. Inside the glacial brilliance of stucco, the completely bare walls, affirmed the sensation of unpleasant coldness. As one crossed from one room to another, the echo of his steps reverberated throughout the house, as if long abandonment had sensitized its resonance.

Alicia passed the autumn in this strange love nest. She had determined, however, to cast a veil over her former dreams and live like a sleeping beauty in the hostile house, trying not to think about anything until her husband arrived each evening.

It is not strange that she grew thin. She had a light attack of influenza that dragged on insidiously for days and days: after that Alicia's health never returned. Finally one afternoon she was able to go into the garden, supported on her husband's arm. She looked around listlessly.

Suddenly Jordan, with deep tenderness, ran his hand very slowly over her head, and Alicia instantly burst into sobs, throwing her arms around his neck. For a long time she cried out all the fears she had kept silent, redoubling her weeping at Jordan's slightest caress. Then her sobs subsided, and she stood a long while, her face hidden in the hollow of his neck, not moving or speaking a word.

This was the last day Alicia was well enough to be up. On the following day she awakened feeling faint. Jordan's doctor examined her with minute attention, prescribing calm and absolute rest.

Jim Gray: They can see in the dark

Gene Colan: vampire 16

Gene Colan: vampire 16

Veronica Hollinger: The Vampire and the Alien: Variations on the Outsider

(Science Fiction Studies 48, Volume 16, Part 2, July 1989)

The Vampire and the Alien: Variations on the Outsider¹

(Winner, Pioneer Award, 1990)

That SF is capable of evoking in its readers "a sense of wonder" has become something of a critical cliché.² Another and equally characteristic side of the SF coin, however, is its role in what we might term "the domestication of the fantastic." H.G. Wells introduces this issue, for example, in his "Preface to the Scientific Romances" (1933). "Nothing," he writes, "remains interesting where anything may happen." For this reason, the SF writer should provide the reader with orderly ground-rules for his or her fictional universes. Wells concludes that "[the writer] must help [the reader] in every possible unobtrusive way to domesticate the impossible hypothesis" (p. 241; Wells's emphasis). This is reiterated, in different terms, by Eric S. Rabkin, who argues that

what is important in the definition of science fiction is...the idea that paradigms do control our view of all phenomena, that within these paradigms all normal problems can be solved, and that abnormal occurrences must either be explained or initiate the search for a better (usually more inclusive) paradigm. (p. 121)

For this reason, while the SF genre expands the scope and the variety of the physical universe, it often does so—ironically perhaps—at the expense of what cannot be explained in terms of natural law and scientific possibility —i.e., at the expense of the super-natural or the un-natural, the ontologically indeterminate area of the fantastic.     

From the generic perspective of SF, the territory of the fantastic lies just across the border, and SF has always been effective at expanding its own territories through the scientific rationalization of elements originally located in the narrative worlds of fantasy. In Colin Manlove's words, "the science fiction writer throws a rope of the conceivable (how remotely so does not matter) from our world to his [or hers]..." (p. 7). Manlove points out that "as soon as the 'supernatural' has become possible we are no longer dealing with fantasy but with science fiction" (p. 3).            

A classic example of this domestication of the fantastic occurs in Arthur C. Clarke's Childhood's End (1953), a novel which draws the conventional figure of the devil—bat-wings, barbed tail, and all—across the border of the supernatural into SF territory. Childhood's End not only provides a "plausible" narrative framework for its demystification of the devil-figure; it also aims to explain the powerful ongoing presence of this figure in our collective race-memory. Clarke thus manages to transform mythic fantasy into alien reality while maintaining the "sense of wonder" inscribed in the original figure.         

The vampire, a less grandiose but equally horrific archetype, is one satanic figure which is currently enjoying a resurgence of literary and critical popularity.³ "Immortalized" by Bram Stoker in his classic Gothic novel, Dracula (1897), and still most typically associated with the horror genre, the vampire too has occasionally crossed the border from fantasy to SF, undergoing varieties of domestication in works such as Richard Matheson's I Am Legend (1954), Tanith Lee's Sabella, or the Blood Stone (1980), and David Bischoff's Vampires of Nightworld (1981).         

Bloodrayne (Director: Uwe Boll)

Starring:
Kristanna Loken
Ben Kingsley
Michelle Rodriguez

In eighteenth century Romania, Rayne, a dhampir (half-human, half-vampire), prone to fits of blind blood rage but saddled with a compunction for humans, strives to avenge her mother's rape by her father, Kagan, King of Vampires. Two vampire hunters, Sebastian and Vladimir, from the Brimstone Society persuade her to join their cause.

Bram Stoker: Dracula's Guest

http://talesofmytery.blogspot.com.es/2012/12/bram-stoker-draculas-guest.html#.VChLElcVet8