What, exactly, is a Twilight? I do not know, but according to professional money estimators it’s going to make somebody a hundred million dollars this weekend. Good for them! Whoever made this movie’s parents should be proud. “Here’s a gold star, shaped like a noose. Wear it like a neck hat!” As I am neither a teenager girl or a teenage girl’s mom (YET) I am confused as to what New Moon is all about. Confused but aroused!

I checked in on the trailer and read what the YouTube commenters had to say. Did you know that YouTube commenters are some of the smartest writers on the planet? Each week they throw their copies of the New Yorker in the trash and are all, “I don’t read things meant for babies.” That’s how smart they are! Apparently, given an infinite amount of time and an infinite amount of keyboards, YouTube commenters would write the complete works of Shakespeare then call them all gay? That is a true math theorem I just made up. But anyway, this is what I figured out:

New Moon is a sports movie, it seems. It’s about two really different teams, one is Team Edward and one is Team Jacob. These teams are really different! One of them is tall and muscled and pale and loves Bella and has hair on its belly, and the other is tall and muscled and dark and loves Bella and has a waxed chest. Could not be more different, am I right?

And I am not sure entirely what sport they play, but it seems that one of the rules is that you have to make grown women cry, constantly and embarrassingly. Bella apparently is really selfish and bets on the wrong team. Or the right team? I don’t want to give away the ending. There are also vampires, somehow, but honestly it seems like people would be very excited a bout this even if there weren’t vampires. Do you guys want to see the movie I wrote called Eclipse about two super fucking gorgeous guys whose shirts always fall off who really selflessly offer themselves up to a homely every-girl? Oh also one is an alien named Henry Spaceman and the other is a mummy robot called Didlo and who gives a shit somebody write me a check for a million dollars.

I guess at some point a character gets covered in vampire baby crap so this movie is also kind of a baby comedy. It’d be great if Edward had to improvise a crib really last minute and when the other characters aren’t looking uses his super strength to make one out of a telephone pole. That’d be a great scene full of laughs! New Moon  should be called Three Men and a Bella.

There you go. You now know all the facts about The Twilight Saga: New Moon. Don’t bother seeing it, and you can still be comfortable chatting about it at cocktail parties, and when I say cocktail parties I mean overnight lock-in soda dances at the rec center, because this is for children. Also, I am a total children expert what with knowing about their soda dances.

Jacob Fleisher, creator and co-star, Jacob Fleisher has written for MTV, Comedy Central, TLC, A&E, Paramount, Fox and the Weinstein Company. Currently, he is co-writing a feature for Warner Brother studios. Also currently, he’s still wearing his fangs. Jacob lives in LA, but grew up in New York City, so he constantly complains about LA. He is wanted in 37 countries for crimes against hilarity.
www.jacobfleisher.com

Kristen Carney, co-star, is an actor, comedian and host who has appeared from Los Angeles to Europe on some of the most famous stages in the world. She started her stage career at 13 as a dancer for Show Stopper Productions. As a member of the touring company, she performed at Disney World, Euro Disney and Universal Studios. Now, when she isn’t working in front of a camera, Kristen is telling brutally honest jokes on stage at Carolines, The Ice House, The Laughing Post or University of Wisconsin.
http://kristencarney.blogspot.com/

Jenessa Joffee, director, has directed over 20 short films and web videos – mostly comedies. “The Legend of Shizuko Nishimura,” “Shank,” and “American Obon,” have enjoyed film festival runs. “Twilight: 5 Years Later” won the Atom.com Showdown. Jenessa trained in film directing at the American Film Institute. She currently resides in Los Angeles.

Carl Hampe, producer, During his time as an executive at Warner Independent Pictures, Carl Hamper worked on countless feature films, including “In The Valley of Elah,” and “Slumdog Millionaire.” Though Carl is way too big-time to produce a web-series like this, he is also Jake’s downstairs neighbor and Jake refused to put down carpeting until Carl agreed to get on board.

Jack Ferry, cinematographer, is a director, cinematographer, editor, writer, and producer. Most of his projects are for the internet, which means he is extremely wealthy. He hopes to one day learn HTML so he can update www.jackferry.com.

Kit Pennebaker, cinematographer, was born with a love of cinema. A New York City native, Kit has been working professionally in film since he was a teenager. In 2004 Kit graduated from New York University’s prestigious Maurice Kanbar Institute of Film and Television at The Tisch School of the Arts. Today, Kit works as a director of photography on music videos, commercials, concerts, and narrative projects.
www.kitpennebaker.com

Maia Wagle, our AMAZING make-up person, lives in LA and enjoys mutating monsters and beautifying the chosen people. She believes that make-up should be creative, character driven, and FUN! Her work ranges through many medias, beauty for pin-ups and television, cut-off limbs for shows like Threshold and Dexter, Demons for Tenacious D, apocalyptic tour costumes for Skinny Puppy, and she made our werewolves. maiawagle@mac.com

And in case you haven’t seen the premiere episode, I went ahead and embedded it for you right here too:

Check back at vampire.atom.com on November 11th for the next episode.

Andrew kinda judges me for loving this video (don’t listen to his refutations, he does!), but I think it’s great that it goes full-blown-hillbilly-dumbness-idiot-action-activate-style. And as you can probably tell from my prose today, I’m in the mood for that. I know that it’s probably professionally made or whatever, but just because something is trying to be stupid that doesn’t mean it isn’t (which remember, I like).

Now, if you’re like Andrew, and prefer your parody videos to be coherent but still want hot women and stupid, pasty guys, then you’ll enjoy Intercourse With A Vampire, which does not feature “Truck Men” of any sort.

“Truck man!”

Be sure to check out Highlights from the Scream Awards, because apparently everyone but me was invited.

The old-timey vampire couldn’t have been further from the pseudo-goth nancy-boys of today. Ancient  folklore depicted vampires as bloated, discolored, blotchy-skinned, stinking animated corpses covered in rotting death shrouds. But then, if we kept with that story, what would our pre-teen girls masturbate to when they outgrew boy bands?
 

 
This modern fantasy – the gaunt, pale,  noble vampire heartthrob – didn’t become popular until much later, when The Vampyre, a novel written by John Polidori, was published in the 19th century. This work established much of the current vampire mythos, including all of the Romantic affectations, the seductive associations, and their ritualistic origins.But before that time, the origin of the vampire varied greatly, with different cultures believing them to be anything from the angry spirits of evil men, to regretful suicides, to the Chinese belief that a dead body jumped over by a dog would arise as the living dead. But then, the phrase “similar to a vampire” should be taken with a grain of salt as well. What people thought constituted a ‘vampire,’ varied even greater than what they thought spawned them.

The Bulgarians, for example, believed vampires only had one nostril, while the Moravian vampires were all nudists. Albanian vampires wore high-heeled shoes exclusively, and Mexican vampires had skulls in place of heads. Brazilian vampires had furry feet like hobbits, and early American vampires were thought to suck blood from their victims’ ears using their vampiric noses. There were common traits across all cultures, however. Red hair was often thought to be a sign of vampirism, as well as the ability to sleep with one eye open. All Southeastern Asian vampires shared a bizarre kind of Obsessive Compulsive Disorder in common: They could be stopped by spilling bags of rice, sand, or seeds in front of them, because they’d have to count every single particle before they could move on.

But more importantly, the common traits of bloating flesh, ceaselessly staring eyes, sharp teeth and fingernails were all cornerstones of these tales. And we’re recently discovered a reason for that.

A Venetian archaeological find in back in 2006 turned up an ancient plague pit, (a mass grave for disease victims,) wherein a woman was buried with a brick shoved between her teeth, presumably to prevent her from feeding. This intrigued forensic scientists, who then began investigating possible reasons for the ancient gravediggers to suspect this particular corpse amongst the dozens present. They found that the brick was placed in this specific woman’s mouth several years after she was buried, when a resurgence of plague hit the area. The gravediggers, faced with an influx of new bodies, began exhuming older, pre-existing mass graves to inter the fresh ones.

When they came across a body that seemed much more well-preserved than the others, but still bloated due to the decomposition process, they assumed this was a sign of a fresh feeding. And since seemingly fresh blood was seeping from the face, and a hole was eaten through the burial shroud – as though she’d been chewing it – you can start to see why they were unsettled. So they assumed it was a vampire, and teenagers suddenly had one more way to express their parental angst.

But the bloating they saw was actually little more than the post-mortem build up of gases in the body, and the blood is really a slurry of bodily fluids pushed up through the mouth by decomposing organs. After death, the body also loses fluids and skin, gums, and facial features begin to contort and shrink, which explains the illusion of the sharp teeth and long nails, Finally, the burial shroud was decayed about the mouth due to the higher presence of bacteria there, especially after death. As for the unnerving, ceaseless stare? Well, all right. That one is just plain vampirism. Feel free to panic and start staking everything that looks a little pekid.

That brings up the subject of killing vampires: It’s easy to see where the holy associations-  like crosses and holy water came from – people still turn to religion to combat perceived evil in modern times. And fire… well, fire burns, doesn’t it?

Got a scary thing? Burn with fire. Problem solved!

But then, where did the practice of wooden staking come from? That just seems so bizarrely specific, and yet it’s also a common theme all across the world. This, again, can be explained by the nature of human decomposition. Penetrating the body at an advanced stage of decay, and with a suitably large instrument, would cause the body to “bleed” and deflate as the internal pressures suddenly expelled the dead fluids inside. As the gases escaped the body, they would also produce a groaning, hissing, screaming noise, which could have either sounded like an unearthly death cry or, in some cases, sound quite similar to flatulence.

So, does it take away a little of the magic knowing that ancient vampires were fat, purple nudists in high heels with hobbit feet, who would fart through their mouths when you killed them?
 

 
As stupid as this may seem – misinterpreting all of these normal, natural stages of death as proof of mythical monsters – it’s not like this was limited to ancient times. In 2005, Romanian villagers were prosecuted for mutilating a corpse, which they explained to the authorities was the body of a relative recently passed. Sickness, ill fortune, and disease plagued the family immediately after their uncle died, and so they assumed it was the evildoing of a dark spirit. Operating under this belief, they dug him up, staked him with a pitchfork, and pulled out his heart. Then, because if something is worth doing, it’s worth insanely overdoing, they also burned the heart and mixed the ashes into some Peppermint Schnappes…which they all drank! Hey, listen: if you’re going to lose a relative, be arrested for human vandalism, and get cursed by a demon, the least you could do is get fucked up on his monsterjuice. When asked why, exactly, they were so convinced their uncle was a vampire, the family cited some familiar reasoning: He was bloated and discolored, yet looked plump and recently fed. His teeth and nails were long, and there was blood about his mouth. When they staked him, he moaned, screamed, and twitched – as though alive. That’s when they knew for sure.

So clearly, while the vampire myth may have evolved so drastically as to be all but unrecognizable from its origins, apparently human stupidity has not. We’re all still falling for the same trick, 500 years later. But we are gettin’ fucked up on vampires now, and that’s a new twist: Nobody from ancient times can say they were taking Dracula shots, can they? I guess humanity has made some progress, after all.
 

Read more from Robert at his own site, I Fight Robots