It’s hard to turn on the television or pass by a multiplex these days without seeing an ad for a show or movie featuring vampires. There must be something about vampires that has some fundamental and relatively broad appeal. Although vampires have different personalities and, for lack of a better term, superpowers in their various TV and movie incarnations, while watching them in Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant I recognized a trait that all the vamps share. They are all a combination of great power and great vulnerability. They can fly around, have great strength, and climb walls like Spiderman, but spill some garlic sauce or a dash of sunlight on them and they crumble pathetically. Not to mention their famously picky dietary requirements. Perhaps it is this combination that appeals. Like Superman, they have their Kryptonite.
The Vampire’s Assistant is based on the first three novels in the twelve-book Cirque du Freak series by Darren Shan, aimed at teenagers. The movie is also clearly aimed at teens and young adults: a teenager embraces his inner freak and finds a community of fellow freaks. No longer is he a misfit. Who has not felt that painful feeling of differentness and isolation while passing through adolescence? Chris Massoglia plays Darren Shan (yes, it’s a bit odd), an obedient straight-A student with doting and naive parents and a cute younger sister. His best friend, for unknown reasons, is a disobedient, lying psychopath named Steve (Josh Hutcherson). Darren, feeling the oppressive weight of a predestined life of college, work, and family, sneaks out of his house to see the only performance of the mysterious Cirque du Freak with Steve at an old abandoned theater. There, he and Steve become embroiled with the vampire Crepsley (John C. Reilly), and his large, colorful spider.
Disclosure: my brother was the First Assistant Director on this movie. And one can tell that the set was managed brilliantly and efficiently. As for the freaks, they are a combination of mild (Mr. Tall, who is, and Mr. Tiny, who isn’t) and wild (Alexander Ribs, who has none, and Rhamus Twobellies, who has, well, two bellies). They were created by a combination of prosthetics and makeup for the less dramatically afflicted, and CGI (computer generated images) for others, such as Corma Limbs (Jane Krakowski) who can have an arm ripped off and grow it back before your eyes, and Madame Truska (Salma Hayek) who grows a healthy beard in seconds. The movie should be a serious contender for an Oscar nomination for Makeup: so convincing was the enormous Mr. Tiny’s fat suit and fat-face makeup that not only did I assume the actor, Michael Cerveris, was enormous, but the First A.D. didn’t recognize the un-made-up actor after seeing him only as Mr. Tiny for several weeks.
In order to save Steve, Darren makes a pact with Crepsley that makes him a vampire, or half of a vampire. It’s not entirely clear. This entangles him in a brewing battle of vampire clans (the Vampaneze and the Mofreakins?) in which he and Steve are on opposite sides. Destiny figures heavily in Cirque. Mr. Tiny alternately appears to be orchestrating vampire warfare and acting as a fascinated spectator to events he has seen unfold in a magical book. For his part, Darren has trouble accepting his new destiny as an immortal blood-drinker after having escaped his previous fate of middle-class mediocrity. Steve, on the other hand, embraces his bad-guy fate. Like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Vampire’s Assistant feels like the first movie in a series. Its first goal is to establish the antagonists in a clash between good and evil that will span multiple dimensions and, presumably, multiple film installments. The plot here is aimed at getting Darren in the camp of the good vampires and Steve under the wings of the evil ones. Both boys felt like misfits in their normal lives and feel at home in their new freakish lives. For those who dream of a different, more exotic life, (and what teenager hasn’t?), this movie and the Cirque du Freak books hold an obvious appeal.