Book vs. Movie: The Vampire's Assistant
By Russ Bickerstaff
October 28, 2009
BoxOfficeProphets.com
And in this corner: the Movie. A 112-year-old kid born in France to a guy named Lumiere and raised primarily in Hollywood by his uncle Charlie "the Tramp" Chaplin. This young upstart has quickly made a huge impact on society, rapidly becoming the most financially lucrative form of storytelling in the modern world.
Both square off in the ring again as Box Office Prophets presents another round of Book vs. Movie
Cirque du Freak: The Vampire's Assistant
Somewhere between attempts at adult novels in 2000, author Darren O'Shaughnessy had his first big hit: a juvenile vampire novel about a character named after him who became caught-up in a world of vampires. The children's novel became a best seller, quickly growing into an internationally best-selling series. Always looking for more vampire movies to feed an ever-growing modern vampire film genre, Hollywood seized on the success. With the 12th and final book in the series having been published a few years ago, a film adaptation of the first three books is being brought to the screen courtesy of Paul Weitz (American Pie, About A Boy) and Universal Pictures. The film stars John C. Reilly, Salma Hayek and Willem Dafoe. If successful, the film could theoretically be the first in a four-part series adapting all 12 novels. Is it worth it? And how does the film compare with the book?
The Book
The first three novels in the Cirque du Freak series open as a standard story about a school boy named Darren who is fascinated with spiders. We see Darren going through his daily life including class, schoolmates and parents. Shan's life begins to change quite dramatically thanks to a casual fascination with a flyer a friend of his has for a traveling freak circus coming to town. Darren and his friend make it out to the show - something of an idealized and fantastical kiddie fiction treatment of the old circus freak shows that largely died out in the mid-20th century.
Darren's friend recognizes a spider charmer named Mr. Crepsley from a book he has about vampirism and asks him if he could join Crepsley as his assistant. Reluctant at fist, Crepsley tastes the boy's blood only to find him unpalatable (evidently in the world of the books, a person's nature can be tasted in his or her blood. Darren is still fascinated by Crepsley's spider and actually manages to get up enough courage to steal it from the Cirque du Freak. Time passes and the show has moved on to other towns, giving Darren a feeling that he had gotten away with the theft. Everything is fine until Shan's friend gets bit by the spider, prompting Shan to ask Crepsley for an antidote. Crepsley will only give the antidote if Shan agrees to be turned into a "half-vampire" in order to become his assistant. Though he does not like the idea of traveling with the vampire, Shan agrees to become a half-vampire, thus launching the story into a long and winding episodic plot involving a young boy who must abandon his parents in order to save his friend.
O'Shaughnessy's biggest achievement here is creating a believable story with elements of fantasy that expresses an understanding of moral ambiguity. At first, Shan refuses to take blood from humans even though he would not need to kill them in order to do so, but he slowly comes to the realization that he must do so in order to survive and ultimately help protect them from more vicious things that walk the night. At one point, Shan encounters a vegetarian - someone who would seem to have the moral high ground over him until it becomes clear that there are other aspects of his personality that aren't as nice. Nearly every person that Shan encounters presents some other kind of moral riddle that exposes the reader to a profound amount of moral complexity.
The problem is that the story itself really isn't all that interesting. Certain groups have praised this book as being really good for middle school kids, but I don't remember having much problem with adult novels by the likes of Anne Rice and Bram Stoker when I was that age. And the maturity level of Darren and his friends prior to the whole vampire thing seems much more closely aligned with kids in fourth or fifth grade. Anyone older than that is going to be bored by the tone of the narrative. For the most part, the plot is nothing that hasn't been seen in this genre before and O'Shaughnessy seems to be writing down to his audience a bit. The story doesn't really start getting interesting until the end of the second book, by which time most older readers would have already lost interest. For a novel with a lot going on in it, there really isn't much of interest through the 450-some pages of the first three books.
The Movie
Given his love of horror films and cinematic darkness, The Vampire's Assistant would have been the perfect project for Tim Burton circa 1987 or so , but Burton and Hollywood have come a long way since the late ‘80s and instead we get Paul Weitz - someone who has had more experience with interpersonal drama than fantastic visuals and eerie moods. Weitz also was one of two people credited with adapting the books for the screen, which allows him to focus the film on his own strengths as a director.
Right away, it becomes apparent that the milieu of the book has been changed. Instead of the interesting and ambiguous feel of a residential UK, the film is set pretty solidly in the US. We have a considerably older high school-aged Darren Shan somewhat competently played by 17-year old Chris Massoglia. This changes things considerably. The books have a much younger kid only beginning to enter adolescence and contend with all the emotional difficulties of that while simultaneously dealing with all the problems that go along with being a vampire. With the book's adolescence-as-vampirism thing stripped from the story, it comes across as much more of a traditional vampire story compete with al the standard heroes and villains populating a dark world of shadows just beyond the normal plane of human consciousness. Yawn. There isn't even really much exploration of moral ambiguity, which was such a pleasure to see in the books and probably the only genuinely novel thing about them.
The script by Weitz and screenwriter Brian Helgeland (A Knight's Tale, Mystic River) seems like an attempt to distill elements not only of the first three books, but the first two trilogies in the series. The idea, I guess, would be to make the entire series into a single trilogy of movies. With the film's opening week well behind it, it's not hard to figure out the fate of this idea. And seeing as how it's a really good chance that this film isn't going to break even at the box office, it's not hard to figure out what the book had that the film lacked beyond the delicious little bits of moral ambiguity that makes it of passing interest to older readers.
The appeal of the books rests in a very episodic plot that sees the title character moving slowly towards the vampire world. In the film, we see a vaguely interested Massoglia and best friend Steve (Josh Hutcherson) finding a flyer for a freak show and promptly attending it without any reservations. The freak show itself is quite interesting, as are the freaks. Weitz plays brilliantly to his strengths with interpersonal drama and we see a group of very real, very interesting people that have physical things separating them from the rest of the world. The human element of the freak show doesn't have the kind of wildly fantastic appeal that we find in other contemporary cinematic depictions, or the delicate balance we see in Tim Burton's Big Fish. Still, it IS a lot of fun to see Salma Hayek as a precognitive bearded woman, Jane Krakowski as a woman with limitlessly regenerating limbs and so on. Weitz makes it all seem so practical without even the slightest hint of fantasy, which is successful as a film element, but not terribly successful as an adaptation of the book.
The story itself quickly sweeps through various story elements. John C. Reilly makes for an interesting Larden Crepsley and he makes for a pretty interesting dark hero, but we never really see his personality fully explored in a film that tries to throw too many elements into the mix without much depth. The film ends up looking terribly flat onscreen. The one place where it excels beyond the book is in the CGI artists' portrayal of Crepsely's spider Madame Octa. She's got plenty of personality here and actually comes across with much more charm than her depiction in the book. She races down a high school hallway tugging fruitlessly at windows in an attempt to escape and for a brief moment we feel something's been added to the story. Octa's brief appearances in the film isn't really worth the ticket price, though...even on matinee.
The Verdict
While the series of books is far from flawless, even as a series of books for grade school kids on their way to junior high school, it's not without its charm and there's a definite appeal to the storyline. The film does have its moments and makes certain elements of the book come alive on the screen, but it consistently fails to make much of an impression beyond those details. And without some underlying bit of novelty to make the film original, it lacks the spark of creativity that would significantly separate it from a host of other vampire movies that have been released in the long history of horror cinema.