I tried to make a little film about a woman who was writing a screenplay about her vampire lover. He was not a murderous evil creature, but the producer was. Peril ensued, but good was triumphant.
I have long since thrown away the wreckage.
But I never throw away an idea. Many years later I redid it as a novella, with a better storyline, more characters, and a backstory. And part of the backstory was that my heroine was once a script editor on a very unsuccessful vampire movie called “Beneath The Mausoleum”. An actress fails to appear, so she’s drafted to play the role of a victim.
She considers the movie an embarrassment, her vampire friends consider it hilarious.
The character’s name was Diane and the actress who played her in the student movie was a very nice person as well as ungodly beautiful. Unfortunately, just as I was about to suggest undying love and happiness she told me she was taking a modeling job in another country and was leaving forever.
Two weeks later I saw a picture of her in an ad for a phone sex line. She was wearing nothing but a strategicly placed notice that I could “call 24 hours”, and she had been living with her parents.
Well, I knew that Poser would come out eventually, so I kept the picture, and when I got Poser 4 the first character I made was a recreation of her.
Then, doing Fun At The Beach, the time came to kidnap and rape Diane, and I found I couldn’t do it. She was too real for me.
I finessed it, having Olivia order her put in a crate and shipped away, but I had a big problem; I couldn’t use my favorite character!
Slaves Of The Vampire was my answer. Slaves is an outright comedy. Diane and her roommate Ellie (who was also a character in the novella, but not based on a real person) have a loving relationship sharing a boyfriend named Peter. They engage in vampire/rape fantasies, totally and hopefully hilariously oblivious to the fact that they are surrounded by real vampire rapists.
By the way, this is Ellie:
Thankfully, I really like Slaves. I like the comedy, I like having some people in my world with happy lives and positive relationships, and I like how I can not only use my favorite character, but feature her. Frankly, I wouldn’t be doing Duke Of Hell, at least not for long, if I couldn’t do more than a neverending parade of monster rapes, and it’s thanks to Diane and Ellie for showing me I could.
(Yes, I know Diane is raped in Beneath the Mausoleum, but that’s only in Paul Sacul’s imagination. Funny how that works.)
