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Friday March 29th 2024

Vampires (John Carpenter's Vampires) | 1998

Vampires filming location: Plaza Hotel, Las Vegas, New Mexico
Vampires filming location: Montoya and Katrina hole up: Plaza Hotel, Las Vegas, New Mexico | Photograph: Wikimedia / KeanoManu

John Carpenter's southwest vampires are closer to the bloodsucking family of Kathryn Bigelow's Near Dark than the Eastern European nobility of Hammer films.

The movie is shot around the red deserts of Santa Fe, New Mexico.

The 'Sun God Motel'was a set built around the existing sign of a motel that had burned down several years before.

Slayer Montoya (Daniel Baldwin) and on-the-change vamp victim Katrina (Sheryl Lee) hole up at the Plaza Hotel, 230 Plaza, Las Vegas, east of Santa Fe.

The hotel already has a footnotein film history. In 1913, it had been the HQ of Romaine Fielding's Lubin Film Company, and later became home to silent Western star Tom Mix, who made many of his movies in the Las Vegas area, occasionally using the Plaza as a location.

The Plaza Hotel has been been featured more recently in the Coen Bros 2007 No Country for Old Men, and this Las Vegas (as opposed to the other one) is seen in Easy Rider.

The fictitious town of 'Santiago' is Cerrillos, a small desert town on I-14 between Santa Fe and Albuquerque, previously used in Young Guns.