The Fourth of July has come and gone, which means it’s officially spooky season. (Because we said so. We do make the rules.) It’s hotter than Hell’s half acre outside, so how do we get into the Halloween mood? Well, do you like vampire movies from the 80s? Movies where the lead female character is incredibly sexy and the lead male character is awkward and nerdy? How about vampire lore that makes zero sense? What about teenage boys who only ever think and talk about sex? Can you look past some fairly rampant homophobia, misogyny, a sprinkling of transphobia, and a lot of other 1980s-mindset tropes and triggers? Well, strap in, tiger, because we are doing a deep-dive into one of my favorite1 Halloween movies, Once Bitten.
Warning: Spoilers ahead.
Once Bitten is one of Jim Carrey’s first movies. (I mistakenly thought it was his very first movie, so apologies if you ever heard me say that. To be fair, it’s his fourth movie, and two of those four were made-for-TV movies, and the other one has a 2.8 star rating on IMDB, so….) The plot focuses on Mark (Carrey), a high school student in Southern California, who just wants his long-term girlfriend, Robin (Karen Kopins), to put out already because teenage boys are one thing and one thing only: horny. This is an idea so ubiquitous you aren’t even questioning it, are you? Good, keep that up. You’re going to need to suspend your disbelief heavily for this movie.
Mark (who drives an ice cream truck even when he’s not working in said ice cream truck) and his two male best friends go to a bar in LA to try and score some chicks. Little do they know that they’ll actually run into the Countess, a centuries-old vampire who decides she’s going to turn little virginal Mark into a bloodsucking nightmare.
The Countess is played by Lauren Hutton, who looks, and I cannot stress this enough, absolutely incredible in every single scene. I would let her turn me into anything she wanted. (Yes, this is another movie that made me gay.)
She lures Mark back to her extremely “modern”2 1980s mansion somewhere outside of LA, I guess, and here’s where things start to get a little weird. First, some background: when we meet the Countess, she’s awoken by her extremely gay assistant/familiar, Sebastian (Cleavon Little). He brings her bottled blood, which she drinks while bemoaning the lack of virgin blood because everybody was just fuckin’ all the time in 1985. Here, we learn that she needs to drink the blood of a virgin three times before Halloween, and time is running out.
If you’re thinking, “I’ve never heard vampire lore that specific and strange before.” Take a number! There’s all kinds of lore about how/why vampires are made, what they look like, how they can behave, etc., and that’s all well and good. Debate is healthy! But I think we can all agree that the most common theory is that a vampire has to drink some of your blood (usually via biting your neck with their sharp fangs), and in exchange, they put some of their own blood into you, either via the puncture wounds or putting it into your mouth. Then, presto change-o, you’re a vampire! Gross, but I can kind of understand the logic since it’s all blood-based. There’s also the version where just being bitten but not fully drained by a vampire can cause the bitten person to become a vampire. Ok! Sure! I guess it’s spread like mono.
None of that is the case in Once Bitten, in spite of its very name and custom theme song, for Mark has to be bitten not once, not twice, but three times in order to become a full-on vampire and in order for the vampire … magic3 to work on the Countess. Not only that, she has to take the blood from the femoral artery, right near Mark’s penis, which is probably severely chapped from all the jerking off he must do since his girlfriend won’t put out.
You could, I suppose, make the case that the title and the song written for the film are about how, once bitten, you start transforming into a kind of “vampire light,” and your life changes forever.
The song also talks about singing in the rain, which is an entirely different movie. But sure.
The first time the Countess bites Mark, back at her mansion, it appears he’s about to get the blowjob of his dreams when she carefully takes his pants off. Instead, he cries out in pain and passes out. (Another lie from the theme song, which promises, “You won’t feel no pain, boy.”) When he wakes up, the Countess makes it seem as if they did at least fool around, and my guess is he probably had an orgasm anyway because of the nonstop erections 18-year-old boys have all the time. Mark heads home, back to high school and his girlfriend, who presumably will never find out he kind of cheated on her, or at least, that he thinks he did.
Mark’s second near-the-penis bite happens while he is visiting Robin at the clothing store where she works. The Countess appears out of nowhere, doesn’t have a reflection in the fitting room mirror, and proceeds to snap the buttons off of Mark’s clothes until she finally gets a bite of his femoral artery. No one notices any of this. It was the 80s.
Robin finds him passed out in the fitting room with his pants around his ankles (thankfully with boxers still on, we don’t need a peek at Jim Carrey’s 23-year-old dick). Over the next few days, Mark starts acting … strange. He’s up all night and sleeping most of the day. When he does sleep, he has the most intense and strange dreams wherein he is obviously turning into a vampire, but he doesn’t seem to understand that. He grows paler and starts wearing all black. He even walks into the kitchen where his mom has drained the blood from a steak into a glass for some reason (?!), and he drinks it down without a second thought. Mark even freaks himself out when some kids come up to his ice cream truck and, in the midst of gathering their sweet treats, he turns back and hisses at them, causing them to scream and run away.
After being reluctantly dragged to a Halloween dance with Robin (he’s only part vampire now, but absolutely full goth and goths don’t go to school dances), there’s a confrontation between Mark, Robin, and the Countess that results in the best dance battle of all time, IMHO. Totally normal for a teenage girl to strip down to her underwear in front of her entire school to fight the older woman who wants to steal her man using only the power of dance and a song that spells out everything that’s happening. Subtlety is for losers.
The Countess also seems to have some power that allows her to possess Mark, but Robin wins the dance off and keeps her man … for now. But as they leave, Mark notices that his reflection in the mirror is gone, and both he and Robin realize that he is becoming a vampire.
Again, this does not square up with any other popular vampire lore I’ve ever heard, minus his missing reflection. Does the Countess have some kind of vampire venom in her teeth that enters Mark’s body when she literally gets her fangs into him? Is the femoral artery the key to slowly turning a mortal into a vampire?
Also, it should be noted: The blood we see the Countess drink out of a wine glass at the beginning of the movie is not necessarily virgin blood. In fact, it seems as if she *can* drink the blood of humans who’ve had sex, but she needs virgin blood by midnight on Halloween this time because reasons. Based on her obsession with Mark, it certainly seems like she will die if she doesn’t drink a virgin’s blood three times before Halloween night.
The final confrontation involves Mark and Robin being chased around the Countess’ mansion. We discover lots of hallways, torches, other vampires the Countess has turned (who don’t seem to have this Halloween problem?), and therefore, lots of coffins. That’s important, because Robin and Mark manage to get ahead of the Countess and her undead swarm (plus Sebastian), only for the swarm to break into one of the coffin rooms and find a coffin rocking and squeaking ominously. Turns out, at the prospect of Mark turning into a vampire, Robin decides it’s finally time, and they’re both no longer virgins by the time the coffin lid opens. The Countess makes a joke about how they couldn’t possibly have had sex in that time … or actually, that they could, but they couldn’t enjoy it. (Sick burn, Countess.)
The clock begins to chime midnight, and it’s time for the Countess to die.
But she doesn’t. She just looks a bit older. Not even her full age, because based on the costumes of most of the vampires around her (and they are absolutely costumes), she is over 120 years old. Lauren Hutton looked incredible for her real age, so they just aged her up a bit. Sure, she looks more like a grandma now, but her body is probably still insane. And she didn’t die! And it’s implied that all that vampire magic that was surging through Mark’s body with his hormones is now gone? Did he ejaculate it into Robin? IS SHE A VAMPIRE NOW?! We’ll never know because the movie ends without answering any of the many questions the viewer almost certainly has.
The point is: Mark got laid. Because in the world of Once Bitten, sex is the cause of, and solution to, all of life’s problems.
- Read: It’s bad, but I’ve been watching it since I was too young to see it, and hardly anyone has heard of it, so it’s my duty to spread the gospel. We do not forgive nor forget the 1980s themes/tropes. ↩︎
- Either you are familiar with this brand of 80s decor, or you are not. We can’t help you. No one can. ↩︎
- We also can’t help you with this one. We don’t know. ↩︎
