October 28, 1995
Web posted at: 10:15 a.m. EDT
From Entertainment Correspondent Mark Scheerer
NEW YORK (CNN) -- Just in time for Halloween, a vampire movie is hitting the big screen. This one stars Eddie Murphy as the bloodsucker. Murphy hooked up with his hero, director Wes Craven, to make "Vampire In Brooklyn." (755K QuickTime movie)
It's not too hard to figure out the film's bloody premise. "It's self-explanatory, because Brooklynites are unique, as are vampires," says Murphy, "and the two coming together, something funny is going to happen."
Craven wanted to give Murphy a different look, one that involved colored contact lenses and a device that gives him fangs. "They had some thing rigged where it goes over my teeth, and I bite the back of my jaws and it makes the teeth come down," Murphy says.
Yet another telling of the "undead" story underscores the undying popularity of vampire lore. "It doesn't hurt that you turn on the daytime chat shows every now and then and there's some guy who's claiming he's a vampire," Murphy says.
"That's just as bad as a real vampire -- a guy that thinks he's a vampire. A bite is a bite," Murphy says, laughing.
When renowned horror film director Wes Craven heard Murphy had come up with a vampiric movie idea, he met with the film star. "Murphy immediately started going into characters from my films. He was doing 'Freddie' and other characters," says Craven. "It turned out he was a big horror fan, so we really hit it off."
Doing characters, of course, is one of the things Murphy does best. He plays a preacher and an Italian thug in "Vampire In Brooklyn."
"When you're doing 'Saturday Night Live,' you can come up with a new character every week. I'm four people in 'Vampire' and eight people in 'Nutty Professor,'" Murphy says. "It's a drag to do, but when you see it, it's fun."
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