Queen Of The Damned Review (2002)

From the time I was just a kid, vampires have held a special spot in my little dark heart. I went dressed as a blood sucker many times for Halloween, reusing the costumes for dress-up any chance I got. My first Monster High doll was Draculaura, and I still check the toy aisle to visit those ghouls sometimes. I even discovered a spell on YouTube that was supposed to turn you into a vampire when I was about eight years old — and you bet your patootie I repeated that thing every single night for months. I grew up in a very monster-friendly household — my dad being the frontman of a little horror punk band called The Jackalopes and my mom being an avid reader of many books, but namely Anne Rice. So maybe it was inevitable that one of my favorite and most formative childhood movies would be Queen of the Damned.

Say what you will about the film, but you can’t deny the visuals — and you certainly can’t deny the soundtrack. Whenever I hear “System” or “Forsaken,” I’m instantly transported back to sitting on the front porch of my childhood home, playing Barbies with the girl who lived across the street, my mom’s Queen of the Damned CD spinning in my boombox somewhere behind us. I probably had no business watching that movie so young, but to this day it remains a favorite.

I’m not going to spoil the whole movie if you’ve not seen it, but trust me — if you like gorgeous vampires, music, blood, and/or Jonathan Davis (he wrote five of the songs on the soundtrack, and in my opinion they’re the best ones on there), you’ll love this movie. I mean, come on — it basically has everything! It even has a death scandal: Aaliyah, the young singer and actress who played Akasha, the queen of the vampires, was killed in a plane crash caused by a drunk pilot just after she finished filming the movie. She was only twenty-two years old. There are many rumors and theories about the “true” story behind the crash, but I’ll let you go down that rabbit hole yourself.

I could sit and summarize the whole movie for you, but I suggest you just go watch it — or at least listen to the soundtrack and pretend you’re a sparkly vampire rockstar in leather pants for a minute or two to cleanse the soul. That’s what I’ll be doing later, at least.