The horror movie behind Vampire Weekend’s ‘Walcott’
Art inspires art, and cinema has proven to be an endless muse to songwriters. From iconic soundtracks like Simon and Garfunkel’s work for The Graduate to odes to the art itself like Weyes Blood’s ‘Movies’, countless songs have been written to and inspired by cinema. Vampire Weekend’s entry into this catalogue of movie-loving musicians spawned from a film made by their frontman.
Before Vampire Weekend became a band name, it was a short film made by Ezra Koenig. Borrowing from the vampiric tale of Joel Schumacher’s The Lost Boys, the songwriter set out to create his own horror movie. Starring Jason Patric and Corey Haim, the original film followed a pair of brothers who discover the blood-sucking underbelly of a Californian town.
In college, Koenig adopted this tale but relocated it to Cape Cod, Massachusetts. The father of his protagonist, Walcott, is killed by vampires, leading him on a mission to Cape Cod in order to tell the mayor of their presence in the area. The film was abandoned and forgotten not long after it was started, only to be rediscovered just before the conception of Vampire Weekend, the band.
“For two days he filmed this movie called Vampire Weekend about this guy named Walcott whose dad gets killed by vampires,” bassist Chris Baio explained to artistdirect, “And he travels up to Cape Cod to warn the mayor of Cape Cod that vampires are attacking the country. He only made it for two days, and then sort of forgot about it for a while.”
It was several years before it was rediscovered and reused. “And, then, two-and-a-half years later, during his senior year, he sort of unearthed the footage for it, and made it into a two minute trailer,” Baio explained. According to the bassist, this was only around a month before the band formed.
“So when the band came together, we sort of took it and not over-think it,” he concluded, “That, and the song ‘Walcott’ are the only connection to that movie.” Featuring on their debut record, ‘Walcott’ doesn’t seem gothic or vampiric on first listen. It opens with jubilant keys and percussion, but its lyrics take a darker turn.
“Walcott, don’t you know that it’s insane? Don’t you want to get out of Cape Cod, out of Cape Cod tonight?” the frontman sings, and it’s clear to picture the short film it might have accompanied. Between descriptions of evil feasting on human lives and urges to take flight, it tells that same abandoned story from years before.
