First of all, Virgin-Atlantic Airlines gets a gold star in my book. Having flown quite a bit over the past six months, I’ve been reminded on just how stingy airlines can be, making even a brief flight a test of endurance. They are very generous with full body scanners and less so with basic human services, such as food, entertainment choices on long flights, and a sense that you’re doing anything other than propping up a flailing, deregulated industry. Virgin-Atlantic demonstrated that air time need not be torturous. So, with many choices of movie to watch, on Good Friday, I decided on one of my favorite genres of religious movie—the vampire flick.

I have been anticipating Dark Shadows for well over a year now, but I had heard nothing about Fright Night. Really, in many ways Fright Night was an unremarkable vampire movie, but then again, watching on a plane is maybe not the place where one would expect the gothic mood required for full enjoyment. Nevertheless, the full range of religious cures of vampires was present with one notable exception: crucifixes. Crosses abounded, but here on Good Friday I saw no corpi. There was holy water, so clearly it wasn’t purely Protestant sympathies that led to the abandonment of crucifixes in the movie. In any case, crosses were only a minor deterrent in this scenario. What finally dispatched the chief vampire in this case was a traditional wooden stake. Which, somehow reminds me of typical airplane food on most airlines.

Driving around a secular London dressed in religious garb, St. Paul’s Cathedral lit splendidly in the night, was a reminder of the hold Christianity still has on even non-religious culture. It was kind of like the corpus-less crucifix in the movie. The inspiration behind the great gothic stylings of Big Ben and Parliament arise from their long association with Christian culture. On the streets people were milling about London late in the evening, not apparently fresh from church, standing in the shadow of Westminster Abbey and happily snapping photos. This may be a montage of disparate images colliding in my jet-lagged mind, but somehow virgins, vampires, crucifixes, and churches seem to fit naturally together.