Vampire

This is the new home of Midnight Sun. The move to a new URL is part of a newsroom-wide switch to a new publishing system. Baltimore Diner has already done it, and so has Z on TV . Eventually, all of the paper's blogs will upgrade as well.  Movable Type was a perfectly good platform, but not the dinosaur one we've been using, which was like blogging with a typewriter. But the benefits of switching over will be imperceptible to readers. For readers, the most obvious change will be the blog's layout, which will be cleaner and more uniform.

Forget the reigning image of Count Dracula as upscale lounge lizard. Cast off the dominant picture of homegrown vampires as sex-crazed or love-struck, mixed-up kids. F.W. Murnau's "Nosferatu" (1922) uses a fanged, hypnotic demon to throw a spell that follows you home from the theater and stays with you for days — and nights — on end. It's the evil-fairy godfather of all great horror movies. Seeing it on the AFI Silver's big screen at 7 p.m. and 9:30 p.m. Friday, with a live score by D.C.'s Silent Orchestra, is an experience that connoisseurs of the creepy should not pass up. They will savor every Transylvanian minute — and every minute set in the fictional town of Wisbourg, Germany, too. (If you can't make it, Kino has released the film in a splendid two-disc DVD edition.

Beach House is growing up. Before this year, the four-year-old atmospheric pop duo from this area mainly played clubs and small festivals. Lead singer Victoria Legrand said the largest gig to date was a 1,400-person crowd at Webster Hall in New York City. There were no cushy riders, decked-out tour buses or security to keep drunken fans away. Sometimes crazy things happened after shows, as you might expect if you're an indie band with no handlers. "Crazy things like when you are in France and someone who looks like [singer]

When Vampire Weekend set out to record its second album, "Contra," the whole process was a whirlwind. After 18 months of touring, the popular indie rock band had two weeks off and set about recording the follow-up to its acclaimed 2008 self-titled debut, according to bassist Chris Baio. "Contra" came out in January and was warmly received by critics. On Saturday, Vampire Weekend headlines at Merriweather Post Pavilion . Now, with the band talking about a third effort, members want to budget more time for writing and recording — and for themselves, Baio said.

Everything that's good about "Daybreakers" bursts forth in the scene wherein a hematologist played by Ethan Hawke undertakes an experiment and injects a not-quite-FDA-approved synthetic liquid into the veins of a fellow vampire, under the watchful eye of a pharmaceutical magnate played by Sam Neill. From the scene's relative placement early in the story, and the familiarity of its premise, it's clear the operation will fail in the most spectacular way possible. The setup goes back a lot further than "Independence Day" or "The Thing" (either version)

The Informant! *** With any luck, before he reaches 40, Matt Damon will be recognized, as Edward Norton once put it, as "just a stone-cold good actor.... incredibly agile." He pulls off a brave comic change of pace in this Steven Soderbergh picture about a quirky whistle-blower. He anchors the movie with his unpredictable physical portrait of a man at odds with himself and makes it swing with his voice-over narration, full of quirky non sequiturs and Freudian slips. It's a brave performance, and a hoot.

Would-be vampires and would-be girlfriends of vampires will be out in force tonight, as dozens of Baltimore-area retailers will host parties celebrating the midnight release of Twilight on DVD. Based on a best-selling book series by Stephenie Meyer, Twilight chronicles the unlikely (and intensely melodramatic) love affair between a loner teenage girl (Kristen Stewart) and an immortal vampire (Robert Pattinson). The books have sold millions of copies, mostly to pre-teen girls, and the 2008 movie has pulled in more than $190 million at the U.S. box office.

You want your first crush to last" could have been the theme song for Twilight, the movie version of Stephenie Meyer's mammoth best-seller about a high school junior, Bella Swan (Kristen Stewart), who moves from her mother's place in arid Phoenix to her dad's place in the dank, small town of Forks, Wash., where she is smitten with her biology desk-mate, Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson). He's part of a clan of gorgeous, super-pallid high-schoolers adopted by the town's respected, super-pallid physician, Dr. Carlisle Cullen (Peter Facinelli)

The U.S. is about to become one big Twilight zone. That is, if it isn't already. With more than 8.5 million copies sold in this country - and 17 million worldwide - Stephenie Meyer's four-volume tale of vampire love among the high-school set is already a bona fide cultural force, especially among the young girls who hang on its every word. But tonight, with the midnight premiere in select theaters of Twilight, based on the first book of the series, the mania may really go big time. "It's just a big mixture of all this drama and romance," said 12-year-old Leia Cunningham, a student at Hereford Middle School who was one of about 50 teen and preteen girls attending a movie prerelease party Saturday at Borders Books in Timonium.

If you walked into the Swedish horror movie Let the Right One In midway through, you might see the 12-year-old boy hero chastely embrace a girl his own age and think, "How sweet." When she asks him if he'd love her if she weren't a girl, you might think, "How interesting," then under your breath start muttering, "Ah, youth. Ah, Sweden. Ah, nuts." But she isn't a girl; she's a vampire. And this boy is not just experiencing a surging crush but a life-defining bond. Most contemporary horror films derive shocks from mere torture.