Woods as John "Jack" Crow Daniel Baldwin as Tony Montoya Sheryl Lee as Katrina Tim Guinee as Father Adam Guiteau Thomas Ian Griffith as Jan Valek Maximilian Schell as Cardinal Alba Mark Boone Junior as Catlin Gregory Sierra as Father Giovanni Cary-Hiroyuki Tagawa as David Deyo Thomas Rosales, Jr. as Ortega Henry Kingi as Anthony David Rowden as Bambi Clarke Coleman as Davis Chad Stahelski as Male Master Marjean Holden as Female Master Production Largo Entertainment bought the rights to John Steakley's novel in 1992 and planned on turning the film into the studio's next big project. Although Carpenter, alongside Sam Raimi, Peter Jackson, and Ron Underwood, had all been considered, Russell Mulcahy was the first to be the attached director. Dolph Lundgren had been cast in the lead role of Jack Crow, and it was reported that Willem Dafoe was being eyed for a secondary role, likely the role of antagonist vampire Valek. Many proposed drafts for the film existed, including one that took place entirely at The Vatican and featured a vampirized Pope as the villain, and another that took place in a distant high-tech future where vampires are commonplace and vampire hunters are as abundant as police officers. The film was slated for a Summer 1996 release date with a budget of $50–$60 million, but conflicts between Mulcahy and the studio forced him to leave the project before filming began, taking Lundgren with him. The two would immediately begin working on Silent Trigger, which borrowed elements from the unused scripts for Vampires. Shortly after finishing work on Escape from L.A., John Carpenter was thinking about quitting filmmaking because "it stopped being fun". Largo Entertainment approached him with a project called Vampires, an adaptation of the novel of the same name by John Steakley. They gave him two screenplays; one by Don Jakoby and one by Dan Mazur. Carpenter read both screenplays and the novel, and he saw the potential for a film he'd been interested in making. "I went into my office and thought, 'It's going to be set in the American southwest and it's a western – Howard Hawks.'" Carpenter had always wanted to make a film that experimented with mixing the horror and western genres, and felt Vampires was perfect for him. "The story is set up like a western. It's about killers for hire. They're a western cliché. In this movie they’re paid to