Director: Oz Rodriguez
Cast: Jaden Michael, Gerald W. Jones, III, Gregory Diaz, IV, Sarah Gadon
Have I Seen it Before: Never. Had it not been for Horror Hangover, on which I will guesting here presently, the film likely would have flown right under my radar.
Did I Like It: First of all, if Jaden Michael isn’t on the short list for an eventual live-action interpretation of Miles Morales, or if Marvel takes too long so that he would age out of the role, then there isn’t really any justice in this world.
There isn’t any justice in this world, is there?
I can’t readily think of a film which presents a vampire tale with the same perfect blend of irreverence and actual genre acumen which Edgar Wright brought to Shaun of the Dead (2004), or even Mel Brooks did for the classic Universal Frankenstein films in Young Frankenstein (1974).
There is nothing to not love in the film, so much so that it could have rested on the laurels of its cast and care with vampires to get the job done. However, the filmmakers have managed to also pull off the impossible, and add a new layer to the vampire mythos, a concept so desiccated that if you had told me there was anything new under the sun*, I would have scoffed and probably made a point not to catch the film at all.
One of the themes of the original novel, Dracula (and to a lesser extent, cinematic interpretations of that story including Nosferatu (1922), Dracula (1931), and Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1992)) was how the Count’s manipulation of real estate was just as insidious as any of his hematophagy, as his foreign influence on the Western world was a specter in and of itself. Here, this idea is inverted and the gentrification of close-knit neighborhoods is seen as the first step of true horror. It’s such a simple idea, I can’t imagine the filmmakers didn’t sit around wondering if it hadn’t been already done before.
*Sometimes you just have to accept the inevitable word choice that’s coming straight at you. Sometimes you can fight that inevitability. This was definitely one of the first type.