This is one of the two vampire movies I actually like. (The other is this big slice of coded gay panic.) It largely got lost in the shuffle when it was released, probably partly because it was preceded in theaters by the only sort of okay The Lost Boys, and the fore-runners of the Twi-hards were too busy swooning over Jason Patric, Kiefer Southerland and the Coreys to appreciate the brooding intensity of Adrian Pasdar or the under-rated charms of Bill Paxton.
A big part of why the film works for me is that it resists the trends of that era regarding the “classic” monster types. Most monster movies were going for tongue in cheek or dark comedy, reserving real “scares” for the slasher genre. And the Anne Rice-ification of the vampire as tragic romantic figure was coming into full bloom as well. Kathryn Bigelow resists that. The vampires in her film are unrepentant murderers, inhuman monsters, something sickeningly unnatural. And being in that state has warped their minds in indescribable ways. They’re not romantic, they’re not tragic. They’re just wrong. They’re so wrong, there isn’t really a word for them. The word “vampire” never occurs in the film. There’s no garlic or crosses, no niceties about being invited in.
Which is why it’s sort of interesting that so much of the film revolves around adolescent ideas of romance. Farm boy Caleb meets a mysterious girl, Mae, who speaks in cryptic riddles before biting him on the neck and running away. The next thing he knows, he’s been abducted by her “family” who debate how to kill him before realizing that he’s “turned” and is one of them now, whether they like it or not. The next few days of Caleb’s life alternate between falling deeper into love with Mae and trying to somehow survive the horrific violence and carnage her family revels in, before a chance encounter between Homer, the eldest vampire ironically trapped in the body of a pre-adolescent boy, and Caleb’s sister provides Caleb with a chance to escape and the most plot convenient cure for vampirism ever contrived.
Caleb’s love for Mae is adolescent. It’s your stereotypical “love at first sight” and “Rome & Juliet” type of love, the kind of love that only exists in romance stories about adolescents. The conflict this creates in Mae’s family is adolescent as well. Homer “turned” Mae, and is jealous that Caleb is essentially stealing her from him, and the other members essentially bully Caleb in a, well, dickish sort of way. The turning point of the film is Homer’s entirely bizarre and sudden infatuation with Caleb’s sister, which seems motivated more as a means of getting back at Mae than an actual obsession.
In a larger sense the world of the vampires is one of an eternally arrested adolescence. While there is some indication that most of them were probably “bad” people before joining the ranks of the undead, their current motives are as much boredom as anything else. They need to drink blood, yes, but the savagery and ways in which they “play” with their food are borne out of having lived so long that they’ve seemly devolved to a child-like, amoral state. It’s effective because it makes good use of the lack of supernatural overtones to their vampiric state. When a vampire is overtly supernatural, it’s easy to accept that they’re evil just because they’re evil. Here, were care has been taken to make sure that the vampires are as “natural” and “real” as possible, their evil becomes slightly banal and pathetic. Again, appropriate to the tone of a vampire being something wrong and despicable, that line between contempt and pity being thin.
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