In George Romero’s beautifully strange take on the vampire film, he dispenses with all of the gothic cliches in favor of a dreary working-class Pittsburgh setting full of run-down streets, lonely housewives and a yawning spiritual void. Romero also dispenses with the sexy, scary bloodsucker in favor of a shy, incomplete, virginal young man who’s oddly sympathetic at times considering that he’s a serial killer (he’s such a dork that he even kills awkwardly). He dispenses with the usual Van Helsing-style vampire hunter in favor of a rampagingly unpleasant old Bible-thumper who wants to save our anti-hero’s soul before he drives in the stake.
Romero throws out all of the silly old rules about mirrors and crucifixes.
Oh and while he’s at it, he also throws out the vampire, too. May as well.
Or does he?
Martin has a thing for drinking blood fresh from the vein, but he uses razors and syringes full of knock-out juice to get it. There’s nothing supernatural about him. He’s too much of a clueless kid to be centuries old. Also, he doesn’t need blood to survive. It’s not his sustenance; it’s a kink.
Meanwhile, his decrepit old uncle, his mind fogged with superstition, somehow knows about this (while the law doesn’t) and he’s pegged Martin as a true blue Nosferatu.
Then there are the quick black-and-white flashblacks of Martin doing his thing in low-budget depictions of the Bram Stoker days, full of candelabras and blatantly fake fog-machine atmosphere. The flashbacks look like student films. They could be real and they could just as likely be a fantasy of either Martin or his uncle, both of whom are insane.
Me, I take the view that Martin isn’t a vampire. Serial killers are often driven by some sort of purpose. Some sort of command from on high. A mission to snuff out a particular kind of person. A feeling that they’re doing the world a favor. A revenge act on the world in return for their own horrific pasts.
And if you look at Martin as a disturbed soul who’s come to identify as a vampire, even though he isn’t, the pieces mostly fall into place. He’s a loner who can’t open up to anybody. The only time he speaks freely is as an anonymous caller on a late night local radio show who treats his psychosis as a gag (Martin keeps his radio turned up when he makes the calls and it’s a brilliant touch when Romero emphasizes the radio broadcast delay by having the conversation that we just heard echo in the background a few seconds later; it’s a distorting crack in the mirror). The vampire schtick seems to be Martin’s justification. Oh sure, he’s not an old school vamp who’s scared of garlic and sunlight, but he IS a vampire, in his own mind. An evolved vampire for the modern day.
Why does Martin think this? When did he get so screwed up? And how?
The brilliant stroke here is that Romero doesn’t go into any of that. It’s all a mystery. The only story he’s here to tell is the one in which quiet serial killer Martin goes to Pittsburgh to stay with his crazy uncle. We get very little background, no explanation, nothing to make us feel comfortable to pick a side. Watching this movie is only half the experience; the other half is the conversation that you have afterward.
And if you thought that Romero’s Night of the Living Dead had a blisteringly ironic ending, Martin just about equals it. It’s a punch in the gut that leaves a bruise.
This was George Romero’s own favorite of his films and you can see why. Though Romero didn’t get his wish to make this entire movie in black-and-white, it’s still uncompromisingly odd, a real maverick’s work. Quiet. Haunting. Bizarre. Set in its own world, though it feels a lot like the real world.