A well-made “realistic” take on the zombie apocalypse… except with vampires. Otherwise, it’s the same damn thing. Most of the vamps here even have freaky brain-dead faces and wander the night wordlessly gurgling and hissing like something straight out of the George Romero textbook.
That’s not so strange when you consider that the modern zombie mythos is largely built on Richard Matheson’s slim but hugely influential 1954 novel I Am Legend, about the last man alive in a world of bloodthirsty vampires who sleep all day and try to break into his house all night. Vampires are the grandparents of today’s zombies.
Director/co-writer Jim Mickle pays his respects here and takes the undead epidemic back to its roots. It’s a film that starts in the middle. How the world became as infested with vampires doesn’t matter here. All that matters is survival among the few regular folk still left. Everything is frontier land again, knocked back about 200 years. Some right wing wackjobs interpret it as a sign from God and have taken over the airwaves and formed crazy cults wherever they can. Others live in denial, in perpetual fear or in temporary safe havens. Then there’s the rare breed who become vampire hunters, never settling in one place, but never running away, either. They see a vamp, they kill it. It hides, they find it. That’s who this movie is about. It’s a slice from the life.
The Walking Dead TV series has stolen some of this film’s thunder when it comes to getting down to the details of daily living after the undead have taken over (both the film and the series debuted in the same year, with the Walking Dead comics series coming seven years earlier), but this is still an entertaining trip into a fantasy wasteland where killing is living.
This is Jim Mickle’s second film. His first, Mulberry Street, is a similar zombie-movie-without-the-zombies. He’s a contrarian, but he’s good with flying blood and hard-boiled creeps.