While Romero made many other horror films, he seldom strayed away from his beloved slow-walking flesh-eaters. Even knowing that, it’s something of a surprise that he only made one vampire film during his long and fruitful career. To his credit, it might be his magnum opus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Released in 1978, Martin<\/em> struggled to gain a foothold with critics and audiences who couldn\u2019t see Romero as more than the zombie guy. While it had its fans, it felt too odd for its time, a languid tale of abuse that rejected most of the trappings of the subgenre it inhabited. If the Dead<\/em> films were intense and fun, Martin<\/em> was uncomfortable, downbeat, even cruel. Its eponymous villain is a strange young man (played by Romero regular John Amplas) who says he is an 84-year-old vampire. From the offset, this version of events is suspect, as we see Martin drug a woman on a train, slice her arm with a razorblade, then drink from her before letting her bleed to death. Perhaps he is a new kind of vampire. Or maybe he\u2019s just another serial killer who hates women.<\/p>\n\n\n\n While vampire films frequently deal with sex, it\u2019s rare to see them so thoroughly acknowledge and explore the thematic connection between vampirism and rape. That implication has always been present in modern vampire fiction, whether it\u2019s Dracula preying upon the na\u00efve women of upper English society or the forced infection of the condition in Abel Ferrara\u2019s The Addiction<\/em>. Romero makes the dynamic unavoidable, particularly when Martin\u2019s florid fantasy is shown next to his predatory truth. It\u2019s a moment that makes you rethink every other vampire film you\u2019ve seen, forcing you to reconsider just how many of those \u201cseduction\u201d scenes really showed otherwise. Take away the capes and castles and stick your killer in the middle of 1970s Pittsburgh, and what changes? <\/p>\n\n\n\n In Pittsburgh, which seems especially desolate through Romero\u2019s lens, Martin is reluctantly taken in by his elderly cousin. Cuda is a Lithuanian Catholic who treats Martin like the vampire he believes himself to be, convinced that he is the fulfilment of a decades\u2019 long family curse. His attempts to repel Martin with garlic and crucifixes fail, leaving Martin to bitterly proclaim, “There’s no real magic… ever.” Yet he retains these tools, stuck in the old ways and unable to change. Cuda’s orphaned granddaughter, Christina, is more modern and sympathetic, believing Martin should receive professional help for mental illness. He has an affair with a clinically depressed housewife who later dies by suicide. This is a place where nobody is satisfied, where the world has failed them all and left them to rot in a crumbling town with no options. The lifelessness of this former steel city, one where buildings are left abandoned and whole generations are without jobs, makes Martin feel right at home. Where better to be lonely than a place where everyone else is?<\/p>\n\n\n\n There\u2019s a lot of wriggle room in the vampire genre as to what actually gets to be called a vampire movie. Park Chan-wook\u2019s Stoker<\/em>, for example, doesn\u2019t feature any of the monsters but borrows so heavily from those tropes and style that it feels like a natural part of the canon. Martin<\/em> is a tad more straightforward by comparison. The ways it challenges what audiences knew about vampires at the time still carries intense creative weight, enduring because vampires themselves never truly go out of style. The rot that Martin embodies spreads, not through blood infection but with the disintegrating state of a nation in flux that desperately clings to the past. Romero\u2019s best zombie films embodied an eternal truth about humanity;it\u2019s no wonder his sole vampire movie did so as well. Some ideas will live forever, for better or worse.<\/p>\n\n\n\n “Martin” is streaming on Tubi<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2023\/05\/martin-1024x576.jpg\")
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Filmmakers tend to swing between the two sensual extremes of vampires, making them either soulless monsters or swooning hunks. By 1977, the predominant image of the vampire on-screen was Christopher Lee\u2019s Dracula, the Hammer Horror villain who deliberately toyed with that seductive image and left slews of topless women in his wake as a result. Martin<\/em> borrows from that tradition, with its lead imagining himself as a figure of intense allure. His delusions position him as the hero of monochromatic rewrites of reality, full of billowing curtains and damsels of consensual attraction. It\u2019s a stark contrast from his actual modus, methodical and clinical and undeniably without approval from his victims. There is no magnetism in his awkward silence. There are hints that these visions are flashbacks to Martin\u2019s past, which suggest a narrative where he\u2019s the anti-hero of this tale, or even its misunderstood hero. Yet these slivers of ambiguity feel almost immediately refuted by the rest of the film.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n