This guest post is by Marc Z. Goldgrub, let us know what you think in the comments.
Vampire movies and TV shows right now all have to suffer some kind of comparison to Twilight, so I’ll just get that out of the way right now: Midnight Son is not Twilight. It is a something of a difficult love story involving a tall, pale vampire and a dark-haired girl who kind of gets turned on by his being all weird and shy…but it’s not Twilight. And so…
Midnight Son strives to be almost as realistic as a vampire movie can be. In it, a vampire is someone who needs to drink blood to live, whose flesh burns off in the sunlight (right down to the bone), and whose eyes turn yellow when they get a blood-boner (they’re about to drink blood and they’re psyched). They don’t have long pointy teeth, but if they bite you, you become a vampire too.
The film follows slow-talking, socially awkward 24-year-old loner vampire Jacob (Zak Kilberg), who works as a security guard at night and sleeps during the day in a basement apartment. He drinks animal blood and obsessively paints pictures of the sunset that he can never see for himself. One night he meets Mary (Maya Parish) when he buys some candy and smokes off her outside a club. They start talking, he tells her he has a bit of a skin disease and can’t go in the sunlight, she says, “You’re like a vampire…” (translation: “I want to bone you”) and gives him her number. He calls her a couple days later, she comes over, they start hooking up, she gets a coke-induced nosebleed, and now Jacob is hooked on human blood and needs more. So that proves to be a bit of a problem. Murder, sex, and bloodsucking ensue.
The film succeeds in large part because of its (for the most part) believable and intensely conflicted characters. You care about Jacob and feel bad for him – the guy can’t go outside in the daylight, works a shitty-ass, dead-end job, and he’s really scared that he’ll end up turning a chick he likes into a vampire like him. He is nothing like Edward who you look at and say, “You get to be young, good looking, super fast, strong and cool forever – AND ALL YOU CAN DO IS MOPE ABOUT IT!” It’s his perspective that makes things interesting and makes the movie tick. But he is a little bit of bitch, and does act all oh-woe-is-me with Mary to the point where it’s hard to understand why she puts up with him. But things never get melodramatic; director Scot Leberecht keeps the emotions that abound awkward, unresolved and subtle.
So ultimately, though Midnight Son is not without precedent – George A. Romero’s little-remembered Martin mined the same territory – it’s an interesting and thoughtful vampire movie that works largely because of its mood and starkness. It didn’t blow my mind, but it was cool.
