"Martin" (1977)

Martin is writer-director George A. Romero's modern re-imagination of the vampire story. Romero's first decision to move away from the romanticism and myth is to strip the vampirism down to its most basic components: blood lust and agelessness. What remains is a self-loathing, awkward loner -- potentially literally as Romero leaves it ambiguous as to whether Martin is actually a vampire or if it's all in his head. Troubled teen Martin (John Amplas) says he's 84 years old but his urges are familiar for anyone just on the cusp of adulthood -- his sexual confusion is both pubescent and psychotic. Romero takes the underlying sexuality always inherent to vampires and emphasizes it to its extreme. Martin's desire for blood is highly sexualized, even eroticized. The first scene of the film gives us a good sense of both Martin's tactics and his lust. Martin hasn't entirely accepted drawing blood from people or the cost of human life it entails. He injects his victims with a drug that knocks them unconscious so they don't feel any pain. It's a humane act but everything else about the scene uncomfortably reads as an act of sexual violence. There's a date rape connotation underneath giving the drug -- an idea that gains greater plausibility when you factor in the fact that Martin only pursues female victims. As if the sexual undercurrents weren't already strong enough, Martin outright acknowledges his weird associations of his vampiric acts with his sexual uncertainty and impotence. He has trouble having actual sex and so drawing blood stands in for actual sexual gratification. Romero goes further to establish Martin as a film indebted to vampire lore while also reinterpreting it. Black and white flashbacks to Martin's first vampiric attack re-call older vampire cinema, especially Dracula (a disc-jockey mockingly calls Martin "Count" on a late night horror-fest program), and the juxtaposition with the present shows how distant from those types of narratives Martin is. Romero wants to complicate what the realities of being an immortal being with such desires would be like, as well as to update them to a modern setting, in this case the decaying city of Pittsburgh (As to be expected from Romero, there's some minor social commentary about the 1970's going on here). In a painful scene, Martin botches a job, failing to account for the appearance of other people, and the scene turns into a drawn-out, protracted home invasion where Martin has to violate his own skewed moral code to survive. Romero pulls us back and forth on our sympathies; Martin is well-meaning and naive even as he's violent and sociopathic. But what else would you expect from a guy who's been living as a teen for nearly a century?

Grade: 3.5/4 ★★★