Martin

George Romero's vampire film, which inverts the genre entirely. Martin is a young man who says he is an eighty-four-year-old vampire. The film never confirms it: he has no fangs and uses a razor blade; he does not fly, he attacks in a train compartment; garlic and crosses do nothing to him. His elderly cousin Cuda is certain he is cursed and hangs crucifixes around the house. So the question is whether Martin is really a vampire or a young man whose mind has come apart, persuaded of it by his own family's story. It was shot in Braddock near Pittsburgh, a collapsing steel town. The shuttered shops, the unemployment and the empty streets are not background but part of the cause. Romero said many times that it was his own favourite of his films. Short black and white passages show old-world vampire scenes in Martin's head; the film does not say whether they are memory or fantasy. John Amplas plays Martin. An important work for anyone interested in 1970s American horror and attempts to break a genre. For a viewer expecting a classical vampire film there is nothing supernatural here, and the violence is cold, ordinary and unpleasant.