Honourable Mentions: The Shorts of Devi Snively

If you haven’t heard of Devi Snively, you will. She is the director and writer of Trippin’ – which won best screenplay at the 2010 Bram Stoker film festival and I was lucky enough to chat to her at that event and discovered that she had a couple of vampire shorts to her credit and that both had snuck online and both, I discovered as I watched them, were very different beasts to each other.

Raven Gets a Life

blood tear

The 2006 Raven gets a life starts with a recreation of Dracula with Circus-Szalewski playing Bela Lugosi playing Dracula. The line is the famous “ To die, to be really dead, that must be glorious!” line. In the audience of the movie theatre, young looking but 150 year old vampire Raven (Amber Burke-McDonald) cries a blood tear.

pills with blood

She goes to a shrink (Steve Christopher, the Telling) who questions her from a script and decides she is manically depressed. She gets her prescription pills from a pharmacist (Steven R Barnett) but the drugs make her drowsy and, worse, apathetic in the hunt. The shrink’s solution – more pills.

Circus-Szalewski as Bela

Instead she goes to the movie theatre and watches Dracula again and Bela – having scared off the audience by speaking from the film – suggests that pills are not the answer and (in a rather biting moment) he doesn’t recommend morphine! In the end, however, it takes a brush with death (Todd Sheneman) to make Raven realise that she already has a life…

This was an excellent little short, well acted with surreal asides and a deeper message that actually proved to be a genre trope reversal. The use of Dracula, as well as Swan Lake as the main musical refrain, was very genre knowing and any fan of the ’31 Dracula will get something from this. The imdb page is here, there is a homepage here and you can see it here:



Teenage Bikini Vampire

fantasy

In complete contrast Teenage Bikini Vampire is just damn good fun, with a very surreal edge. It begins with Sadie (Ashley Fox) dancing, wearing a black poker dot bikini as surf music plays. Yes, Sadie dreams of being a beach babe – just a shame that she is dead and her father wants her to act like a vampire. The family go off to feed but Sadie sees a surfer boy. They share a fantasy as she falls for him. When interrupted the boy runs off yelling a warning about vampires.

spf 5000

Sadie dreams and the dream is rather surreal, with the moon and sun represented by people. The sun usurps her dream, pulling the surfer boy away and punching her out. As she awakens she has had enough. Her family are having a quick drink before bed but Sadie is going to the beach – she has factor 5000 sun cream. It does no good and she runs from the beach.

pouring a drink

The family get the surfer boy and kill him. They then take Sadie out, to the graveyard, to give her a surprise. The surfer boy isn’t actually dead but undead. Vampirism isn’t so bad if you have someone to share it with…

This was silly and purposefully so, from “Buffy Sucks” on a child vampire’s t-shirt to the cry of panic at the sight of a vampire it was silliness all the way and good fun to boot. The imdb page is here, a homepage here and the film is embedded below: