Monday, October 03, 2011

Honourable Mention: Vampire (Ricky Kelley)

I stumbled over this one at Vimeo, it is a very short film directed by Rickey Kelley and released in 2011 (I’m guessing, though it may have circulated before that date). The flick is notable for its use of black and white interspersed with colour and for the primary performance.

Jon Minadeo as the Vampire
Said primary performance was given by Jon Minadeo as the vampire and, at the head of the film we see him sleeping, led on the bed still in street clothes including a hoody. A chink of light burns through a window; the vampire grimaces in agony. He awakens and a tap drips, in the toilet he falls to his knees and wretches. Later he sits on the floor, running his fingers across the carpet to sunlight, there is no visible effect. Is he a vampire, in our undead sense, or a clinical vampire?

colour moment
Either way he is a murderer and, when it comes to blood, a junky. At night he walks down the street and approaches a house. A man (Krishna Chaitanya) is up and about. He goes into the kitchen to wash up. We see the vampire in colour, blood at his mouth. Black and white; the man dead on the floor and, upstairs, a child calls for his father. In colour again and the man feels guilt but, as he reaches for his own head in anguish, he licks at the blood sticky on his fingers, greedy, remorseless as he tastes the substance he needs.

It is Minadeo’s non-verbal performance that narrates much of the above – serial killer or undead predator, sick due to the consumption of blood or because of the need for it? We can’t say, At the time of mention there is no IMDb page.

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