Short Film: Blood & Lust

This is a short film directed by Patrick Eichner and released in 2023, it comes in at just under 38 minutes. My thanks to Akash Inti, who plays the role Akash in the film, who gave me access to the film.

As a truck pulls into woods we see a man, Gus (Christopher J Reilly), with night-vision headgear moving through the dark. In the truck a guy has picked up a young woman – Dame Demonica (Danél Catherina Minnaar), according to the end credits – he is not backwards about the fact that he wears a wedding ring and takes it off and pockets it.

Demonica fed

They start to get hot and heavy but he notices Gus watching, gets out the truck and beats him up. That done he gets back in, and his date and he get back to it. She bites whilst down there and comes up with blood on her mouth (and fangs, but her fangs are subtly small and have a degree of realism – in that perhaps they’d be overlooked – because of that). But why was Gus creeping round with night vision equipment?

Christopher J Reilly as Gus

Well, if you think he might be a hunter, you’d be way off target. In fact it is because he is a sex addict and clearly a voyeur. We next see him at a sex addict support group (though many of the members don’t seem that supportive) and he is sporting some nasty looking bruising on his face. As he is talking about his life – and I liked the dialogue here that was just enough to give some depth, whilst it was lacking further depth due to the constraints of the short film format – the vampire enters.

on the hunt

She is clearly hunting him and isn’t being subtle. As he walks home he bumps into a trolley of a homeless man (Tim McCaffrey) and then she grabs and feeds from him, in plain sight, before confronting Gus. She speaks about them sharing something intimate and how good he smells, and he admits that she is the woman he spied on. She kisses him but immediately bites his lip, requiring a taste, and then lets him leave (after delaying him so he can give her a light).

great imagery

He ends up in a Goth club/bar but it has a number of actual vampires in there and he comes onto the radar of venue owner and vampire Lady Samantha (Maia Andrea). It seams Gus does have something the vampires want and the film explores whether he is going to get out alive… We don’t really get an indication of why he ended up in a vampire hang-out (and presumably had not been there before) and one could guess fate or mental manipulation (Demonica makes him freeze with a hand gesture even before she had tasted him) and a longer vehicle would allow the filmmakers to explore further the whys and wherefores of the story, especially expanding on Gus’ backstory. The short has a lot of style, that has to be said, and some particularly nice vampiric imagery. There is a Homepage. The imdb page is here.