Honourable Mention: Dark Realm

Ron Fitzgerald (Lilith) – actor and stage illusionist is no stranger to the vampire genre. As well as being in Lilith he has been in a couple of low budget vampire films that I haven’t yet managed to get my sticky little mits on and has also posed as Graf Orlock for a series of photos (one of which appears in this film).

This 2013 film, directed by Vinnie Bilancio, showcases his stage show and from the trailer I assumed the surrounding story would have a vampire edge. It doesn’t, as such, but there was enough vampire (and Goth) imagery to lead me to suggest that this is definitely of genre interest – though that falls into the stage show aspects rather than the story surround (which I won’t spoil). In fact one of the illusions is accompanied by a piece of music entitled, the Vampire’s Dance and, as he says of another illusion, it is some “dark, sticky vampire fun”.

starting the illusion

The film starts with him performing an illusion where he seems to remove his assistant’s head to the strains of Voltaire’s When You’re Evil. Just a note on the soundtrack, as it is fantastic throughout and I must see about getting some House Made of Dawn, but I digress. As he lifts the box, which allegedly holds the head, blood pours from it and he bolts up awake. Raven (Kaylee Williams, III Slices of Life & A Blood Story), said assistant, is in his bed and puts the nightmare down to butterflies – Ron has a 3 night engagement coming up.

murder, or is it?

As the film progresses we see plenty of Ron’s stage show in his Master of the Realm persona but we also see strangeness occurring around him. Raven has vanished and no one knows where she is leading him to get Lady India (The Sacrifice) in to replace her during the first night. He sees Lady India murdered and then suddenly she is fine. He seems to lose time, have waking nightmares and meet people from his past who are dead.

Master of the Realm

This is a budget film but overcomes that because it concentrates on the show – though the surround story is less important, in some regards, it does neatly fold things together by the end. The references to vampires are enough for us to give this a feature and you can get a stream of the film over at Vimeo and the DVD is available via the film’s Homepage.

The imdb page is here.