Short Film: Sam the Vamp

Coming in at the 11 minutes mark, Sam the Vamp is a short film from 2016 that was written by, directed by and stars Saba (Vamperifica). It plays with the idea of a vampire anonymous type of group, something which has been covered before in the vampire genre. My understanding is that the short evolved from a feature script and therefore there is some extraneous aspects that perhaps would have made more sense in a longer film where explanations could have been offered – at this point I’m thinking around a witch type lady, casting incantations, who has a bandaged, hirsute creature with her (either a feral vampire or a werewolf, perhaps).

That said there are some fascinating characters drawn in the very short running time – especially Father Julius Bane (Robert Harrington). He is a be-wigged priest, when dealing with mortals, who is actually a bald-headed vampire.

Sam at the programme

As for Sam, well it is he who is invited to speak at the meeting and despite his very modern look he is an ancient vampire (we don’t discover quite how old but he was around before Christ, in fact he was around before the Mayans had a calendar). However in a modern world with google, cameras, DNA etc he has found the act of feeding has become difficult (and unpleasant due to disease – he mentions Lyme in particular) and he now mostly feeds off dogs and cats. He has not fed properly for so long that he has permanent fangs on display (noting that most of the other 12-steppers) do not.

So, what could go wrong? And what’s with the two guys, one who looks freshly bitten and is lolling? Well for the answers to those questions you’ll have to catch the film.

The imdb page is here.