Short Film: Zompire! Dr. Lester's Monster

Weighing in at 14 minutes this is a creature feature that was a 2010 film school project for director Lucien Knotter, filmed in Black and White and featuring the increasingly popular zompire… though not as one might at first think.

It starts off in the lab, where wannabe mad scientist Dr. Lester (Ed Lloyd Moore) is at work, sat behind him is his zombie henchman, Lurch (Jef Johnson). A bat flies in (and a really crap one it is with, on the furthest left periphery of the shot, a blurry hand of the person manipulating the bat), drops off a letter and then transforms into vampire servant Vlad (Andreas Chalikias).

an evil scheme

It is from the Mad Scientist Guild – and it is a rejection of his application to join. There is a glimmer of hope, he can present a finding at the guild and gain entry if it is found to be acceptable. Fail and not only will he be rejected but he will be barred from ever applying again. He has to think about what he wishes to create but all the monsters from his youth are no longer scary. People want pretty vampires and fast zombies.

dance, zompires, dance

Vlad says that monsters can still be scary, put him and Lurch together and… The Dr. has a plan – a bit of Frankenstein type action and he creates a zompire who sits up and is all kinds of fabulous sassy (and called Tim (Blake Heiss)). Tim doesn’t like the term zompire – he prefers vambi – and is not interested in being scary, just performing. However the presentation at the guild is sort of performing… on a stage… what could go wrong?

sparkles

Just to note, a zompire (or vambi) newly turned does sparkle and this does aim jokes at Twilight, which of course is shooting fish in a barrel – however the conflating of the move from the horror staple by using both pretty vampires and fast zombies was interesting. It is probably the first time I’ve seen the latter listed as not scary, they’re just a different kind of scary to the standard Romero zombie and an altogether different metaphor. You can see what happens at the guild below.

The imdb page is here.

Zompire! Dr. Lester's Monster from Lucien Knotter on Vimeo.