Short Film: Die Jägerin

Posted onto YouTube in 2014 this is a fan film created by Kurt Kliebisch and Kevin Schmidt and was brought to my attention by Alex Malkavian on the Facebook Group Vampire Fans. I’m looking at this as a short film but rolling in at an hour it is almost a feature in its own right. It does something wrong but plenty right as well. Filmed in German (and set in Germany) the filmmakers added a version onto YouTube with English subs to get a wider audience (I understand).

As I just said the film is set in Germany but is part of the Buffyverse. Sensibly they avoid adding characters from the series and use original characters with the film set 10 years after the conclusion of the series. Of course, in that we saw a spell that turned all the potential slayers into actual slayers and that is still the case in this.

shadow puppets

We start with a slayer, Nora, looking beat up and moving through the night streets. She rests and is grabbed, chloroformed and taken – her stake dropping to the ground. We get the history of the first slayer in a shadow puppet type animation and briefly meet watcher Gabriel and the members of the Watcher council he works to. Then we see a car drive along, and in it are three slayers – Leni, Robin and Lilli – with David, Leni’s boyfriend it seems. They are going to meet Gabriel and his slayer Miriam. Robin is sceptical but Leni thinks there’ll be strength in numbers (we later hear that the watcher’s council is stretched so thin that many slayers are without watchers).

dusting

When they meet them they are with Elias, Miriam’s brother and sufferer of visions. They are soon at work with Miriam taking Leni on patrol to show her the area. They are knocked by a running vampire, who turns around and attacks. He is quickly dusted and I have to say the dusting effects were really well done for a low budget fan film. They follow a group of vampires and report back – Gabriel has long suspected a vampire club that the slayers will raid but slayers are being kidnapped and there is an evil influence that is closer to home than anyone would like…

ready for action

If the dusting effects were good then the interactions between the characters and the building of said characters were done well also. However I do have to mention – before you watch the fan flick – that the combat was atrocious, looking ineffectual, ill-choreographed and amateurish. Now the interesting storyline does work to overcome that but you have been forewarned. All in all these guys did much with very little and the story made a sense to the series (though might be out with the canon comics, I understand). At the time of writing I couldn’t find an IMDb page.