Short Film: Vamped

This 2014 short film was directed by Matt S. Bell and comes in at just over 27 minutes. It is professionally put together but suffers for the fact that it very much feels like the start of a larger piece – be that feature or series.

It starts with a pan across the front of a house at night. A young woman, blood on her top, comes running out of the house screaming. She manages to get into her car and drive off but her phone rings and, on answering and looking back, she crashes.

bat-eared

A woman, Nikki (Gayle James), exits the car – blood at her mouth, the driver dead at the steering wheel. She sits on the hood as a second vampire – this one with bat ears – comes up. She is at the town looking for a specific person – they need him in the war that has started. The male vampire refers to the one they seek, disparagingly, as a sunset superman. We see Nikki later, on a laptop, arranging to get in on some kind of game tournament

Gayle James as Nikki

Green (David M. Lawson) works in what appears to be a game/DVD rental store. He has (what appears to be) unrequited love for co-worker Nancy (Amy Wickenheiser, the Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn part 2) – who is known as Drew, though she dislikes the nickname. Green and his friends are all geeks and the dialogue around them worked rather well. He meets Nikki at a game night and ends up back at hers. She is, he discovers, a biter and then someone bursts through the window – she tells him to run.

Donny Broussard as Carpenter

The next day he feels unwell and food doesn’t sit well. That evening he is visited by Carpenter (Donny Broussard) – Green has been turned into a vampire and Carpenter is a guide, who are assigned to newborns. Of course, Green doesn’t believe it until he sees that, unlike earlier in the day, he no longer has a reflection. In this world sunlight just takes a vampire’s powers but also, during the day, they have a reflection – losing it at night. Fangs take their time to grow and any blood (human or animal) will do – Green is given a business card for a liquor store that also sells blood to vampires. We later also discover that there are Primaries, vampires of the original bloodline who are more powerful and more aggressive.

graphic novel style

As I say this feels like an opening to a much larger world, the dialogue works well and is well delivered by all involved. There are nice scene-fades using a graphic novel type of graphic. The shame, for me, was it seems like more was not done with this but you can see what is available below. The imdb page is here.