The After Dark – review

Director: Tom Devlin

Release date: 2024

Contains spoilers

This was an ambitious low budget vampire film in that there was a real push at world building and enough grasping to some common tropes to allow that world building to work in the scant 70 minutes run time.

It starts with Rancid’s Lars Frederikson as a character called Volsung giving us a to camera narration (and, in fact, he also breaks the fourth wall during the film to address the audience). He tells us of two groups, the Vanished, stuck in the past, and the Lobos, rock and roll vampires. The two, he confides, are tumbling towards war.

the Vanished

We then meet the Vanished. They are the Goth/Victoriana costumed type of vampire. The camera offers us a view that it is a society (or clan, as that is used through the film) which is typified as endless boredom. We see rats drained into decanters and then poured as they sit around staring and speechless. Their leader Vigo (David “Gangrel” Heath) notices that one of their number, Philip (Josh Cornell), is missing, leads them on a clan chant (or, almost, 12-step affirmation) and then we see that dinner is glasses of rat’s blood and unprepared rat carcass for main course.

Jack and Dax

Having seen a couple hand out flyers for a rock/punk/biker bar called the After Dark, we see Philip attack a homeless musician and his girlfriend for a flyer, wounding him and kidnapping her. The After Dark itself is run by Dax (Nicholas Cvjetkovich) and is open to vampires and humans alike. He attracts the dispossessed and alternative and some of those will be turned. His second in command is Jack (Danny Saxton) and Dax sends him out for blood (bottled) for the “blood bath”.

Mary Beth feeding

Mary Beth (Ashley Ballou) – sometimes just Beth – hates her relatively (three year) new life as a vampire in the Vanished. Through her eyes we see that Vigo is power hungry and holds on to it with an iron fist. He saw her as a mortal, had to have her and turned her. She is forced to call him Master. He is also a hypocrite, forcing his clan to eat rats he indulges in eating humans. Why he made the others eat rats isn’t explained, and may simply have been a control thing, because he sees humans as nothing but food. An angry Mary Beth meets Jack in an alley and there is instant mutual attraction. She is then sent to spy on the After Dark (as a young, therefore unknown vampire) and her and Jack consolidate their relationship.

vampire love

So there is a whole section of them falling more and more in love in a short space of time – dancing and skateboarding (this being a mistake as it is clear that the actress is running up and down the short ramp with the camera not straying down and the skateboard noises done by foley) – this leads to the inevitable showdown between clans (with Vigo simply against the Lobos as much as affronted by her betrayal). This leads to the last section of the film being a battle in the club. This is mixed in effectiveness; a chopping through the centre of a head with skateboard was an effective sfx, Vigo and Dax going at it works as the actors use their profession and wrestle, but a 4 person swordfight really fails as it looks like none of the actors are sword proficient.

Vigo is a messy eater

The sets are very limited and there are moments that don’t work (a side trip by Dax, for instance, gives us more background but just didn’t make sense plot wise), but the filmmakers manage to create a world that feels built and a credible relationship with Jack and Mary Beth that actually feels natural – congratulations to the actors for injecting the necessary chemistry there, though some of the diction was a tad stagey. Lore-wise we rely on the megatext more than are shown things. Sunlight is a no-no, they are immortal (but in the fight sequence it appears that death easily comes for some, and neither side use a stake). This was fun enough and has impressive world building, as mentioned. However its ambition cannot be reached by its low budget. 5 out of 10 seems fair, so long as you know there are flaws.

The imdb page is here.