"Martin is designed so that all those supernatural monsters that are part of our literary tradition are, in essence, expurgations of ourselves. They are beasts we've created in order to exorcise the monster from within us...I tried to show in Martin that you can't just slice off this evil part of yourself and throw it away. It's a permanent part of us, and we'd better try and understand it"
-George Romero
Don't you wish sometimes, your life was as easy as a black-and-white movie? The kind of world where everyone lives in massive mansions, the men always have a distressed damsel to save, and the women all get to live long lives in comfortably wedded bliss? You would?
Yeah well to bad kid, there is no magic, life is hard
Martin is a 1977 American horror film written and directed by George A. Romero, and starring John Amplas. The film is the first collaboration between George Romero and special effects artist Tom Savini, and Romero has called this movie the favourite of all his films. Martin, who comes to live with his uncle and cousin in the dying town of Braddock, Pennsylvania, sedates women with a syringe full of narcotics, then slices their wrists with a razor blade so he can drink their blood. all the while he is having romantic monochromatic visions of vampiric seductions and torchlit mobs, and struggling to escape the evil his family has projected onto him.
Martin himself is one of the most interesting horror movie killers I have ever seen.
For his entire life, he has been told over and over again he is a blood-sucking creature of pure evil for no other reason than being born to the wrong set of possibly vampiric parents. It's certainly up for interpretation, but it's pretty clear that Martin isn't a vampire in the traditional sense. Somewhat similar to LEATHER-FACE, He only/mostly kills because of his family's influence and abuse.
Instead of feeling like any other vampire movie I have ever seen, this movie is a story about addiction, loneliness, generational trauma, and disappointment. And i loved it.
11/10
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