Day 220

movie: Midnight Son
starring: Zak Kilberg, Maya Parish
genre: Vampire, Drama,Crime
year: 2011
format: Shaw Video On Demand

plot: a young man who suffers from Porphyria, and works as a security guard on the night shift, falls in love with a woman he met at a bar.  Soon, he learns that he has Anemia as well and starts to believe he might just be a real vampire.

This movie was brilliant!
You've got a gorgeous blend of every vampire sub-genre here and it actually works to perfection.

The film takes two real medical disorders, mixes in real folklore, and some key Hollywood plot points to create one of the most original vampire stories I've seen in years.

The vampires are both living and dead.  Let me rephrase that... the lead character is a living vampire while two of his victims become vampires after they've died from accidental deaths ( one from a gun shot and one from a bottle slicing him.  And in some folklore accidental deaths can cause vampirism) 

As for the metaphors,  a) drugs is the most obvious here.  One of the victims happens to be an addict, the other happens to be a dealer.
b) We also have the vampire as the outsider, the reject.
c) The lead character is an artist who only paints landscapes of sunrises and sunsets, lending to his obsessive behavouir. (another metaphor for disorders and addiction)
d) We have a blood disorder,
e) The character played by Parish is a goth-type which falls squarely into the social sub-genre of vampire films.

For anyone who is a student of the vampire genre, you will see echos of other films like Midnight Kiss, Pale Blood, Habit,  Immortality Wisdom of Crocodiles, Vampire's Kiss, My Best Friend is a Vampire and even Fright Night (Fright Night by the way is used as the movie the lead character is watching at one point)

For anyone who has got it in their head that a good vampire movie needs to be overly sexual or deviant should go looking somewhere else.  The story is beautifully done with little nudity.

what do I think I learned from this film?
There is a line in this film that gets repeated by almost all the characters "we all have our thing"  meaning, everyone has something that they are addicted to or obsessed by.   It's learning to accept each other as well as ourselves for the things that we do have as habits. Our addictions, right or wrong are a personal thing. They are part of who we are and how we see and accept or don't accept ourselves.