The vam­pire movie is final­ly grow­ing up

At the begin­ning of Fright Night, only the audi­ence and our boy-next-door hero know that his new neigh­bour is a vam­pire. In The Trans­fig­u­ra­tion, Tom Holland’s 1985 cult clas­sic is a key ref­er­ence point for Milo (Eric Ruf­fin), who imag­ines his own vam­pirism as pri­vate rage and hunger, not a pro­jec­tion of out­sider anxieties.

Just as Philip Ridley’s The Reflect­ing Skin and Ana Lily Amirpour’s A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night did before it, Michael O’Shea’s bizarro com­ing-of-age film feeds on its protagonist’s oppres­sive envi­ron­ment. The direc­tor presents his phi­los­o­phy as part of this col­lec­tive assert­ing of the vam­pire into the sociopo­lit­i­cal his­to­ry of hor­ror. As much as Blac­u­la and Vam­pire in Brook­lyn assumed the oppo­site, O’Shea picks up where the black man­i­festo of Gan­ja & Hess left off.

Break­ing with cen­turies of folk­lore, Milo doesn’t believe that a per­son needs to be bit­ten to become a vam­pire. It’s some­thing that grows inside, from suck­ing a wound­ed fin­ger to stalk­ing human prey, tap­ping into the Cro­nen­ber­gian notion that the body will mutate with­out warn­ing or con­sent. Milo describes his own life through neg­a­tive space, how his mount­ing dis­con­tent and alien­ation led to his ​‘trans­for­ma­tion’. We imag­ine this trag­ic change from what’s left unsaid. Gore is kept to a min­i­mum, but we still sense the vis­cer­al ter­ror of a child dri­ven to drink blood as escapism.

With­out a mir­a­cle, it’s either this or become mixed up in the gang­land activ­i­ty of his hous­ing project. At least, in vampirism’s soli­tary aes­thet­ic, Milo has cut him­self off from the oth­er option, even if that has giv­en rise to his own crim­i­nal­i­ty. If he can steal from any of his kills, he will; an ulte­ri­or motive glossed over in his per­son­al mythology.

Invig­o­rat­ed and reas­sured by the idea that this thirst makes him a vam­pire, Milo stalks his vic­tims know­ing that each kill will bring a small relief from anx­i­ety and depri­va­tion. It’s nev­er explic­it­ly stat­ed which came first to him – the vam­pire fan­ta­sy or the urge to feed. But he’s cer­tain­ly been fas­ci­nat­ed in the sub­ject for years, amass­ing a VHS col­lec­tion in trib­ute and for his ​‘stud­ies’. Through all of this, he feels no despair, only a blind­sided ded­i­ca­tion to his fan­ta­sy. Even his lack of emo­tion could be part of his becoming.

The rit­u­al of Milo’s research and re-enact­ment cycle mir­rors the emo­tion­al dis­af­fect of The Reflect­ing Skin’s Seth Dove (an explo­sive Jere­my Coop­er in his first role). He sees his father set him­self alight and watch­es him burn to death, but doesn’t cry. Their emo­tion­al sep­a­ra­tion could be a symp­tom of depres­sion or, as Rid­ley him­self not­ed, the ear­ly signs of psy­chopa­thy.
Seth’s moth­er may be overzeal­ous with her pun­ish­ments, and his father dis­tant even before his sui­cide, but he can’t find fault with his fam­i­ly life. He wants to see the insen­si­tiv­i­ty of his lit­tle world as some­thing other.

Before the father comes under sus­pi­cion for the death of a child in his com­mu­ni­ty, he tells his son a sto­ry about vam­pires. They can’t go out in the sun, sleep in coffins in the day and suck the blood of humans. If they don’t have blood, they get old and die. Dol­phin Blue (Lind­say Dun­can), pale with a soul-pierc­ing stare, only goes out­side in a black head­scarf and shades. Seth’s imag­i­na­tion does the rest. The inves­ti­ga­tion he under­takes to prove her guilt gives him pur­pose, a dis­trac­tion from the vague, hope­less ten­sion exud­ed by his elders.

The fairy tale nature of this ten­sion, the temp­ta­tion of a for­bid­den oth­er­world, indi­cates the dan­ger of Milo’s vio­lent escapism, Seth’s over­pro­tect­ed exis­tence, and the right­eous cru­sade of the Girl (Sheila Vand) in A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night. The lat­ter two even feign romance in dra­mat­ic igno­rance of dark­er forces at play. Ridley’s wheat fields are spray-paint­ed gold for the hyper-real bright­ness of a half-remem­bered child­hood. The Girl is lit in soft mono­chrome like the taboo-break­ing Irene Zazians, though she drinks the blood of men who per­pet­u­ate the misog­y­ny of an amor­phous Iran. Her vam­pirism is nev­er con­firmed either. Only a drug-deal­ing pimp per­ceives a set of fangs, per­haps in fear of being preyed upon as cas­ti­ga­tion for his jun­gle cat façade.

The Reflect­ing Skin, on the oth­er hand, works on a child’s res­olute belief and lit­er­al think­ing to build its fan­ta­sy before shat­ter­ing it with grown-up truths. That Seth would rather believe in an imag­ined vam­pire than face the full extent of the death around him speaks to Ridley’s nos­tal­gic intent. Amir­pour, mean­while, relies on famil­iar arche­types: the princess, the enchantress, the rogu­ish Jack of all trades. Entrap­ment by oppres­sion gives these char­ac­ters a need to affect some­thing, frus­tra­tion and reck­less­ness invit­ing punishment.

But in The Trans­fig­u­ra­tion O’Shea refus­es to pre­tend to any ​‘going into the dark for­est’ alle­go­ry for dis­cov­er­ing evil. His film is grey and hard, inti­mate and low-lit. Milo was born in these woods. Unlike the Girl, the film knows that Milo is no hero or mar­tyr, regard­less of his vic­tims’ crimes. He con­sumes cru­el­ty and becomes it. Even the new girl in town, his white and vir­ginal angel, can’t save him.

As The Trans­fig­u­ra­tion ends, Milo is no clos­er to real­is­ing that his blood does not orig­i­nate from with­in. He descends into rage against oth­ers and final­ly him­self. Seth reit­er­ates his own society’s igno­rance through his ever more malig­nant imag­in­ings, let­ting Dol­phin get into a car with men he has come to recog­nise as the true killers. The Girl’s attempt at a roman­tic end­ing is hope­less. She has refused to shed the chador that denotes her vam­pirism, and the road ahead leads only into dark­ness. For Milo, the dark­ness is equal­ly eter­nal. In his vampire’s hunger, this may be a blessing.