Movies I Watched - Vampire May 2026
Aside from the Avatar movie, all of these were part of the Super Saturday Movie Club, whose monthly theme this time was "Vampires".
May 2 - Only Lovers Left Alive (2013)
I've mentioned before that MPV, the programme I use to watch movies, lets you quick-save a screencap by pressing the S key. For most movies I tend to end up with around 25 to 30 screen caps; I saved 46 shots from this movie.
This is an amazingly moody piece, shot in digital which gives the night scenes an ethereal, strange air; the acting is stellar yet understated, the entire thing lives and breathes of post-rock. The only blemishes it has is that every so often the writing can be a little bit too much, but every single scene is somewhere I would like to inhabit. 9/10.
May 9 - A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night (2014)
A movie with very little to say, the ultimate definition of style over substance, except it does not have nearly good enough style to prioritise it so much. "You are not good enough to be too good for this" comes to mind. This is an overlong short that could have been a very effective 20 minutes piece, but there is simply nothing here to sustain 100 minutes.
Also, people need to stop calling this an Iranian movie with no qualifiers; this is an Iranian-AMERICAN movie, shot in California, with Iranian-American actors and very little to say about Iran, or women, or vampires, or anything else. 5/10.
May 11 - Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender (2026)
I watched the leaked version. It is an ok movie for children, yet it inexplicably seems targeted at fans from the original show, who surely are all in their mid 20's to early 30's by now. Yet all the visual candy, the extremely simple TV-like plotting, the breakneck pace, it all feels like keys jingling.
Nevertheless, I like the animation, I still like those characters even though they had no character arcs here and didn't really feel like the original characters at all, and the bones of something interesting are here, it's just ultimately compromised in execution. Oh and the Taika Waititi feature trying to ape the Genie from Aladdin is genuinely vile. 6/10.
Did not bother to save any image from this movie.
May 16 - The Hunger (1983)
Like every other movie in this list aside from the previous one and the following one, I had already watched this before, yet there is just such a power to this movie.
You think of vampire movies and you think of bisexual vampires, nuanced romances, characters that feel ancient and refer back to their past lives in other time periods, an appeal to the fear of the HIV pandemic and heroin addiction... yet this is one of the very few movies, along with The Addiction, that actually delivers on all of this, and it delivers it with an inimitable eye and sensibility. It feels sexually charged and delicate, yet poignant. Somehow, it also feels like a miracle, as you can see through the gaps the strange sci-fi vision that the studio probably had for the movie, and which was ultimately not delivered - for the better. 9/10.
May 23 - The Addiction (1995)
The only vampire-related movie in this list I hadn't seen yet, and I was blown away by it. It is an exploration of power and addiction, following in the footsteps of The Hunger and improving it in every single way. It might be the only vampire movie, aside from Blade, where black people feature prominently too.
The Addiction portrays vampirism as a form of philosophical disease, and each of the vampires in the movie (which are few) have a position on it and a relationship to power. Not only that, it is also one of the few vampire movies where the city itself feels real and massive, using many public locations filled with people to great effect. It has become my second favourite vampire movie ever, behind only Sinners, though I believe this to be the better movie. 10/10.
May 30 - Near Dark (1987)
It is always unfortunate when a movie is worse than I remember. I had originally watched Near Dark in 2021, just as I was beginning to watch movies more seriously, and I fell in love with the marauding, wild west vampires joyriding through their unlife, their hyperviolence and scenery-chewing performances, the day shots which radiate heat and the night shots which brim with electric light; all of that is still there, but never for long enough to feel intentional. All of these elements are strung along by an uninteresting main character with unclear intentions, and the unfortunately saccharine relationships he has. I wanted this movie to either fully commit to being like Lost Boys and Fright Night, or to commit to being like Ginger Snaps, but unfortunately it stays at the halfway point and cannot coalesce into something truly great. Still worth a watch though. 7/10.
