The vampire is an eternally fascinating piece of modern mythology. A psychosexual creature which has permeated the popular culture with its mixture of bloodletting, seduction, and the promise of immortality. It’s also a reason why the vampire subculture has ironically failed to die out; ever since it was spun into being during the 80s by bevvies of bored velvet Goths who had read too many Anne Rice novels. But the vampire lives on, especially in cinema. It is on the back of this that Buffy alumnus Juliet Landau has piggybacked her directorial debut.
A Place Among the Dead is the seemingly final incarnation of a project that Landau has been working on since the mid-2010s, where it began as the crowd-funded documentary A Place Among the Undead. This original plan involved Landau quirkily interviewing various actors who had played vampires, as well as the novelist Rice herself. However at some stage, this mutated from being a documentary to a TV series, before finally ending up as a horror mockumentary. In it, Landau and her real life husband, Deverill Weekes, who co-wrote and co-filmed much of the movie, are looking into a series of real life exsanguination murders in the LA Goth scene. This addendum to the documentary is supposed to round it out, and as we are repeatedly told in snippets from the interviews with other actors, with things like this, she is, “like a dog with a bone”. Thus, the whole film begins a spiral down the rabbit hole into what’s real and what isn’t and whether or not Landau is in fact the next victim lined up by the mysterious Darcel.
The problem with the film is that it clearly doesn’t really know what it wants to be. After a slightly baffling opening, which seems to point strongly at Landau working her way through some childhood inner demons and familial issues, the film jars awkwardly between short segments of the interviews with the likes of Gary Oldman, Joss Whedon, and Ron Perlman, and abrupt shunts into an unconvincing faux-documentary, complete with some very bad acting and frankly amateur-level digital editing effects. And Landau herself does herself few favours by spending the whole film in a state of borderline hysteria.
While it’s far from unwatchable, it is neither a compelling nor a believable experience. It is a messy film, with a student art project feel to it. What’s worse is the feeling that it would be far more entertaining watching an hour or so of the interviews with the actors, and scrap the whole horror movie angle. Or even if they had stuck with the faux documentary style, as has been shown to be a ripe concept for horror in films such as Hell House LLC and Savageland. In the end, this is one that I’m sure a small audience of vampire obsessed goth teenagers will treasure between rewatches of the first 3 seasons of Buffy, but for anyone else, one best left in the crypt.
Available on-demand from Mon 9 Nov 2020