Year Of The Vampire: George A. Romero’s Martin Might Just Be An Incel Prototype – /Film

In many ways, "Martin" is a vampire film that isn't really about vampires. No one in the film is actuallythirsty for blood in the true, Hollywood sense of the word. Martin's elderly cousin Tateh Cuda does believe his family is plagued by a vampiric curse that has been passed down from generation to generation, but the movie almost goes as far as to make fun of typical vampire lore and Cuda's reliance on it. When Cuda tries to control Martin whom he refers to as "Nosferatu" his cloves of garlic and plethora of crosses do nothing to harm or dissuade Martin from doing whatever he pleases. Occasionally, Martin experiences flashbacks (or hallucinations) to a time period when he truly was a vampire and his cousin was trying to kill him, but these scenes are not examples of real life. In the real world, Martin tells Cuda that "things only seem to be magic. There is no real magic. There's no real magic ever."

What sets "Martin" apart from other vampire movies is its startling lack of the very magic Martin talks about. What is thought of as a vampire in this film is really nothing more than a term used to describe a young man's horrific mental state. The only power he gains from sucking the blood of his female victims is a literal power over their bodies and their lives. Unlike a vampire, he does notneedtheir actual blood to survive, but he does feel he needs to drug and murder women in order to feed his biological need for sex and companionship. By deciding not to make Martin anactualvampire, Romero pushes the genre of the vampire movie forward in an extremely literal way. He forces us to think about our relationship to the word "vampire" in a way that is perhaps a bit more realistic to the human condition. A vampire is no longer just a monster to be feared. Rather, it can be anyone looking to overpower and dominate others. No thirst for blood actually necessary.

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Year Of The Vampire: George A. Romero's Martin Might Just Be An Incel Prototype - /Film