
Martin is great!
“What if vampires were real?” asked no one but George Romero.
Well, damn.
After nearly months of perfect posts, I missed one yesterday. I watched a movie, wrote about it, got it all nice and formatted, and then forgot to publish.
The realisation came the next morning, courtesy of that bizarre moment of clarity that a shower brings. Oh well. I dashed out of the shower and hit “publish” which means I’ve got one day missing but two posts today.
Oh yeah, today. Today’s movie is Martin — a George. A Romero film from 1978. According to Romero himself, this is his favourite film.
Martin is about a young man named Martin. He believes himself to be a vampire. In fact, the opening scene is him drugging and cutting a woman and drinking her blood. He also claims to be 84 years old and has black-and-white visions of vampiric deeds, flaming torches, and pitchforks. These could be memories, or simply insanity.
Of courser no one believes that Martin is a vampire, except for his Lithuanian great-granduncle, who seems to believe it the moment he sets eyes on Martin. As Martin tries (and mostly fails) to resist his urge for blood, his great-granduncle Tateh starts investigating ways to stop him.

The opening of the movie is really creepy and offputting. Martin sneaks into a woman’s cabin on a train and injects her with a sedative. Him rationalising why (“don’t worry, it won’t hurt you! It’s to help you sleep!”) before stripping her nude and draining her blood is downright unsettling.
The budget of Martin is one of the lowest of any movie I’ve watched (US$80,000!) but it manages to be packed full of atmosphere. In particular, there’s a chase through a foggy playground at midnight that has a great hammer horror feel.
There’s also a remarkably exciting and kinetic home invasion scene for a low-budget horror from 1978. Martin, armed with a hypodermic needle and a bumper supply of sedatives, plays cat-and-mouse with a pair of lovers. First separating them in an exciting chase through the house, sedating them, and then drinking the blood of one of them.
It’s more than just a horror tale, though. Martin is clearly a disturbed and repressed young lad. When he’s not drugging ladies and drinking their blood, he’s on the radio as “The Count”, confessing that he has a problem with “sexy stuff”. In fact, after finally doing the sexy stuff with a housewife named Mrs Santini, his urge to kill subsides a bit. It’s classic Romero, where the horror represents something very grounded and real.
In a way, Martin is doing what stories like Watchmen, or movies like Batman Begins, do. What if these fantastic stories were real? What would be the actual practicalities of a non-supernatural vampire living in the real world?Martin using a syringe full of drugs and a razor blade is akin to Bruce Wayne buying 10,000 bat-ears through a shell corporation.
That’s what makes Martin a unique entry into the vampire lore, and easily my favourite of this George A. Romero catchup.

