Streaming Availability: N/A (May I suggest you Internet your Archive, perhaps)
In the late Seventies and early Eighties, America craved monsters. Something was happening, maybe organic, maybe manufactured, that exploded the concept of serial killers from dry criminologist jargon to sensationalist headlines. The term "serial killer" did not even exist in common language until this time. Not coincidentally, movies about unstoppable psychopaths butchering teenagers became the defining subgenre of horror for a generation. Michael Myers was a pop culture superstar and so was Ted Bundy.
I could not begin to parse out all the complexities of this issue here in a movie review. The murder rate in the US did double between 1960 and 1980, peaking at 10.2 murders per 100,000 people. (It has since fallen back to 1960 levels.) But there is no evidence that theatrical, charismatic killers on rampages were on the rise. With the serial killer phenomenon, it feels like the country wanted a reason to be afraid. It took actual, dangerous people and expanded them into predator Boogeymen, ones hiding around every corner. Was that thanks to an irresponsible media selling anxieties? Was it psychiatrist "experts" selling snake oil theories? Was it the rise in conservative reactionaries with the Reagan era? Was it disillusionment with the promises of mid-century capitalism and thus a collapse in trust in the social fabric? Or were people just horny for blood and tits?
Something was going very wrong in America at this time, and instead of blaming the powers in charge, we decided to become terrified of each other.
Martin, by the way, is another difficult vampire movie. Whether it even is a vampire movie is something the movie questions and complicates at every turn. It definitely is a film about a serial killer, though is he a killer by choice or driven to it by the pressure of a shared delusion? His family, and eventually many adoring anonymous fans all wait excitedly for his next kill. This is all set in the dying civilization of a Western Pennsylvania town as the Steel Belt turned into the Rust Belt.
Let's start with the issue of vampirism. Our protagonist, Martin (John Amplas), is repeatedly called a "Nosferatu" by his elderly cousin, Tata Cuda (Lincoln Maazel) who has taken him in. However, Martin breaks basically every rule of the vampire creature. He is has no fear of sunlight or Christian symbols, he can chew garlic, he has no fangs (classic move in an artsy film trying for "our vampires aren't like other vampires"), and he repeatedly tells us "there is no real magic, ever". Martin is a young man to our eyes, but Cuda claims his cousin is decades-old. Martin tells his younger cousin, Christina (Christine Forrest) that he is eighty-four, though she believes none of it. Cuda is easily scared off with plastic fangs and a cheesy Dracula cape, which Martin puts on to scare him.
Martin has only one true vampiric aspect: his need to rape and murder women for their blood. We open on an awful attack on a train. The movie is making a big statement here of intentions. If this is too much for you, leave now.
If you're looking for a clear answer as to what is real and what is supernatural, that's not going to be found in Martin. The movie further complicates its reality by showing us Martin's own fantasy-world. Romero wanted to make the movie in black and white, but had to compromise for a Seventies drab colors scheme. But we do switch to black and white whenever we enter Martin's imagination. He dreams of a simpler world of high gothic horror, a life following the classic Universal Horror tropes in castles rather than this confused, lonely one in a nowhere town. Martin also has whiffs of desire for conventional love, usually before killing a woman in a grisly, clumsy attack. The film is constantly crushing any sense of romance to its events.
Along the way, Martin does make two key connections. One is with an older lonely woman in an unhappy marriage, Abbie (Elayne Nadeau), which does eventually become consensually sexual. Maybe the more key relationship is with a local radio station, where is Martin is recurring caller, confessing his violent escapades. The host nicknames Martin "The Count" and they quickly builds a fanbase, which also allows us an organic way to our anti-hero to narrate his thoughts and feelings. Neither relationship holds any real chance at humanity. Abbie is depressed and sees Martin mostly as a kind of pet. And the radio fans are exploitative leeches, hungrier for violence than even our killer is.
Of all of George A. Romero's films, Martin might be the one with the most utterly hopeless. This is a bitterer movie than his zombie apocalypses. It's a slow film shot in a town as inevitably doomed as Martin himself is. That setting is is Braddock, PA, a dying place that in 2022 is down 1,700 residents when once it held 20,000. Even forty-five years ago, in Martin, the characters all comment that Braddock is no place for a young person. Martin's cousin flees town with her awful, abusive boyfriend, Arthur (Tom Savini!), because there is no better option. Nobody is alive in Braddock, they're just dying slowly.
Martin is a perfect match for 1986's Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, another low-budget serial killer film set in a failing corner of the blue collar Rust Belt. They're both gritty, unpleasant experiences about men on the margins of society, driven to repetitive nightmarish acts for no reason other than how the world has no better use for them. Serial killer Henry Lee Lucas was the inspiration for the film Henry. He would claim to have killed hundreds of people, though in actuality it may be as few as a three. Lucas was exactly the kind of creature the police and media needed in the Eighties to sell their picture of a world gone mad, full of shark-like drifters ready to eat the innocent. He was more a constructed narrative than reality. And in Martin, there is no magic, there probably is no vampire at all. There's just the empty, pointless pain leftover when America no longer needs workers, it needs monsters.
Next Time! Werner Herzog remakes a vampyre in Germany in Nosferatu the Vampyre.
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