#vampire flick

Vampire Academy

So I'm black and am bone tired of historical black films being either about slavery or the civil rights era. This film is very much a period drama that just so happens to have vampires in it. Like Dusk Till Dawn, it starts as one genre before the second genre (horror) starts bleeding in little by little until you're watching Depression-era gangsters going toe-to-toe with a vampire and his thralls.

Both Smoke and Stack (played by Michael B. Jordan in dual roles) have love interests who exist in different worlds from them. Smoke's estranged wife is a practitioner of folk medicine and believes in the supernatural while Stack's love interest Mary (Hailee Steinfeld) is a white-passing black woman who he broke things off with so she could live a white life. They're both still deeply in love with them but left their wife and lover to live a life of crime in a bid to get ahead in a racist world.

To summarize the first half of the film, the brothers buy an old saw mill to turn into a juke joint. They enlist their cousin Sammi to play at it and when he plays, he plays so well that his music summons the ancestors and descendants which dance alongside the living. Enter the vampire Remmick who wants Sammi's gift. As a vampire, he's cut off from both the living and dead and hasn't been able to commune with his people in centuries so he wants Sammi to join him and summon his ancestors too. Remmick quickly turns the patrons of the juke joint into vampires so he can have a "community" of his own but it's a pale imitation of what Sammi can do. With only 7 survivors left inside the juke joint, they have to hold out until sunrise while Remmick taunts them from outside.

My favorite moment is obviously the scene where the ancestors and descendants dance with the living but my 2nd-favorite scene is when 1 of the newly turned vampires tries to trick his way back inside. At this point, everyone is slowly realizing they're in a horror movie (except for Smoke's hoodoo wife who figured it out quick) so while the vampire keeps trying to get someone in the juke joint to let him in, they're asking why they must VERBALLY give consent and he can't say it outright. It's a great scene because the audience knows he's a vampire but the characters don't know what he is, they just know something's amiss.