WITH HITS like Twilight and True Blood leaving their teeth marks all over pop culture, vampires are hip again. And yet, a truly original take on one of monsterdom’s timeless classics is nearly impossible to find. They have been done to undeath.
What writer-director Scott Leberecht’s film Midnight Son does is reinvent the genre. Following the story of an a lonely young man who paints sunrises in his basement apartment when he’s not working his minimum-wage security job, Midnight Son is as much a mystery about whether or not its main character is a vampire—and a thoughtful examination of what it means if he is—as it is a horror film.
Panic over his rapidly escalating “anemia” drives the plot, but it’s the acting, the eerie atmosphere and the realism that make this film a must-see at Cinequest this year.
Leberecht spoke to Metro about his debut film in anticipation of its world premiere this Friday at Cinequest.
METRO: There’s so much vampire stuff out there. What made you want to take a chance on telling another story of that type?
SCOTT LEBERECHT: I continually just didn’t see what I was wanting, which was something that was very real. Something that was sad, and that didn’t romanticize this monster character. I wanted to do something that was almost like a documentary, taking it to the point of “forget about everything you’ve seen—what would it really be like?” The two conventions that we kept were no sun and no food—you’ve got to have blood. How would you deal with it?
As the main character, Jacob, begins to undergo these extreme changes, it’s not clear whether he has ever even considered the idea that he might be a vampire. Was that intentional?
That’s exactly what I wanted. To me, what this represents in terms of, something we all must deal with is Jung’s “shadow” idea, that there’s this thing inside of us we all feel like we have to hide. But even before we know it’s there, we know it’s there. I wanted the audience to have that experience of saying “Does he know, or doesn’t he? Has he never thought of this?” … It’s definitely a film about figuring out your identity.
The only film I can think of that ‘Midnight Son’ even remotely resembles is George Romero’s ‘Martin,’ also about a young man who may or may not be a vampire. Were you influenced by that film at all?
You know what’s funny, I had not even known about that movie until I’d written a couple drafts of the screenplay. Someone read it and said, “Have you ever heard of the movie Martin?” I said no, and they said, “Well, you better go rent it.” I was blown away. I was really impressed with the opening scene. I’m like, this is exactly what I want to capture, this fucking weirdo where his world is his life and this strange stuff that he does has become so normal to him that he doesn’t even notice it.
How did your work on visual effects at Industrial Light and Magic influence the film?
I kind of came away from there with a bad taste in my mouth about movies driven by visual effects. I think that may have even influenced this drive I had toward making a more realistic fantasy movie. That sounds weird, but that’s the way I felt coming away from ILM, I was so sick of sort of seeing things I loved not really taken seriously because it’s a comic-book movie, or because it’s a vampire or werewolf movie or because it deals with fantastic elements. It suddenly gets relegated to teen summer fare, and any intelligence or sensitivity goes out the window. It was hard working at ILM, because what gets you in there is intelligence and sensitivity, and yet that’s exactly what we weren’t allowed to use there. It was weird. We put a lot of that into our shots, but what was always sad was going to the movie’s premiere and just being like, “Wow, that was a terrible film. The effects were brilliant, but they didn’t seem to really care about anything else.” So that may have influenced why I wanted my vampire film to be low tech, or more real.
Fri., March 4 at 9:30pm, San Jose Rep; Sun., March 6 at 6:45pm, Camera 12; Fri., March 11 at 12:30pm, Camera 12
