The best vampire movie you’ve ever seen

Mitchell Brown October 18, 2024 – 3:54 p.m

Vampires seem to be making a comeback, don’t they? Between the surprising revelation of Father Paul and the angel in Midnight massthe selling point of a little ballerina vampire girl Abigailwhat should have been a surprise reveal but we’ll get over it, we don’t have time; the upcoming Robert Eggers Nosferatu Adaptation and probably a fourth example of current vampire media, if you take the time to google it, vampires are having a serious resurgence. Whether it is done to create a counterbalance The Twilight Saga Putting it as small as possible in the back window – also known as “The Robert Patinson Method” – or because it reminds people how funny vampires can be, vampire media has a noticeable return to grotesque violence and the old rules of vampire history completed. While we seem to be in a vampire renaissance –Renfield! Number four, we did it – there was a smaller film that slipped through the cracks in the 1900s and made vampires violent and bloodthirsty again: He never died.

Released on Netflix in 2015, the film stars Henry Rollins as the titular “He” who never died. Although the film received consistently positive reviews, it is often overlooked by genre fanatics. Be it because of the lack of release or because there is a silent majority of people who can’t forgive Henry Rollins Steve-O’s “Off Road Tattoo”. Jackass: The Movie is anyone’s guess. However, if it’s the latter, that’s a very niche and narrow hill to die in, and it would be a shame if it prevented you from watching “Heat.” Yes. He’s there too. Anyway, regardless of why the film was underrated, with the Halloween season in full swing and people always looking for new and fun horror movies to watch in October, He Never Died is a funny and bloody outing that twists the vampire story in a different way. In a nihilistic but still funny way, it lays the foundation for what other vampire stories would later flesh out, and in its own way takes up themes that were present in the films before it were established. The film does all of this while being highlighted by Rollins’ perfectly (and hilariously) directed lead role.

Rollins plays Jack, a man who mostly keeps to himself and whose time is divided between sleeping, going to the local restaurant, meeting his usual waitress Cara (Kate Greenhouse), and playing bingo. He also buys blood from a hospital intern named Jeremy (Booboo Stewart) as he is secretly an immortal being who needs to drink blood and eat meat, but he tries to stay sober and not hurt anyone. However, as soon as his previously unknown adult daughter Andrea (Jordan Todosey) appears on the scene, a group of mysterious gangsters also appear who repeatedly invade his life and try to maim or kill him. What they don’t know is that this is more of a nuisance to Jack than a threat.

What makes Vampires a fun movie monster is the fact that the stories and characters can range from funny to self-referential using the rules that pop culture has established What we do in the shadowsto straight-up monsters like in From dusk till dawn, too complex and tragic Bram Stoker’s Dracula. He Never Died plays it with a more grounded and realistic approach, more in tune with Almost dark or Martin. The film doesn’t stick too closely to the vampire mythos – Jack can go into sunlight, he can turn into nothing, and he can also enter churches. The only vampire traits he has are the desire to drink blood and eat humans – which is treated as an addiction rather than a survival necessity, but more on that later – and he can’t die. No matter the injury, Jack heals everything.

What’s most fun about the film’s premise is that the character has no social grace whatsoever because Jack can’t die and has lived for thousands of years – one of the best exchanges in the film is when he reveals what his real name is doesn’t care about anything because nothing matters. There’s something strangely satisfying about how quickly he rationalizes conversations so that they end as quickly as possible. “Near Dark” is probably the best comparison to this as Jack walks around with the attitude that he is bored and done with life as he has nothing to live for and nothing to do. In one scene he lists every job he’s ever had, and the list is so long that you think he’s done everything someone like him can do and gone unnoticed. He has achieved so much in his life, but he still has nothing to show for it as everything is seen as a distraction to keep him busy.

While that sounds like it would make the movie boring, it’s actually funnier. Jack’s complete indifference to the well-being of everyone and everything around him gives the film a dry sense of humor, and a lot of that is thanks to Rollins’ performance. Every word out of his mouth has the energy of someone who hates his job but can’t seem to get fired no matter how hard he tries – the job in this metaphor is life, in case that wasn’t clear, and there is one Moment where it could be that he accidentally killed someone he knows and he just shrugs it off and you think it won’t keep him awake.

The film is like a window into his life, as you get the feeling that the events that unfold are just slightly out of the ordinary, and that in the end Jack doesn’t grow or learn anything. There’s never a moment where he thinks he’s finally going to die, but he cathartically realizes he finally has something worth living for. None of that. He overcomes the final hurdle in the story, and then the film is not over, but rather over. In another film this would feel like sloppy writing, but Jack is so cold and distant that it would feel disingenuous if he found or learned to care for any form of redemption at the end.

This is a vampire movie, so people die horribly, and Jack is solely responsible for everything that happens. It’s never about Eli Roth-level torture porn or unpleasant macabre images; It’s always played funny or darkly comical. There is never a moment where Jack attacks an innocent person; If anything, it’s always someone who tries to kill him first, or it’s one Falling down It’s a situation where it’s someone we as an audience don’t already like and it forces us to tune them out. One of the funniest moments in the movie is when he relapses and tries to set people up just to have an excuse to stalk strangers by intentionally throwing money on the ground or bumping into people, but everyone is always super friendly and polite. That’s why he can’t bring himself to do it, which only irritates him even more.

It’s already been mentioned that Jack’s vampiric desire to eat people is treated more like an addiction than a means of survival. If you’re a Henry Rollins fan, you know full well that him playing an addict is about as ironic as CM Punk playing a hard-core partier Girl on the third floor. If there is a word for reverse typecasting in the dictionary, casting this role would be one of the examples. While the sober aspect is there – it’s not even subtext, as Jack calls it – the film is never weighed down by heavy drama. This is not a monster movie Requiem for a dreamand the film knows this. It just adds another layer to the burden of life Jack is dealing with.

In many ways this almost seems like a precursor to what Mike Flanagan did with the vampires in Midnight Mass, showing the power of addiction and how a vampire’s blood-sucking can be comparable to drugs or alcohol, albeit in a heightened, fantastic way. While this undertone flows into the many themes Midnight masswhen it comes to that He never diedit’s more like an added layer to Jack’s personality. The film doesn’t condemn him for backsliding and killing people. It knows that when you watch one of these films, that’s what you want to see. When he gets around to eating body parts, it’s so casual that it borders on comedy. At some point he rips out a dead man’s throat, Street house style, and then he just eats it because… well, let’s face it, the other person has no use for it anymore and throwing it away would just add to the landfill.

While vampire films are a subgenre of horror that is already filled to the brim with many genuinely entertaining entries with varying tones –The Lost Boys wasn’t mentioned here, but this is one of the most infectious and entertaining films ever made – He Never Died is another solid film that makes for a fun Halloween viewing. It’s gory without being gratuitous, funny without being silly, and has just enough dark touches to fit the season without being a straight horror film. It takes themes from other vampire films about how stressful it would be to be able to live forever, but it has the confidence not to get lost in the drama and just shows the humor in the boredom of what the day is . today would be like that. Most of these were paeans to Henry Rollins’ performance, but that’s what makes the film. He creates what could have been a established character and breathes additional life into Jack…which is ironic considering all he wants to do is die.