MARTIN

As a child, I would often spend weekends in Girardville, PA. That's where my dad is from. It's a relatively small town, home to less than 2,000 people. Even at a young age, I was struck by how depressing the place was. The coal mines that once sustained the town financially had since long dried up. I don't ever remember seeing a single child in all my time spent there. It was like everything that still had any vitality to it had long since moved away or was swallowed whole by the crippling stasis of a town that never recovered from its economic collapse. 

There were churches, of course, and plenty of bars populated by old men that all looked like they had been stubbornly refusing the grave for decades. People spoke about pre-Vietnam times like they were yesterday. No one seemed concerned or even interested in tomorrows or todays. Just the old times, the better times. Every conversation was about people in the past or long evenings spent in the 50s or 60s, and nary an hour went by without someone telling me that I reminded them of so-and-so when they were little. Visiting that old town was like wandering into some great wake full of people endlessly mourning the death of the "good old days".

That is the kind of setting that George Romero's MARTIN takes place in. The town is Braddock, just outside of Pittsburgh. The town is old and dying. It's the kind of place where two cousins, one female and one male, living beneath the same roof is considered inappropriate. Masses are still partially delivered in Latin and the old priest still performs exorcisms, much to the chagrin of the new priest in town, a younger man who smokes and chuckles about seeing THE EXORCIST at the theater. The depressed state of the economy is driving the younger citizens out to the city. Every housewife we meet is either being cheated on or is cheating on her husband. Everything is decaying. People talk about the older days and the older ways, as if they were more pure and noble. It's like no one ever thought about whether or not they should move on and leave the past in the past.

Into this environment comes Martin, a young man in his early 20s. He has freshly arrived from some undisclosed place to stay with his elderly cousin, a man named Cuda. Martin is reclusive, almost cripplingly shy, but soft spoken and gentle. He's also a vampire. Or so he believe himself to be. The sun only bothers his eyes a little and religious icons hold no power over him. “I'm 84 years old”, he tells his cousin Christina, a 20-something woman looking to get the hell out of Braddock before it poisons her too.

Cuda also believes that Martin is a vampire. In fact, Martin has been sent to live with him for a reason. Cuda is to cleanse Martin's soul before eradicating him. To protect himself and Christina, Cuda hangs garlic on the doors, carries a crucifix and even rigs a bell system on the door so he knows when Martin comes and goes. For Cuda, the Nosferatu is a real thing, a demonic curse put upon his family. The evidence of that curse is kept in a family photo book and through the hushed legends the family pass down from generation to generation. “There is no magic”, Martin tells him, but for Cuda, the magic is all too real. Martin is a vampire and is to be destroyed if he so much as harms a hair on any person living in the city.

MARTIN is a complex bit of work, far more nuanced that your typical run of the mill vampire film. The world of the characters is an explicitly Catholic world (Romero himself grew up in a Catholic family) and perhaps this is just my atheism coloring my perspective, but the underlying point of the film seems to be that there is an inherent danger in adopting a Bronze Age system of beliefs.

Cuda belongs to the backwards intellectual class of people that once thought the way to solve tremors was by drilling a hole through the skull to allow the demons shaking the body to escape. He gives holy importance to plastic crosses and cloves of garlic. When Martin decides to give Cuda a little fright by dressing up like your typical movie vampire, complete with a cape and plastic fangs, Cuda doesn't respond with a frown and a groan of displeasure. He responds by collapsing in fear, dangling his rosary in front of him. His “old country” beliefs, rife with supernaturalism, have robbed him of the ability to know fantasy from reality. Martin may not be a monster in the literal sense of the word, but Cuda, his head pumped full of religious delusion, definitely makes him out to be.

Martin is both a victim and a victimizer. The film alludes to his upbringing being one of near constant brainwashing. He's been told that he's a vampire presumably since birth. Throughout the film, Martin suffers from delusions (presented to us in glorious black and white vignettes), exhibits signs of extreme gaslighting and routinely displays ambivalence towards anyone expressing doubts about his condition. “It isn't magic. It's a sickness”, he tells Cuda and right he is. In the underlying allegory of the film, Martin's vampirism, that is his inherent sinfulness, is a sickness, one that Catholicism claims we are all suffering from. We are all the inheritors of original sin, disgusting creatures in need of salvation, damned since birth.

The Catholic preoccupation with all things carnal is depicted here as scenes of vampirism (vampirism has always had a sexual component, after all). Martin, kept by his family in a state of repressed, almost infantile sexuality, can't even bring himself to refer to the act as “sex”, instead referring to it in a juvenile way as “sexy time”. His acts of vampirism are brought on by sexual longing, preferring to only attack attractive women. He drugs them and rapes them, ending the encounter by slitting their wrists with a razor blade, drinking their blood. He poses the bodies, giving the impression that the victims committed suicide (another Catholic preoccupation). 

Because of his upbringing, Martin only recognizes sex as something sinful, something that ends in catastrophe. When he finally meets Mrs. Santini, a bored, lonely housewife and has sex with her, razor blade free, it pacifies him. The sequences between the two are the only time we see Martin engage in what can be considered normal, healthy behavior. But because this is a horror film and the allegory cannot end in anything but total destruction, the happiness (or at least relative passivity) doesn't last long. Martin cannot completely overcome his delusions and Cuda, ever sure that Martin is little more than a mythical monster, misconstrues a simple tragedy as something unholy.

In the end, everyone suffers, all because of religious delusions. The film is a parade of wasted and ruined lives, and if that sounds like a downer to you, well, it is. MARTIN is not DAWN OF THE DEAD. It isn't a Saturday morning cartoon. This is a tragedy wrapped in a horror film. But it's also a breathtaking bit of work, a supremely fascinating deconstruction of the vampire film, written and directed by a true independent filmmaker at the height of his creative potential. It's my favorite of all Romero's films and at the risk of sounding like I'm heaping false praise, this is one of those films that offers me up something new each time I watch it. It's assured enough in its own message that it never feels the need to hold my hand throughout. It's subversive enough to be both hilarious and uncomfortable, often at the same time. It's existential as well as being delightfully morbid, capable of tickling both the brain and the gag reflex.

It's also a film that can be watched and enjoyed from multiple angles, which makes it a perfect film to argue about on the internet. And who doesn't love to argue about movies on the internet?

SEASON OF THE WITCH

It's going to be difficult to summarize the plot of George Romero's SEASON OF THE WITCH as there really isn't a plot to be summarized. Romero's film follows a bored, aging housewife named Joan as she grows more distant from her already distanced husband, regards her daughter's affair with a college professor with a tinge of jealousy, dutifully endures the gibbering stay-at-home moms in the community, and engages in endless conversations with her best mate, another bored, aging housewife. This is “GET LIBERATED!” the movie, chock full of messages about female empowerment and feminist agency. It's also “GET BORED!” the movie, because all of the endless dialogue might be fine for proving a point or two, but it would also help if something actually happened along the way. 

Apart from a few very effective dream sequences, nothing much happens as the film lifelessly lumbers down it's nearly two hour path. I think the version I own is slightly shorter than some other versions. I know for a fact that Romero's first cut of the film ran over three hours. I would have preferred that version, honestly. There seems to be a great deal missing from the cut of the film I watched. There's a whole subplot about Joan's daughter going missing that is simply dropped ten minutes after it crops up. It feels like Romero didn't quite know what the hell to do with all the footage he shot so he simply decided to keep what was explicit and drop whatever was subtle. That's why the characters in this movie just talk and talk and talk. 

But truthfully, some of the conversations the film contains are quite good and the actors, none of whom had anything resembling careers before or after this film, sell the material quite well. The best scene in the entire movie feels like a Lifetime adaptation of Sartre's No Exit, just three people in a room quickly coming to the conclusion that they don't like each other very much, with the male aggressor using alcohol and drugs to force a woman to her breaking point. Scenes like this have an individualistic power to them, but as a whole, there's only so much talking one man can stand, especially when the dialogue is so completely on the nose that it feels like I'm trapped in a room with a street preacher for two hours.

The witchcraft angle (when it finally shows up, that is) more or less feels perfunctory. Witchcraft has long been tied to the idea of influencers, people (usually women) who can control or corrupt the will of others. For a film that expresses such a distinct hatred for patriarchal societal norms, witchcraft is perhaps the single best reversal Romero could have chosen. Joan falls into witchcraft because it offers her a chance to control that which has been decided for her. She's an older woman. The Women's Liberation Movement has left her behind. She's already in her trap, married to a controlling man, saddled with a teenage rebel for a daughter, condemned to the circle of babbling housewives. Witchcraft provides her with the agency she should have but doesn't. She (supposedly) weaves a love spell over the professor, allowing her to regain the sexuality societal custom has robbed from her. She (supposedly) performs a conjuration, a scene that is shortly followed by Joan shooting her husband dead, thinking he was the violent attacker she has been dreaming of lately.

Or was the shooting accidental? I say that Joan “supposedly” casts a love spell and “supposedly” performs a conjuration because I have no idea if these scenes were meant to be taken literally or not. I don't honestly think they were. The idea of “witch”, the label Joan defiantly places upon herself at the end of the film, seems as concrete and real in this film as the idea of “Nosferatu” is in MARTIN. The witch label, if taken figuratively, applies to Joan in a way. Witches were often believed to be women capable of deceiving men, often explicitly targeting them, often with their sights set on their money or their virility. But that is only one view of what a witch symbolizes.

As Joan's husband is dying on the lawn, a voice-over bit of dialogue plays out. The voices belong to men, apparently the cops arriving to the scene. They complain about the damn women doing this kind of shit all the time, not knowing their place, look at this poor guy who did nothing to deserve this. That is one interpretation of Joan's character, one kind of witch, evil women beset on destroying men.

Joan's repossession of her freedom from her husband, her reclamation of her own sexual agency, and her stern refusal to bow to the pre-liberation ideas of what middle age women should be, belongs to the second interpretation of a witch, that of an empowered woman no longer shackled to the will of men. Now if only the rest of the film allowed us any room for interpretation.

I have a feeling that I need to watch the film again and maybe even one more time after that before I actually come to an opinion on SEASON OF THE WITCH. For the most part, I just found the film boring. I think it was well acted and most certainly well directed. It looks like a dry run for MARTIN, a film I consider to be Romero's finest work. But there's no room for interpretation or mystery. Characters speak bluntly and at length. They don't grow or change as the story goes on. Everyone and everything is placed in such a deliberate fashion that the film never feels organic. It feels like a polemic rather than a drama, a diatribe rather than a conversation. And in the end, that is what pulled me out of the film, sat me on the sidelines and left me feeling rather cold.