Martin (1977)

Martin gets its 8 by asking a question that dismantles the entire vampire genre. What if there’s no such thing as a vampire, only a disturbed young man who believes he’s one? George Romero, between his zombie films, made his most personal and least seen work, and it’s one of the smartest horror films of the seventies because it refuses to tell you whether any horror is happening.

Martin is a film about a killer who may be eighty-four years old or may be a confused teenager, and Romero never lets you settle the question.

I find Martin harder to shake than any vampire film with a real vampire in it. I spend the whole running time feeling sorry for a killer and a little ashamed of it, and that queasy mix is exactly what I want from Romero. It’s rough and slow, and the roughness costs it, but I think it’s the bravest thing he ever made.

This ambiguity is the whole film. Martin drinks blood and believes he’s a vampire from the old country. His elderly cousin agrees and treats him as a family curse to be managed and eventually destroyed. But Martin has no fangs. He uses razor blades and syringes. He walks in daylight. He’s either a very old monster or a very sick boy, and the film’s refusal to decide makes it haunting.

The Vampire Without Fangs

Martin commits his killings with brutal, clumsy practicality.

He drugs his victims with a syringe, waits for them to go under, and opens their veins with a razor blade. There’s nothing supernatural in the method. It’s the work of a disturbed young man who has learned to do something terrible and tells himself a story about why. The first killing, on a train, is a long, awful, fumbling sequence that strips every ounce of romance from the act.

I think Romero’s choice to make vampirism messy, sad and entirely human is the smartest move in the film. There’s no transformation or hypnosis or bat, only a lonely young man who needs blood, or believes he does, and gets it with tools from a hardware store. That clumsy train killing makes me squirm more than any fanged monster ever has.

The film intercuts Martin’s killings with brief black-and-white sequences that may be memories of an old-world vampire past or may be fantasies he’s constructed. Romero never confirms which. These flashes look like a classic horror film, all torches and frightened villagers, and their contrast with the grim color reality of modern Pittsburgh is the film’s formal heart.

Pittsburgh and the Dying Town

Romero sets Martin in the decaying steel country around Pittsburgh, a region of shuttered factories and emptying towns, and the setting does enormous thematic work. Martin’s cousin Cuda lives in a dying community, clinging to old-world beliefs in a place that the modern economy has left behind. The vampire superstition and the economic decay rhyme. Both are the old world refusing to admit it’s over.

This grounding in real, unglamorous American decline separates Martin from every other vampire film.

There are no castles. There’s a run-down house in a failing town, a part-time job at a butcher shop, a lonely boy delivering groceries. Romero shoots his horror in the most ordinary American spaces, and the ordinariness makes Martin’s condition, whatever it is, feel like a real affliction instead of a fantasy.

John Amplas and the Sympathy Problem

John Amplas plays Martin, and I think his performance is the film’s quiet triumph. He plays a killer as a shy, mumbling, lonely young man, awkward with women, bullied by his cousin, desperate for connection. Amplas makes Martin pitiable, and I hate feeling that about someone who drugs and drains strangers. That discomfort is what Romero wants, and he gets it out of me completely.

Romero forces the audience into sympathy with a murderer by making him so sad and so human. Martin calls a radio talk show to discuss his condition and becomes a minor local celebrity, the host treating him as an entertaining oddity. He has a brief, doomed connection with a lonely housewife. Outside the killings he’s a sympathetic figure, and the film never lets you forget the killings either. The radio calls are my favorite scenes, funny and desperately sad at once.

The Cost of the Approach

Martin’s strengths come with real costs. The film is slow, grim, and made on almost no money, and it looks it. The seventies regional-cinema roughness, the flat lighting, the uneven supporting performances, the muddy sound, will put off viewers used to polish. This is a cheap film, and while the cheapness suits the grimy subject, it’s still cheapness, and some sequences suffer for it.

The pacing is deliberately uncomfortable too. Romero refuses the rhythms of a conventional thriller. Killings are drawn out and clumsy, and long stretches follow Martin’s mundane life.

The film wants you bored, uneasy and sad, and it gets there, though a few of those long stretches test my patience. It’s easier to admire and be disturbed by than to enjoy.

Does Martin still hold up?

Martin gets an 8 from me because it asks whether vampires exist at all and finds its horror in loneliness and delusion.

Romero never resolves the ambiguity, he roots the story in American economic decay, and Amplas makes a killer pitiable. The flat lighting, muddy sound and uneven supporting cast keep it from a 9, and they do cost it. It’s a hard watch and a rich, haunting one, and I think it’s the most personal thing Romero made.

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