Stake Land (2010)

Official trailer

Stake Land gets its 7 by understanding something most vampire films miss.

Sometimes the vampires aren’t the point. Jim Mickle made a post-apocalyptic road movie that happens to have vampires in it, and the subject is survival, surrogate family, and the way human beings turn cruel when the world ends. The vampires here are closer to zombies, a feral plague that’s collapsed civilization, and the film uses them as the backdrop for a story about a man, a boy, and the long dangerous road north.

It’s a small film that punches above its budget on the strength of mood and conviction.

I like this movie a lot more than its budget should allow. It’s sad and dusty and patient, and the gray roads and burned-out towns haunt me more than any vampire in it. My reservation is that it tells a very familiar story, and the people around Mister and Martin never get enough to do.

This is a quiet, melancholy piece of work, more interested in the details of a ruined America than in vampire action, though it delivers enough of the latter to satisfy. It’ll frustrate anyone wanting a creature feature and reward anyone open to a somber survival drama wearing horror clothes.

Vampires as the End of the World

Mickle’s vampires are a contagion, feral and animalistic, that’s overrun the United States and ended organized society. The survivors live in scattered settlements and pick their way across a landscape of abandoned towns and roving threats. The vampire plague functions exactly like the zombie plague of other apocalypse films, a force of nature that removed civilization and left the survivors to deal with each other.

This choice frees the film to be about its real interests.

With the vampires reduced to environmental hazard, the drama comes from the humans, the alliances and betrayals, the kindness and savagery, the question of how to stay human when staying alive demands so much. The vampires are the weather. The story is the people walking through it. It’s a smart reframing that lets a vampire film be a survival film without straining.

That reframing is the smartest call Mickle makes, and he’s right to trust it all the way. Vampire films that stop the story every ten minutes to show off fangs are tedious, and this one never does.

The Surrogate Family on the Road

The film’s heart is the relationship between Mister, a grim, skilled vampire hunter played by co-writer Nick Damici, and Martin, an orphaned teenager played by Connor Paolo, whom Mister takes under his wing after the boy’s family is killed. Their bond, a hard man teaching a soft boy to survive, is the familiar spine of post-apocalyptic fiction, and the film executes it with sincerity if not originality.

As they travel north toward a rumored safe haven, they gather others, a nun, a pregnant young woman, an ex-Marine, forming the makeshift family that these stories run on. The film is at its best in the quiet moments between the violence, the small kindnesses and shared meals that the characters cling to as proof they’re still people. Damici gives Mister a weary gravity, and Paolo makes Martin’s coming of age affecting, though the supporting characters are thinner.

The shared meals are where the film has me. Damici plays Mister so tight-lipped that a single small kindness from him hits harder than any of the kills, and I wish the film had given the nun and the ex-Marine even half that attention.

The Human Villains

The film’s sharpest idea is that the worst threat in the ruined world is other people. The primary antagonists are a violent religious cult called the Brotherhood, who have decided the vampire plague is God’s will and who prey on survivors with a fervor more frightening than any creature. They’re the real predators of the film, humans who have used the apocalypse as license for cruelty, and they scare me far more than anything with fangs in this movie.

This is well-worn post-apocalyptic territory, the idea that people are the true monsters when society collapses, and the film doesn’t bring much new to it.

But it commits to the theme with conviction, and the cult provides the film’s most disturbing moments, including a brutal sequence that raises the stakes sharply. The vampires kill because they’re animals. The Brotherhood kills because they’ve chosen to, and the film knows which is worse.

Mood Over Budget

Made on very little money, Stake Land succeeds largely on atmosphere. Mickle and his team shoot the ruined American countryside with a melancholy beauty, all gray skies and empty roads and abandoned farmhouses, and the film’s elegiac tone is its strongest asset. A wistful voiceover from Martin gives it the feel of a remembered story, a survivor looking back. That suits the autumnal mood.

I love the look of this film. Those empty farmhouses under gray skies feel like somebody’s real memory of the end of the world, and I’d happily watch Mickle shoot ruined county roads for another hour.

The limitations of the budget show in the thin supporting characters, the occasionally choppy action, and a scope that strains against what the money allows.

The film wants to be an epic of the ruined road and has the resources for a modest one. But Mickle directs with enough conviction and feeling that the small film mostly transcends its constraints, and the sincerity gets it past the rough patches. This is a labor of love, and it shows in the right ways.

Is Stake Land worth watching?

Stake Land deserves its 7 as a sincere, melancholy post-apocalyptic survival drama that uses vampires as backdrop for a story about staying human at the end of the world. Jim Mickle’s elegiac atmosphere, the central bond between a grim hunter and an orphaned boy, and the conviction of the filmmaking get it past a small budget. It loses points for thin supporting characters and a familiar reliance on human-cult villains that brings little new to well-worn apocalyptic themes.

It’s a modest film made with real feeling, and I’d send anyone to it for the mood and the heart long before the vampire thrills. The 7 is my way of saying I admire it a great deal and wish it had surprised me more. The road-movie bones are familiar, and the people riding along with Mister and Martin deserved more to do.

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