Sam (Larry Fessenden) is going through a hard time: His father first disappeared, then died, he is a borderline alcoholic and his girlfriend Liza (Heather Woodbury) has left him for a kind of trial separation.
When he meets Anna (Meredith Snaider) at a Halloween party it is lust on first sight. Anna likes to be mysterious. She does not talk much about her past nor her present. Actually, there is not much she and Sam do talk about. Instead they have sex.
Which would certainly a nice thing for Sam, if not for Anna's special kink: she bites Sam and sucks his blood. At first this just feeds Sam's obsession with Anna even more, but when his health and his grip on reality slowly deteriorate and his friends start to look at him funny, he gets strange ideas about this lover who hates garlic, does not eat and is never around during daylight.
The problem with obsessions is that it is hard to get rid of them.
Larry Fessenden is an interesting case. A true independent filmmaker with a very personal style and very individual themes, he has made his home inside the horror genre while using the aesthetics of independent filmmaking that have come down from John Cassavates. As it goes with artists who trade in bastardized forms, Fessenden tends to sit between the chairs. He's too much of a horror filmer for parts of the art house crowd and too much of an art house director for some horror fans. He does not seem to care much, though.
Habit is a kind of remake of a film he made fifteen years earlier, made basically with the same core cast. I'd like to compare the two films, but I haven't seen the earlier version, so I'll just go with the theory that Fessenden must have had a reason to film it again.
Fessenden's decision to play the lead role himself suggests an auto-biographic reading of the film's story about addiction, obsession and self-destruction (and it seemed quite obvious to me that Anna is exactly what Sam is looking for - his own special way of an easy way out).
I wouldn't be impressed if the vampirism in the film only worked as a metaphor - a trap art house directors using non-realist elements step into all too often - but the supernatural here is metaphor and fictional reality at once, making for a fascinating and balanced way to look at a very imbalanced life.
Visually, Habit is a beautiful example of the classic hand-camera and guerilla location shooting style, which is a very effective way to give everything a semblance of reality.
Hyper-realism is a style the acting goes for too. This and the 1982 version are the only movie acting credits for most of the actors (with Fessenden himself as a big exception), yet a certain amateurishness in the performances just helps to keep up the film's mood. Well, if you ignore Aaron Beall whose reading of Sam's best friend Nick is false all the way through.
What is most fascinating about the film for me is something completely different though. It is Fessenden's eye for the little gestures of his characters that makes the film more than a nice little distraction, as well as the story he does not tell, yet that is barely visible in the cracks and crevices of what we are shown.
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