In short: Leif Jonker’s Darkness: The Vampire Version (1993/2005)

A roaming vampire spends his nights destroying a series of anonymous midwestern US small towns. Some teens band together to fight him, using an astonishing number of firearms as well as cobbled together holy water and other more traditional accoutrements.

Made by Leif Jonker (who obviously was involved in nearly every element of the production) in stops and starts when he was still a teen, and re-edited into the “Vampire Version” (which now features songs by Apostasy whenever the gore starts squirting, following the principles Dario Argento taught us) for the DVD reissue in 2005 or 2006, this is about as grand a no budget gore movie as anyone could wish for.

The blurry, grimy visual quality typical of this sort of thing here helps the film take on a particularly dreamlike quality, where washed out colours and the bleakest Mid-West turn into a deeply American version of the Gothic. Here, nobody notices whole towns getting wiped out by animalistic, throat-ripping vampires, because nobody cares about what happens in these trailer parks and low-income family homes; whole states have become liminal places, apparently.

Thusly, continuity problems and strange filmmaking decisions just seem to emphasise that this takes place in a space situated between dreams and waking. The fountains of gore, the many exploding heads, the cheaply pitch-shifted voices and all the screaming of barely coherent dialogue (but who’d stay coherent when confronted with this version of the vampire myth?) all turn into the texture of this dream.

On the other, more quotidian side, this is an inspired example of a group of young people having a lot of fun, making a movie with what they’ve got, pushing towards what they haven’t, coming up with their own tricks and techniques because film school isn’t around where they come from, and often ending up at genuinely creative solutions to filmmaking problems. Particularly the editing is often brilliant in its un-schooled way, dominated by non-handbook cuts that work incredibly well for what Jonker and his cohorts set out to do. That this also adds to the peculiar, nightmarishly thick mood of the whole affair is probably only a by-product of the method, or mere chance, or just made up by a mind with a tendency to romanticize things when watching, but the effect is all the more beautiful (like bent chrome fenders and fountains of blood are beautiful) for its randomness. Which really is what the joy of the great backyard movies is all about.