You Shouldn’t Have Let Me In (2024)

Kelsey (Diana Gardner) and professional Gay Best Friend Blake (Nathaniel Ansbach) travel to Italy for the surprisingly intimate bachelorette party of Kelsey’s former best friend Rochelle (Isabella Egizi). There’s some bad blood Kelsey has never actually talked through with Rochelle concerning the fact that Rochelle’s husband to be is also Kelsey’s ex; what seems to have caused a larger rift in the friendship, however, is Rochelle’s career as an influencer. This turns all of her private interactions public, and makes actual friendship as Kelsey understands it impossible.

Right now, that rift is certainly not bridged by Rochelle’s bridesmaid Jenny (Anastasiya Bogach), who acts like the director and producer of the five person – one of whom mysteriously never arrives - bachelorette outing as if it were an important event to be micromanaged to death.

On the plus side, Jenny did manage what looks like the greatest Air B’n’B coup ever: an actual centuries-old Italian villa.

As it turns out, this place usually belongs to a man named Victor (Fabián Castro). And Victor for is part is soon the be revealed as a vampire who sees Kelsey’s as the reincarnation of a former lover and wants to make her his bride, by any means necessary – so mostly sex, hypnotism, bloodsucking, and more hypnotism.

I enjoyed Dave Parker’s Tubi low budget original quite a bit more than I expected going in. In fact, encountering it felt a bit like stumbling onto one of the lesser Charles Band productions before he got all puppet-y on us: a film that embraces being cheap and cheesy without using this as an excuse for not putting any effort in.

So what if many of the American characters have suspiciously continental accents, if this means we can shoot on location in Italy? Sure, sexy vampires have been done to death, but what if we mix the well-worn tropes of 90s erotic (or “erotic”, if you prefer) vampire movies with some contemporary concerns? That’s the kind of thoughts I suspect to have gone through the filmmakers’ minds, and that’s the sort of thing I’m looking for in my low budget movies rather than total originality or the kind of production values you realistically shouldn’t expect anyway.

You Shouldn’t makes appreciating it rather easy as well – not only does it look pretty great for what it is – the 90s indoor fog and some clever, also 90s-style lighting tricks work wonders for nightclub scenes as well as for a bachelorette party turned hopeful orgy turned hallucinatory mini-hellscape – it’s also very well paced.

The script by Michael Lucid and Mary O’Neil is much cleverer than it strictly needs to be, and eventually turns many a trope of the sexy vampire movie on its head to use the space of wonderfully cheesy horror to think through toxic relationships and the vagaries of female friendship in a world full of toxic men and general assholes in a way that’s at once efficient and aggressively non-stupid. Again, that’s how many a great low budget movie has done it in the past, and clearly, it is a tradition these filmmakers understand and appreciate.

Among the other surprising joys of the script is character work that starts from the expected tropes but eventually turns them into characters that don’t always act like their initial nature suggests, but feel rather more complex and, dare I say it, human, thereby. The cast certainly seem to appreciate that as well, and transitions from bitchy one-note to person very effectively.

Plus, how many horror movies feature a gay occult shop owner and vampire hunter?