Stake Land: The Vampire Film You SHOULD See This Year

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It’s clear that Mickle is a real director and horror fan and not someone who was just handed the keys to a film. In fact, it’s easy to forget at times that we are watching a horror movie – Stake Land exudes a high-end quality that transcends what we’re used to getting in genre films.

Easy to forget, that is, until a raging bloodsucker leaps across the screen and tries to rip out someone’s throat.

Composer Jeff Grace’s minimalist score evokes a delicate, ethereal moodiness reminiscent of Nick Cave/Warren Ellis’ compositions for The Assassination of Jesse James soundtrack. It’s absolutely beautiful work that both stands on its own and simultaneously enhances the hopeless desperation of the film.

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The introspective and well-crafted character-driven plot is also refreshing, as most contemporary horror films are character-driven right into the ground. Stake Land is about more than just vampire killers killing vampires.

We join the characters – a killer forced to care for an orphaned boy, an orphaned boy forced to become a killer, a mother-to-be and a nun who has lost her faith – in silently examining their place in this undead world. As the group fights collectively to survive, each member also struggles to retain his or her own humanity.

When juxtaposed against another recent (and expectedly disappointing) fang film, the Fright Night remake, Stake Land proves that it’s still possible to make a new (although admittedly derivative) vampire movie.

Let’s face it – everything has been done before at this point. But in a time when Hollywood is cinematically regurgitating the same crap year after year, when one of the little guys pops up with something as good as Stake Land, they’ve got my money every time.

Stake Land is a vampiric cross between Phantasm II and The Road, and in my humble opinion is one of the best undead films of the past 25 years. It’s an extremely welcome addition to vampire cinema and proves that competent and talented filmmakers still exist in the horror genre.

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Rob Roberts does not “tweet,” preferring to keep most of his random thoughts to himself, where random thoughts generally belong. You can find him @home, doing many non-Twitter related activities.
Stake Land is available on DVD and Blu-ray. Also recommended is Jim Mickle’s first feature film, Mulberry Street.