The immortality of vampire films

Anew Canadian entry puts an idiosyncratic spin on the mythology of the undead

- ADAM NAYMAN

The title of French-Canadian director Ariane Louis-Seize’s acclaimed debut, “Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person,” doubles as a plot summary and a conceptual joke: after all, to be a vampire is, fundamentally, to be inhuman — and also inhumane. It’s a truism that’s been handed down over the centuries by star bloodsuckers from Count Dracula to Lestat, but Seize’s adolescent heroine Sasha is a radical.

She rejects her predatory (re) birthright in favour of a more ascetic lifestyle that doesn’t impinge on the rights of others. Her strange, sometimes enervating mixture of empathy and piety makes her a perfectly millennial protagonist. Meanwhile, her parents, who do the household’s share of hunting without compunction about the fates of their victims, are loving but bewildered, as well as tired of being criticized by their offspring.

Acritical hit last year at the Toronto International Film Festival, “Humanist Vampire” recently scored a Canadian Screen Award for its original screenplay. Accepting the prize, Seize joked that it was the one category where she didn’t have to compete with the popular juggernaut that was Matt Johnson’s “BlackBerry,” which finished the gala with a near sweep.

Currently streaming on Crave, the film is poised to become one of the more notable Canadian titles of recent years, which testifies both to its maker’s skill and savvy as a firsttime feature director as well as the durability of the underlying mythology that she’s given such an idiosyncratic spin.

Vampires are, of course, older than the movies, and they were also present at the medium’s inception: in George Melies’ 1896 short “The Haunted Castle,” the director-star is transformed into a bat — an optical illusion that helped to establish the visual syntax of horror cinema.