I’m
not familiar with Ernest Dickerson’s work beyond a few television
episodes, but The
V Word made me
want to change that. This is another episode that improved upon a
second viewing. I think I was thrown my first time through because
something seemed off about the episode. Eventually, though, I
realized what it was: this is the rare horror story that isn’t
actually about
the villain. We’re presented with our villain as he’s presented
to our protagonist. The buildup does not include indications that
they’re being watched, or shots of the villain doing horrible
things in shadow. Everything we’re given is their perspective, and
the horrifying things that happen to them. Watching the episode with
this in mind, it’s fantastic.
The
episode succeeds largely because our two protagonists, Justin
(Branden Nadon) and Kerry (Arjay Smith), manage to embody the spirit
of horror-movie teenagers without ever really making you hate them.
They’re both young men with a self-destructive need to assert their
own masculinity, but they’re treated with enough sympathy to keep
us on their side. Justin lives with a single mother and his sister
(Lynda Boyd and Jodelle Ferland), and has an abusive father (Keith
Humphrey) who demeans him, and Kerry is African American and seen as
too “white” by his brothers (not shown onscreen). So, they
decide to break into a morgue where Justin’s cousin works in the
classic “I want to see a dead body” (yes, they’re old enough to
have been to funerals, but it’s implied they wanted to see the body
of a young person). As it happens a vampire named Mr Chaney (Michael
Ironside) chose that night to attack the morgue. Kerry is bitten,
but Justin abandons him and escapes.
I’m
a bit unclear on what happens next: either Kerry, in the process of
regenerating, runs to Justin’s house for help and ends up biting
Justin, or Mr. Chaney orders the vampirized Kerry to seek out Justin.
Either way, this episode feels like the vampire equivalent of
American Werewolf. Rather than just whining about “hunger,”
we see both fledgeling vampires have huge chunks ripped out of their
throats, and the visuals give us a real, visceral sense of what
Justin is going through.
We’re
eventually given some of Mr. Chaney’s origin: he was a High School
teacher fired for inappropriate relationships with students, but we
don’t find out how he became a vampire. He’s not the point,
though, even though he has control over Kerry for most of the
episode. The real drama is the relationship between Justin and
Kerry, and their views on vampirism. Kerry takes a practical
approach, killing Justin’s abusive father to try to get him to feed
on someone not worthy of life, while Justin views the act of killing
to save his own life as unacceptable. Chaney is just a sociopathic
murderer with a barely-concealed sexual interest in the two young
men, and is unable to even maintain control of Kerry when he attempts
to force Justin to kill his sister.
With
Chaney dead, the two reach a truce: Each decides his own path. Justin
ends his life, but Kerry agrees to leave town and to travel the
country, feeding to live far away from Justin's family. Unlike some
vampire works (*cough*Twilight*cough*)
in which the audience is expected to simply accept vampires as
sympathetic if they're not currently killing a protagonist, this
ending doesn't feel like a gloss-over. The portrayal works
because we know Kerry is a killer, and our sympathies with him are
tenuous. He’s only moderately better than Chaney.
Upon
re-watching the show, this is easily my favorite episode so far. I’d
love to see a sequel following Kerry, or a feature-length version of
this story. It’s one of the flat-out best vampire tales I’ve
ever seen committed to film.
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