There’s only so much you can do with the vampire subgenre, and you can bet that most everything you can do has already been done before. But at least in Neil Jordan’s new film Byzantium there is the satisfaction of seeing those things done beautifully, and very well.
Byzantium tells the story of two vampires on the run from their past, seeking sanctuary in an obscure town and knocking ordinary lives off kilter as they play out the latest round in a personal vendetta that has already been going on for a couple of centuries. It’s a familiar set-up – horror fans will have no trouble in catching echoes of Interview With the Vampire, Let the Right One In, The Hunger, even. What’s less familiar is the sheer haunting intensity of this film, the atmosphere it creates through its striking combination of opulence and understatement, the curious and (for me) utterly compelling interaction between the blandly prosaic and high gothic.
The cinematography is scintillating. The way the script grounds itself in the commonplace and moves in a stately progression towards the more grandiose abstractions of poetry is an act of daring that the screenwriter, Moira Buffini, pulls off rather marvellously.
Everyone in this movie plays their part with commitment and appropriate intensity. Saoirse Ronan is outstanding.
Horror cinema has never been more popular, it seems, than it is today. Barely a week goes by without a new horror movie being released – but with the predominance of the over-produced, shoddily conceived and lamely scripted kind of Hollywood product still in the ascendant, there are precious few genuinely decent ones around. It’s all the more satisfying, then, when a film as gorgeous and thoughtful and lovingly crafted as Byzantium arrives on our screens. I came away from it excited and moved – it has a killer ending – and all the more so because Byzantium was filmed in Hastings. Our town looks perfect in her role – mysterious and end-of-summer and faintly spooky – and the familiar locations have been utilized with the same appropriate and effective understatement as everything else in the film. It was lovely to see local people turning out in force to see it – there was a real sense of anticipation and the excited chatter as the audience left the cinema told its own success story. This movie is good for Hastings, and good for horror.
Byzantium is vamptastic. Go and see it.