Shunji Iwai’s VAMPIRE
August 1, 2011 
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Filmmaker and video artist Shunji Iwai is no stranger to Fantasia crowds –he walked away with the Audience prize for Best Asian film at the 1998 festival for Swallowtail Butterfly, and directed Love Letter (his breakout film, in 1995), the dreamy/sad high school drama All About Lily Chou-Chou (2001) and the documentary The Kon Ichikawa Story in 2006.
The online chatrooms of Lily Chou-Chou make a pivotal appearance in Vampire as well; young Canadian actor/model Kevin Zegers (considerably dressed-down here) plays Simon, a soft-spoken biology teacher who lives an inconspicuous life caring for his near-catatonic mother (Amanda http://www.spectacularoptical.ca/2021/02/levitra-schweiz/ Plummer). A seemingly normal guy – that is, with the exception of his routine of trawling of suicide chatrooms looking for willing bloodletters to quench his unnatural anemic thirst.
The film is a series of encounters filtered through Simon’s trepidatious vision –negotiations of suicide and meetings with murder-junkies alike prompt Simon to define himself and his values, and to acknowledge that he can’t exist in a vacuum. Like Romero’s Martin or Scott Leberecht’s Midnight Son (the latter of which also screened at this year’s Fantasia), Iwai’s take on vampirism is one in which human connection and empathy override any sense of violence – and in which the physical vampirism of its protagonist is never definitively explained. A Canadian co-production with appearances by Katherine Isabelle, Rachel Leigh Cook and Keisha Castle-Hughes, Iwai’s first horror outing is a meditative exploration of contemporary vampirism that brings out the best in his motley cast of indie talents.
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VAMPIRE plays Aug 1 at 9:25pm canadian propecia in the Hall Theatre. More info (including the trailer and a great programme text by Festival co-director Mitch Davis) on the film page HERE.
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About the author:
Kier-La Janisse is a film writer, publisher, producer, acquisitions executive for Severin Films and an Adjunct Associate Professor in the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University. She is the author of Cockfight: A Fable of Failure (2024), House of Psychotic Women: An Autobiographical Topography of Female Neurosis in Horror and Exploitation Films (2012/2022) and A Violent Professional: The Films of Luciano Rossi (2007) and has been an editor on numerous books cialis levitra viagra compare including Warped & Faded: Weird Wednesday and the Birth of the American Genre Film Archive (2021) and Satanic Panic: Pop-Cultural Paranoia in the 1980s (2015). She wrote, directed and produced the award-winning documentary Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched: A History of Folk Horror (2021), and produced the acclaimed blu-ray box sets All the Haunts Be Ours: A Compendium of Folk Horror (2021) and The Sensual World of Black Emanuelle (2023).
