Welcome to the set!” crows STAKE LAND director Jim Mickle upon seeing Fango arrive at a Pennsylvania farmhouse. “The final day of the shoot; how exciting!” It’s actually the end of just one leg of the multipart filming of STAKE LAND (currently playing festival dates and opening theatrically next year from Dark Sky Films, which produced it with Larry Fessenden’s Glass Eye Pix), and a blisteringly cold night in September—the kind of complete, consuming darkness that only comes with the absence of streetlights. In other words, the perfect climate for a vampire attack.
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A door in front of you beckons to be opened. Shaking off the horror and carnage you’ve seen, you move through into what appears to be a church sanctuary. It’s cold, dark and eerily quiet, yet it still glows as a beacon of salvation, a spiritual release from the terror experienced by your earthly body.
An artist never knows when inspiration will strike, and for rising makeup FX artist Toby Sells, the moment happened in front of a television set when he was 10 years old. “I was always into monster movies,” he recalls, “but when I saw PLANET OF THE APES on THE CBS FRIDAY NIGHT MOVIES, I was overwhelmed and in awe.”
British actor Andrew Lincoln is about to get whacked upside the head with a shovel, and three-time Academy Award-nominated writer/director Frank Darabont is smiling.
Ask any serious, sophisticated vampire fan about their favorite contemporary fang film, and more often than not, their title of choice will be 2008’s LET THE RIGHT ONE IN. Tomas Alfredson’s chilling, melancholy and austere Swedish coming-of-age bloodbath is as elegant as it is eerie, and managed to bridge the gap between the art house and the exploitation worlds with copious amounts of both beauty and terror. Critical and festival acclaim came in geysers.