Movie Review – Martin

Martin (1977)
Written and directed by George A. Romero

While most know George Romero as the director of the zombie films Night of the Living Dead, Dawn of the Dead, and Day of the Dead, he also made other films during the 1970s. Between 1968 and 1978, Romero wrote and/or directed five non-zombie films, including a romantic comedy. Most of his interests stayed firmly in horror, and of these pictures, Martin is the one you’re most likely to hear about, and for good reason. Having seen only three Romero pictures to date, I can say Martin is the one that kept my attention the best. It is a character study and vampire movie that plays with our perceptions by centering us entirely in the mind of the protagonist, who is definitely a murderer but may also be a literal monster.

Martin (John Amplas) travels on an overnight train from Indianapolis to Pittsburgh. While on the train, he sneaks into a female passenger’s room and sedates her with a syringe full of narcotics. Then Martin proceeds to sexually assault and bleed her from the wrist, drinking the blood as it issues forth. He disembarks at his stop, never caught, and is met by his elderly cousin Tateh Cuda. Martin moves into an empty room in Cuda’s house alongside the old man’s granddaughter. 

Cuda believes in the old stories of the motherland in Lithuania and calls Martin “Nosferatu.” He proceeded to rig a bell above Martin’s bedroom door that rings every time it’s opened so he can track the young man’s movements. Martin also believes he is a vampire and frequently has black & white visions of a past life that he might have experienced or is completely hallucinating. As the hunger increases, Martin finds it harder & harder to control himself. It’s only a matter of time until he feeds again.

While the zombie films are creepy, I didn’t find them nearly as disturbing as Martin. Romero has made a movie that attempts to make the audience empathize with a truly horrific person, and it works. There’s an amateurishness to Martin’s plans, or at minimum a constant clash with dumb luck, that makes me think he is not actually a vampire but a severely mentally disturbed person. An extended set piece at one victim’s home has Martin realizing a piece of information he was not privy to that threatens to upend his feeding. I realized the tension I felt was not on the part of the victims but for Martin, as the film had done an excellent job of centering his perspective. 

I think Romero does well folding old horrors & fears into modern urban settings. Dawn of the Dead, with its commentary on consumerism by taking place in a shopping mall, is one example. Martin is the story of a young man with intergenerational trauma living in a world where his mental health is not taken into consideration by anyone. The old ladies who shout nasty things at Martin as he works at Cuda’s market don’t see him as a person; he’s an object they can punch down on. The only people who show him an ounce of sympathy are Christina, Cuda’s granddaughter, and Abbie, a customer at the market who Martin has an affair with. But as much as the film makes me feel empathy for Martin to a degree, I still am in fear for those women because I know Martin hungers and would drink their blood if he could.

I was reminded of the 2017 film The Transfiguration, which is about Milo, a Black teenager who believes he is a vampire who actively kills and drinks the blood of people in his community. Much like Martin, Milo has this intense internalized system of beliefs about who he is and how he goes about doing it. There’s a female supporting character who has empathy for Milo. In both films, the character’s final fate comes suddenly and at a moment when they seem to have made peace with their twisted nature. I would be surprised if the writer-director of The Transfiguration, Michael O’Shea, wasn’t inspired by Romero’s Martin, at least in some small way. 

While the budget is clearly low and the actors do a decent job to varying degrees, Martin oozes with that sense of urban decay that drew me to The Transfiguration. This is Pittsburgh, as the United States was in freefall due to the greed of banks when it came to issuing bonds for cities to continue functioning. Much like in other cities in the Eastern part of the United States, this forced decay would result in increased crime and a whole host of narratives intended to take power away from people and place it into the hands of corporations, hence the Disney-ification of Times Square under Giuliani. 

We can see that same decay today as fentanyl is allowed to ravage communities, and the police feign helplessness despite having record budgets. A lone psychopath like Martin, while dangerous to specific people, just isn’t as much of a threat as these institutions, which wield immense power and can crush entire communities. Maybe that’s why we have even a tiny bit of sympathy for someone as pathetic as Martin; he’s nothing in the grand scheme of things. How can we be afraid of a vampire when I’ve watched my own country spend billions of tax dollars firebombing people in hospitals on the other side of the world? As we see in the final sequence of the picture, removing Martin from the story doesn’t take much effort. Fixing the bigger problems in this world…well, that will require more than a wooden stake through the heart.

The dominant emotion of Martin is sadness. Romero does have a talent for seeing how heartbreaking the world can be. I think of the little girl turned by a zombie bite and murdering her own mother in Night. The doomed attempt at building order in Day of the Dead. And Martin is yet another sad protagonist in Romero’s sea of them. I think Romero’s work saw the birth of a contemporary horror subgenre, a connection to the existential woes of post-war America. It’s bleaker than Lovecraft because at least there are beings of immense power in some dimension affecting things. In Romero’s world, much like the landscape Tobe Hooper painted in the Texas Chainsaw Massacre, there’s nothing but us clever, dangerous apes, and in the end, is anything more terrifying than that?