MARTIN 1977
“Things only seem to be magic. There is no real magic. There’s no real magic ever.”
This line, spoken by Martin, reflects Romero’s intention to strip away the supernatural and ground the horror in psychological and social reality.
George Romero’s Martin (1977) is the kind of film that slips under your skin and lingers—less a straightforward vampire tale than a quietly devastating meditation on alienation, desire, and the blurry line between myth and madness. If Romero made his name with the flesh-eating chaos of Night of the Living Dead 1968, here he turns inward, trading zombies for a protagonist who’s just as haunted, but heartbreakingly human.
The film awakens like a nightmare, breaking the surface of sleep with the opening scene arriving like a shard of glass in the quiet. Martin (John Amplas), a pale, withdrawn young man, sedates a woman on a train and drinks her blood—not with fangs and capes, but with a razor blade and a syringe. Romero strips away the Gothic trappings, grounding the horror in the mundane. Martin isn’t some ageless monster; he’s a lost soul, shuffling through the faded neighborhoods of Pittsburgh, caught between the superstitions of his Old World uncle Tata Cuda (Lincoln Maazel) and the numbing banality of modern America.
Romero’s style here is sly and unhurried, letting scenes breathe and discomfort build. The cinematography, all grainy textures and washed-out colors, turns the rustbelt setting into a landscape of decay—row houses, empty lots, and the kind of grocery stores where hope goes to die. The art direction is almost documentary in its realism, but Romero still finds moments of surreal beauty: Martin’s daydreams of classic vampire seductions, shot in luminous black and white, flicker through the film like fragments of a forgotten movie.
The supporting cast is pitch-perfect. Maazel is both pitiable and terrifying as Tata Cuda, clinging to garlic and crucifixes, convinced Martin is “Nosferatu.” Christine Forrest brings warmth and complexity as Christina, the only person who tries to reach Martin on a human level. But it’s Amplas who anchors the film—his Martin is all awkwardness and longing, a boy trapped in a nightmare he can’t escape or fully understand. There’s a gentleness to his performance that makes the violence all the more unsettling; you’re never sure if Martin is a monster, a victim, or both.
Donald Rubinstein’s score is a revelation—moody, jazzy, and mournful, it weaves through the film like a half-remembered lullaby, reinforcing the sense of loneliness and dread without ever overpowering the story. The music, much like the film itself, is haunting but leaves much to the imagination, letting emotion seep in at the edges.
There are key scenes that have stuck with me: Martin’s awkward phone calls to a late-night radio host, where he’s dubbed “The Count” and treated as a joke; his tentative, doomed romance with a lonely housewife; the moments when fantasy and reality blur, and you’re left wondering if Martin’s “curse” is supernatural or psychological. The violence is sudden, intimate, and never glamorous—Romero refuses to let you look away from the pain, but he also refuses to let you judge.
Critically, Martin has grown in stature over the years, now regarded as one of Romero’s most nuanced and quietly radical films. At its core, it’s less about vampirism than about the hunger to belong, the ache of being unseen, and the stories we tell ourselves to survive. In Romero’s hands, horror isn’t just about what goes bump in the night—it’s about the shadows that move through empty rooms, the old sins that echo in our dreams, and the quiet terror of being alone in a world that doesn’t believe in monsters, but still manages to create them.
“Martin is a vampire in that he drinks the blood of his victims, but to categorise him as such, in the traditional sense, is to not only misunderstand him, but to forgive him in a way.”
Romero goes on to challenge audiences to question why we so readily compromise our morals when faced with the tragic archetype of the vampire, and whether anyone is so innately monstrous that we can perceive their attempts to restrain their urges as noble. He asserts: “[Monsters]… exist in us and among us […] we should know. We created them.” This suggests Romero saw Martin not as a supernatural villain, but as a reflection of human nature and the myths we create to explain our darkest impulses.