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"For me, the fundamental thing is that the monster is outside, but it’s always there: it's the neighbor. The real threat is the neighbors."
Romero and the zombies are one, but no film is more ambiguous than "Martin". The vampire mythology is defiled, no castles or desolate lands, just a shabby suburb in the outskirts of Pennsylvania where a shy and quiet eighteen-year-old is hosted by the old and anachronistic cousin Cuda who, stuffed with foolish family beliefs, considers him to be the incarnation of a vampire ("...or I will save your soul or destroy you forever, Nosferatu!"). According to Cuda, Martin should be over eighty and fear sunlight, garlic, and crucifixes. None of this is true, he doesn’t use hypnosis or sexual magnetism to daze the victims, but a simple syringe to inject drugs and an ordinary razor blade to cut wrists from which he drinks blood. His violence is not that of a supernatural creature, but of a boy who works in a shop, goes to church, and plays with children, it’s the violence of an ordinary person and therefore even more monstrous.
Romero's direction focuses on atmospheres as anyone else might have approached the genre, but he doesn’t care about the genre and with the camera shows the ordinary ugliness of the places and the people that inhabit his film. Martin, cousin Cristina, the bored housewife trying to seduce him, are faces devoid of any charm and therefore even more disturbing. The ambiguity is further accentuated by the black and white flashbacks showing Martin in period costumes responding to the calls of a beautiful woman, sharply contrasting with the mediocrity of real life and the characters. We will wonder if these are the memories of an octogenarian vampire or the morbid fantasies of a sick boy or yet another desecration/tribute to the genre by Romero.
There are two significant scenes in this regard. The first is when old cousin Cuda, after trying to have Martin exorcised, goes out into the night to find him in the park. And Martin emerges from the fog in a black cloak and fake vampire fangs terrifying the old man who tremblingly prays with a crucifix in hand, only then revealing the masquerade by whispering that it’s just a costume.
The other is when he sneaks into the house of the lady he chose as a victim, believing her to be alone he prepares the syringe to drug her but finds her in bed with her lover and the couple stupidly tries to save face, not realizing the mortal danger.
In the end, Martin is destined to die as vampires do, with the classic stake driven through the heart and this simplifies everything. Killing Martin in that esoteric way eliminates the beast that is outside of us, externalized in the other, and thus we purify ourselves.
As Romero says, the monster is the neighbor but the greatest threat is ourselves with our ignorance.
A film that "sticks with you": the horror of evil is no longer the result of past legends but is the metaphor of the pettiness of the present, in which drinking blood is the search for contact in a society that rejects the "unaligned" individual. And Romero, a year after the special effects-laden "Zombi", benefits from the limited budget available and this time pairs style with concept. The grainy film, saturated colors, anonymous protagonists refer to a master of a wholly different genre, Gerard Damiano and his "metaphysical" porn from the early seventies: "The Devil in Miss Jones" and "The Story of Joanna".
The Italian version, as usual, brings its damages, cutting the film by ten minutes, adding the invasive music by Goblin and slapping on the usual title to recall a masterpiece of the genre: Dreyer's "Vampyr".
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