31 Days of Halloween: Black as Night

2021, Maritte Lee Go (Phobias) -- Amazon

Welcome to the Blumhouse is an imprint used by Blumhouse Productions, representing a collaboration between Amazon Prime and Blum. They are producing six movies in total, supposedly thematically tied, but so far, that tie is pretty thin. The company focuses on doing low budget horror movies where they give the creative team full control, i.e. Jason Blum doesn't come along in a purple suit sticking his nose where its not wanted. I might not enjoy all that they do, but I do like the production values.

The low budget on this one only really shows on the choice of talent (all relatively unknown faces) and the shooting locations (run down sections of New Orleans) but doesn't affect the impact of the movie at all. It's a rather fun vampire romp that struck me as a throwback to the more-teen-adventure-less-horror vampire flicks of the 80s & 90s, such as Lost Boys and Fight Night. 

Shawna's (Asjha Cooper, Secret Diary of an American Cheerleader) not a nerd girl, but she does lack for self-confidence. I wonder how prevalent the light-skinned vs dark-skinned tension is in New Orleans, but it definitely does play into the popular vs unpopular kids dynamic that has Shawna nervous about approaching the popular boy she has a crush on. It doesn't help that Shawna's mother is fighting addiction issues prevalent since the trauma after Katrina, and is living in a mostly abandoned apartment complex. It also doesn't help that her mother is turned by vampires using the same apartments as feeding and breeding grounds. When she accidentally gives her mother final death, Shawna decides to go on the offensive.

Shawna recruits Granya (Abbie Gayle, Scream Queens) a non-Goth but local vampire fiction fan (disappointed there were no overt Anne Rice references), her best fried Pedro (Fabrizio Guido, World War Z) and inadvertently Chris (Mason Beauchamp, Filthy Rich), the boy  she has a crush on, when he does the post-funereal visit and offers to deal with whoever hurt her mother. He didn't know it was vampires, but once he does know, he is all in. Good kid.

There is some fun vampire mythos table-flipping here, especially when a very very old vampire turns out to have no ties to Eastern Europe at all. The rest is good, old fashioned stake and garlic and silver and vampires go poof into dust familiar stuff, all tied to the culture and troubles that New Orleans has as its recent and distant histories. All the kids were played solidly, leaving most of the ham & cheese to the adult vampires.

Based on this one, I might be checking out the rest of the Blumhouse ones in this series.