Here at OBSCURAE, we champion short storytelling as the hunting ground for your next favourite filmmaker – and encourage you not to skip the shorts programme. Welcome back to our short-film review series, Sweet and Short.
Red City is a gothic horror short about the connection between two vampires, and how immortality, religion and bloodlust shape it.
Here at OBSCURAE, we champion short storytelling as the hunting ground for your next favourite filmmaker – and encourage you not to skip the shorts programme. Welcome back to our short-film review series, Sweet and Short.
It is tough to describe, outside of metaphor, how women conceive of their romantic relationships with older men, if they so choose to indulge in them. There's a lot to unpack, and seeing as women's interactions with the opposite sex are publicly and humiliatingly psychoanalysed, it's better to leave things unsaid.
Or, you can make a film about Vampires.
Red City is a short film begging for a feature - a lore-packed, luscious and magnetic tete-a-tete between two Vampires, inextricably linked and unashamedly contentious. The film feels like a crisp, cold catharsis, and with every word spat between our two immortals, the plot thickens redder.
The writing blew me away – almost the entire film takes place in one hallway, as the conversation escalates, and the frank simplicity leaves the story nowhere to hide.
Much of this film reminded me of my own relationship to the concept of debate, which formed as a young girl trying to keep up with conversations the older men were having around me, and eventually surpassing them. There's an odd Peter Pan syndrome that sets in – you find yourself able to hold your own in rooms you're too young for, and you have no choice but to carry that into the rest of your life. When you're young, they call you an old soul. What is that but Vampirism?
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