There’s romance in the air tonight. The weather is calm, the air is cool, and everywhere you look, you’re greeted by the suggestive sight of potential lovers intermingling under a sea of stars. It’s the perfect night to find the counterpart to your soul, or perhaps just a temporary companion to create a lasting memory with... But nights like these are also rife with predators. Wherever the young and lustful wander, you’ll find those with far more sinister intentions, setting traps that an idealistic dreamer may not be prepared to avoid... And that they might not be able to walk away from. And yet, there is one far more rare possibility... That two hunters may wind up preying on each other. There are few pastimes more dangerous than hunting for a predator, because in your pursuit of a fellow hunter, it’s all too easy to become prey yourself.
It’s been a long time since I’ve reviewed anything from Takena Nagao, mainly because I like to focus my horror reviews around the month of October, but in a move that caught me completely off-guard, he actually uploaded a brand new short just yesterday. For those who don’t know, Takena is a Japanese youtuber who makes short stop-motion animations using clay, and I’ve been a pretty big fan of his work for a few years now. His work isn’t perfect, in fact you can see the improvement of his craft in real time if you watch his shorts in release order, but I’ve personally never seen a stop motion animator on Youtube who has kept me as consistently entertained as he has.
If there’s one issue with his work that has endured, it’s that the surface of his clay characters is a little rougher than I’d like it to be... There are a lot of tears and ripples on them, which you would never see from a more professional production like the films we’ve received over the years from Laika, but that roughness does kind of feel comforting at this point. Rather than making his work look sloppy or lazy, it adds a gritty low budget quality to them, which actually works when the story he tells is very reminiscent of classic grindhouse fare. This project in particular calls back to the kind of exploitation film that will show an extended sequence of a protagonist in peril... Usually female... Before they save themselves and enact gory revenge upon their captors.
There’s a lot you can say about movies like these, which can be described as both disgustingly misogynist and triumphantly feminist in equal measure, in fact it's probably best to just call them a matter of taste. There’s always going to be an argument to be made about whether the carnage at the end is really worth all of the uncomfortable torment that it takes to get there. It’s torture porn that gradually evolves into revenge porn, best exemplified by a previous Takena work entitled Pussycat, but as luck would have it, Midnight Vampire ingeniously skips all of that by sliding right past the torture porn portion and straight into the revenge/justice scenario. Which basically means you can enjoy your claymation grindhouse flick without having to feel guilty.
The design of Takena’s vampire isn’t anything unusual for him, but he did make a few interesting changes. She still has the ear-length bob haircut that a lot of his characters have, which is likely used so often because longer and more elaborate hair would be difficult to animate in this particular art form. That hair did get a snazzy coat of silver paint though, which is nice. I also like how she’s wearing something new, a Misa Amane style gothic lolita dress, rather than the typical maid uniform or bunny costume. The rest of the characters aren’t anything over the top, but they all do look like distinctly different and relatively normal looking people, and there thankfully aren’t many of them.
The animation is deceptively minimal, which is probably a good thing to shoot for considering how much time and money tends to go into claymation, but the limited movement is compensated for immensely by the expressiveness of the characters, who can communicate so much information to the viewer with such small changes in their countenances, from the look of terror in a snuff film victim’s eyes(the runny eyeliner effect adds a lot to this) to the subtle unspoken nod between a crime boss and his bodyguard. More importantly, though, this short is shot and directed flawlessly. There’s so much heart-racing suspense in some highly tense moments, including one shot of the protagonist just slowly walking down a hallway. A lot of the music cues are also references to his previous work, which I like.
Like a lot of his previous work, the story is brief and fairly simple, but the narrative is extremely strong and effective. This time, however, the actual moral alignment of the title character is up for interpretation. The vampire meets a guy at a restaurant, goes back to his place(but she can’t enter without an explicit invitation, which is a cleverly subtle little detail). She kills him, draining his blood, but she then finds a dark web red room operating in his house. It’s unclear whether she just encountered this man randomly and just happened to find more than she bargained for, or if she specifically asked him out because she knew what he was up to, which renders her kind of morally vague, which I think is a good thing, because either answer on its own would raise some inconvenient questions.
But if there’s one thing I’m really happy to see carry into this short from his previous work, it’s that spark of creativity that he’s thankfully never lost touch with. I’m not going to pretend everything he’s published is a gem, but even the worst of the bunch(obviously I'm referring to Shitcom) was at least something unique that you couldn’t see anywhere else. Nobody’s going to call his clay wrestling videos masterpieces, but he was still able to show off a strong knack for choreographing action scenes. Unless I’m mistaken, this is his first actual claymation vampire short... His only other vampire related work that I’m aware of was a CGI short about Japanese highschool lesbians... but I couldn’t help but notice how the tone and atmosphere of this short was remarkably different from all of his zombie related projects.
And speaking of creativity, Takena loves to go wild creating gory visual effects using clay. True, the violence and viscera are less excessive this time around, but there’s also a much stronger element of timing, and the slightly tamer nature of the bloodshed allows the creativity of each kill to stand out. Like, there’s a guy who gets his face chopped off, which would realistically be bloody as all hell, but just seeing his face hit the ground a few seconds before the rest of his lifeless body falls backwards is a much cooler visual. Most of the kills are somewhat like that, and as a result, the final kill of the short is able to stand out for how overly gory and bloody it is, and while I won’t reveal the context here, that one HAD to be as savage as possible.
Takena is renowned for his ability to tell these stories with no dialogue, but he does occasionally slip in a line or two via silent film captions, which is a stylistic choice rather than a cop-out, and it’s cool to see it whenever he does it, which he does here. If I had one complaint to make, it’s that vampires are known to not show up on film, and the dude with the mustache just kept filming her. I would have appreciated at least one nod to her being impossible to film. Also, there’s a transition at the end that was kind of confusing, but other than that, this is probably one of Takena’s best efforts. Despite having a title that sounds like what you’d get if you locked Ed Wood and Tommy Wiseau in a room together, it’s a short that gets a little better every time I watch it. I’d highly recommend checking this out, especially if you’ve enjoyed what you’ve seen from Takena before.
I give Midnight Vampire an 8/10.
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