Without the hot comeback vampires are making these days, I wonder if a project like Ti West's Dead & Lonely would get the traction it needed to come to light (hiss, pun, hiss). Maybe, maybe not. Granted, it's a very cheap, very simple project, so West could've done it all on a lazy sunday anyway; but West is a director known to horror fans as the director of The Roost. He also has a new movie coming out this Halloween weekend, a throwback horror flick called House of the Devil.
Dead & Lonely is a web series on IFC.com about two people who meet through an internet dating site. Unbeknownst to one of them, the other is actually a vampire. It's five 5-minute episodes, with each episode going up at noon every day this week. As of writing, the first two episodes are already online.
Dead & Lonely actually makes an all right 25-minute short, if not a bit too long. Then again, I watched it one after another in one sitting. It might feel differently when you have to watch it in increments. The first episode doesn't even have anything happening at all. It's mostly two people lounging in their dark apartments, checking on the computer. The only noteworthy moment being a revelation of who the vampire is: the guy or the girl.
It's light on story—actually, it's light on everything—but it's reasonably handled. It feels very much like a mumblecore take on a horror premise, and it all makes sense when the name Joe Swanberg shows up as production crew in the credits. The actor who plays the guy is Justin Rice, the star of mumblecore pioneer Andrew Bujalski's Funny Ha Ha and Mutual Appreciation. It's two people, two interior locations, not a lot of action, shot in a low-down consumer quality DV. Don't expect it to get bloody or anything, too, because it really is mostly just a guy and a girl having a talk, with the vampire thing almost an afterthought.
Watch Dead & Lonely at IFC, and the trailer for Ti West's House of the Devil below.
