Movie Monday: Review of Midnight Son

In January 2011 I wrote about a then-unreleased movie called Midnight Son that had come to my attention. I had lamented about the vampire genre being like vampires and refusing to die. However, judging by the trailer, this movie showed promise of offering something fresh.

I had forgotten about Midnight Son (to look for it, I should say) until August of 2012, when I received an email from one of the movie’s producers. He let me know it was out on DVD, VOD, and Digital Download.

I checked to see if Blockbuster had it and was excited to see they did. I added it to my queue, but it was only last week when I finally had a chance to watch it. (I don’t get to watch movies like I once did.)

So what did I think of Midnight Son? It affirmed that my first impressions of it were pretty close. It was atmospheric along the lines of Let The Right One In.

Like Let the Right One In, Midnight Son attempted to infuse an old genre with fresh blood and a new spin. Okay, it didn’t just attempt, it succeeded.

The movie’s main man, Jacob (played brilliantly by Zak Kilberg), has a skin disorder that requires him to be a night person. We meet Jacob as he’s already entrenched in his life. He works nights as a security guard, but when we meet him he’s struggling with insatiable hunger. He eats, and eats, and eats, but still his stomach growls. The doctor can’t figure it out. Even for all the eating he does, Jacob’s showing signs of being malnourished –because he is. Jacob eventually figures out blood helps quiet his forever rumbling tummy when he buys steak and is enticed to drink the run off in the package.

He gets away with drinking animal blood from his local butcher for a while. Until he meets Mary (played outstandingly Maya Parish), who becomes Jacob’s main squeeze. Mary has a bit of a drug habit. While straddling Jacob and trying to get it on, she develops an unfortunate nosebleed. She drips on Jacob’s face, who gets a taste of her and that’s it. His full-fledged vampire transformation is underway.

When Jacob tries to break into the bio-hazard dumpster at a hospital to get more blood, he meets “We All Got Our Thing” Marcus (played by the perfectly cast Jo D. Jonz). Marcus offers to help supply Jacob with his “thing” (blood), no questions asked, no judgements made.

Things get a little hairy as Jacob fears he killed a woman who was murdered from the building he guards. He can’t remember doing it, but he’s pretty sure he did it.

Then a skirmish between him and Marcus ends with Marcus disappearing without a trace. Jacob tries to turn himself into authorities, who don’t believe he’s involved in the woman’s murder or Marcus’s disappearance because he can’t tell them how the woman was killed nor can he tell them where Marcus’s body is.

Turns out the woman burned to death. Jacob knows he’s responsible for her death, though he didn’t mean to murder her. He must have feasted on her and “infected” her with his severe sun allergy. (That’s the other nice thing about the movie. Vampires are old-fashioned in this movie. Sun burns them up.)

He also ends up “infecting” both Marcus and Mary, too. (Marcus reappears later in the movie, pretty much unscathed except for his new insatiable thirst for human blood and deadly reaction to sunshine. At least until another skirmish between him and Jacob finds Marcus chained to some rocks waiting for sunrise…)

Mary meets a much different fate. I kind of felt the love story between Jacob and her was like Twilight on crack. There was a definite chemistry between the two, and in its own twisted way it was very sweet.

The only thing I didn’t like was not knowing how Jacob became a vampire and why all of a sudden he would develop his hunger for blood. (It was intimated he’d had his allergy to the sun for a while, but the hunger for blood was new.) Or why when he bit the others they’re transformation was basically immediate.

But I was willing to ignore all that and enjoy the movie, which was just refreshingly different enough to be enjoyable.

Buy Midnight Son wherever movies are sold, like on Amazon.com. (Where you can also rent it as an Instant Video.)

Courtney Mroch

Courtney Mroch is a globe-trotting restless spirit who’s both possessed by wanderlust and the spirit of adventure, and obsessed with true crime, horror, the paranormal, and weird days. Perhaps it has something to do with her genes? She is related to occult royalty, after all. Marie Laveau, the famous Voodoo practitioner of New Orleans, is one of her ancestors. (Yes, really! As explained here.) That could also explain her infatuation with skeletons.

Speaking of mystical, to learn how Courtney channeled her battle with cancer to conjure up this site, check out HJ’s Origin Story.