I’ve been watching vampire movies for decades now. Going all the way back to when I was a little kid. Bela Lugosi’s Dracula was my first exposure to watching these kinds of films. Ever since I’ve been a fan, Movies like gNosferatu, Blackula, Love At First Bite, Interview With A Vampire, and of course, Bram Stoker’s Dracula piqued my interest in this of horror. The latest Vampire movie is called  Humanist Vampire Seeking Concenting Suicidal Person. It’s a vampire coming-of-age story, and it’s quite a cute little film.

Sasha (Sara Montpetit) is a young girl who is starting to realize she’s a vampire and that there are expectations for her to start killing her prey so she can feed herself. The problem is she can’t kill, and this becomes an issue for her parents, who’ve stood by and nurtured her for far too many years. When she meets a boy named Henry (Arnaud Vachon) who has suicidal tendencies, they hit it off. They are both looking to help one another, but something else happens instead.

Vampire films have come in all shapes and sizes since their inception with Nosferatu back in the 1920s. A lot of them are about their struggle to mingle in society or about being alive for a long period of time and not wanting to do so. They tend to miss being normal. It is a curse that they have to bear for the rest of their lives. This movie is more about a young vampire learning the ropes. The do’s and don’t about being a vampire. The director plays these scenes for laughs. I found myself laughing a lot at the idiosyncrasies of this world that was set up in the film.

The director Ariane Louis-Seize chose to depict this story mostly at night so the viewers get to see the vampire family in action as well as the interaction between Sasha and Henry. The relationship between this pair of people one 67 and the other 16 is the main crux of this story. How they interact and get to know and understand one another is the best part of this story. I loved all the quirkiness and shyness they both are imbued with. I could watch these two live their lives and figure out the world together over and over again.

As vampire films go this one is okay but as a coming-of-age movie, this works perfectly for me. In any coming-of-age film, you want to see the main character or characters discover themselves in some way. With this one being a vampire film as well there is a bit of a different learning curve. As always parents are there for their children and the parents in this movie are fantastic. Specifically Henry’s mother. She is very loving and understanding of the situation he has gotten himself into.

I heard about Humanist Vampire Seeking Concenting Suicidal Person out of the Tribeca Film Festival this past June, so I definitely wanted to check it out. I’m glad I did. I had a feeling it was going to be good, and it was. The two young actors at the center of the story were amazing. I could follow their story for years to come if there are more movies about them. This one of the sweetest coming of age stories I’ve ever seen. The director and her writing partner, Christine Boyon, understood the material she was dealing with.  

4 stars

Dan Skip Allen