BLOOD DAUGHTER

This will not be an objective post by any means - it's as much a celebration as a review or analysis. The fact is, my good friend and occasional collaborator Bryan Enk is screening his new work this month. It's called Blood Daughter, and it's his latest in an ongoing series of work (dating to his very first films) based on Bram Stoker's Dracula (the novel, and Coppola's film). This new movie brings Alex Johnson, the daughter of longtime cast member Chuck Johnson, into the extended family of collaborators in the title role. I am the first civilian to have seen the movie. I am delighted to say it's the finest work Bryan has ever done.

Bryan casts his net even farther out this time, brining in elements, appropriately enough, of Dracula's Daughter and Nadja (and, in a key moment, Murnau's Nosferatu) as he pushes the story, begun in 1993, to the present, in which daughter Abby lives in a tower, her needs being met by her father and a number of servants kept in his thrall. Abby seizes the initiative and kicks off a battle for her own soul, which fractures into various fragments with which she spars as the moment of reckoning approaches.

For those familiar with Bryan's earlier films there's much to enjoy in seeing his gang back together, here as the same characters at significantly older ages - Andy Hunsaker's Claudius is clearly wearied from the intervening decades of investigating fucked up paranormal shit; hilariously, the late-40s David Jarrell brings the same youthful mannered pomposity to Lord Henry that he did in 1994, like he stepped directly into this one from Dracula Returns. 

I wondered if many of the tight references to the earlier work would be lost on those coming to the corpus for the first time. Word from the initial screenings is that the resonance of these moments is felt, if not fully understood, by those meeting these characters for the first time. But Bryan's knack for fleet but slaying throwaway gags remains as sharp as ever, as does his ability to mine supernatural tension from concrete, every day settings and detonate little dream bombs with recurring phrases and images. Even if you're meeting these characters for the first time there's much to sink your teeth into.

And then there's Alex.

Alexandria Johnson has been present in this series, quite literally, from her birth (announced by the director in a meta-epilogue to Bryan Enk's Dracula). She takes focus here in thirteen roles (full disclosure: I'd missed a couple until reading Bryan's helpful list), and makes the single greatest, auteur-qualifying contribution I've ever seen an actor make to a Bryan Enk film. The dance between the earlier films and this new one, between youth and age, the various selves of the characters, is the most ambitious thing I've ever seen Bryan attempt, and Johnson's performances (as Abby's various selves and holy shit as the characters of the previous movies) are crucial to how fluid and effortless it all seems. The style of interacting close-ups continues as Abby and her Father begin their conflict in earnest (and Jeff Miller plays the weariness of eternity better than many on-screen vamps) - when the two finally collide in frame together the impact is fraught and thrilling.

I don't know what future this thing is going to have - whether it will become a festival sensation, an eagerly discussed movie that brings deserved attention to the earlier films, or yet another low-budget horror flick lost among the sea of them in the anonymizing streaming landscape. I'm invested in it, and am hopeful that the light of my friend's film does make it to the entire world, even more. Mainly, though, I just hope you get to see it, and dig it. Don't be afraid. Do as you will.