Afflicted

Afflicted has come as a real, enjoyable, surprise. I'd hardly read the review, so I just knew about the "found footage" style. As the story unveils I was getting shocked and amazed, this is one of the most interesting and original approaches to the Vampire genre in a really long while. Derek is one young guy on vacation in Europe for his once in a lifetime (and probably last) trip, that has been turned into a vampire and has no idea of it until the symptons become evident. His reactions and those of his best friend sharing the trip with him, their attempts to try to survive on non human blood, and the despair when finding that only fresh human blood makes the trick....

The story is distressing and frenetic, the locations are nice (Italian coastal villages and Paris!) and the "camera in hand" technique contributes a lot to the anguish that one breaths through the film. By the way, I don't know why this film is considered a "found footage" film, the footage is not found later on, but transmitted in real time to social networks... "found footage" and "self-recorded, camera in hand" are not the same to me.

I've always had a soft spot for vampire stories, in particular those where they are presented as elegant, aristocratic, decadent creatures. (We Are the Night, Underworld...) Audrey, the female vampire that turned Derek, is pretty interesting. I would have loved that she had been more present in the film giving us a better glimpse of her life, but her short appearance at the end is probably the best moment of the film. She decided to turn Derek into a vampire as a gift when she realised that he had a serious health condition threatening to end his life at any moment. The genious moment is when she tries to calm him saying "yes, you have to kill to live, but you can choose who you kill". That's an amazing idea. Normally vampires are either evil ones feeding on any easy victim, or good ones that manage to survive on blood intended for transfusions or some sort of synthetic one. Here we are given the perfect option, leverage that need to kill to eliminate those humans that do not deserve to be alive. Buff, I could immediately think of me as a vampire in Paris (or Toulouse, Marseille, Brussels...) spending the nights bleeding to death as many Salafists as I could find. Buff, in a few years radical Islam would no longer be a threat to our Civilization :-D