The Blood Drinkers
Wayne Koestenbaum
•
16m
Directed by Wayne Koestenbaum • Drama • With Armando Grant, Alonso Díaz Rickards • 2024 • 17 minutes
Koestenbaum calls this film his first “horror film,” and says he was inspired by early David Cronenberg works, which juxtapose mental derangement, bodily metamorphosis, and modernist buildings. In The Blood Drinkers, two men, who may or not be strangers to each other, meet in a well-trafficked yet strangely deserted corner of New York City. Standing against an iconic building composed of mirrored, tilted glass, impersonal and defamiliarizing, the two flâneurs drink blood from test tubes they’ve stored in their knapsack and briefcase, and thereby fall into rapidly intensifying states of erotic derangement, aggression, stupor, and personal transformation. Koestenbaum’s use of superimposed layers—paintings, photographs, drawings, chromatic scrims—makes literal the interior states of the protagonists but also creates an alternative reality, counterpointing the silent gestures of the somnambulists. The two actors, Armando Grant and Alonso Díaz Rickards, took Koestenbaum’s suggestive, rudimentary script and engaged in a set of inventive yet understated improvisations, their created characters skirting all questions of sexual identity and emotional nourishment with a shrug and a sigh and a kiss.
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