Crew
Director/Screenplay – Brian A. Metcalf, Producers – Brian A. Metcalf & Thomas Ian Nicholas, Photography – Brian A. Metcalf & Evan Okada. Production Company – Red Compass Media.
Cast
Thomas Ian Nicholas (Mike), John Heard (Andrew Pritchard), William Sadler (Samuel), Andrew Keegan (Blake Slosser), Esme Bianco (Elleanor Gray), Jordan Hinson (Carrie), Hunter Gomez (Benny), James Russo (Aaron Stanford), Chad Todhunter (Selvin Driscoll), Jessica Morris (Sybil), Amanda Rau (Rebecca)
Plot
Vampires have announced their existence to the world for the first time ever since a tv exposure that revealed they were using blood banks. A three-person tv crew is now invited to go to the home of vampire Andrew Pritchard and his brood. They set out to conduct a series of interviews as the vampires endeavour to demonstrate they are just ordinary people who have given up killing humans. The interviewer Mike remains suspicious. As they sneak into places they are not meant to, they start to gain evidence that the vampires are still readily killing victims.
The Found Footage film was created by The Blair Witch Project (1999) but became huge after the explosion created by Paranormal Activity (2007) in wide release in 2009. Although there were films made outside of genre material, most Found Footage films were genre related. Almost every single genre theme has been touched in some way or another – the haunted house, the psycho film, the zombie film, the possession film, the Frankenstein film, the Bigfoot film, the UFO film, the superhero film, the alien invasion film.
There were a surprise number of Found Footage variants on the Vampire Film, beginning with the British Vampire Diary (2006), the quite good Afflicted (2013) and the low-budget Black Water Vampire (2014). Living Among Us was shot in 2013 but by the time it was released it had been overshadowed by another entry in the vampire Found Footage field, the hilarious Taika Waititi co-directed comedy What We Do in the Shadows (2014).
Living Among Us has a fairly simple one-note premise – a tv camera crew go to interview a vampire family at their home. (Improbably for a camera crew, this involves them actually moving in to stay for several days – a regular tv camera crew would in all likelihood rent a nearby motel). It takes very little before they expose the truth about the vampires – that they still enjoy killing and have made only a handful of surface assurances about no longer being like that.
Most of Living Among Us just consists of the interviews with the family and it taking very little to expose that there is something not normal going on beneath the surface. Unlike most other Found Footage films, which are usually peopled by unknowns, the cast includes a number of recognisable faces, including William Sadler as the head vampire, Esme Bianco as a British vampire, Jordan Hinson as the sound girl (who gets infected and drops out of the show about mid-point), and James Russo as the tv station head. There is also John Heard, who passed away in 2017, making Living Among Us his second-to-last released film, who is miscast as the vampire patriarch.
There are a couple of creepily effective scenes. One where the silent withdrawn member of the household (Chad Todhunter) creeps in on Jordan Hinson while she is sleeping. In another scene, they are dragged to a ceremony and witness as the vampires surround and drink from a naked girl (although what provides unintentional amusement in the scene is the fact that a few surface cuts seem to be all it takes to kill the girl). The other is where Andrew Keegan and Todhunter drag the camera crew along with them as they break into a neighbouring house and slaughter the guys partying there. The latter scenes of the show less interestingly become the routine Found Footage stuff of people running around still filming with lots of blurry shakycam as vampires pop out to attack.
Living Among Us was the third film for director Brian A. Metcalf, who had emerged from music video work and previously made the horror films Fading of the Cries (2011) and The Lost Tree (2016) and subsequently went onto make the thriller Adverse (2020).
Trailer here