Hal Kitchen
Horror is a genre predicated on the tension between the known and the unknown. We know certain elements of the story, characters, situation, and setting, but the tension arises out of what remains unclear. What is the threat? What is it capable of? And what is it going to do? It’s part of why there’s such a prevalence of familiar tropes in horror, the iconic monsters and the famous “rules of the genre,” the familiarity helps ease the viewer into what are effectively fantasy elements in otherwise realistic film worlds. There’s no concrete rule for how much a horror film should tell you, it depends how deep in the genre a film situates itself but successful horror movie has a good handle on its own story. Like any genre, a horror movie will fall apart if the scenario leaves too much up to the audience. Little Bites is a film that presents the viewer with a potentially gripping scenario, but doesn’t do the legwork to fill in the blanks around it, and, more damningly, doesn’t fail to do so because its inundating the viewer with distractions.
The premise is an intriguing one. Mindy (Krsy Fox) is a single mother who has sent her ten-year-old daughter Alice (Elizabeth Phoenix Caro) away to live with her own mother (Bonnie Aarons) while she figures some stuff out. The “stuff,” it soon becomes clear, is that she has a vampire living in her basement. He wants Alice, but Mindy has been placating his appetites with her own blood and keeping Alice at a safe distance, sacrificing herself for her daughter. It’s a macabre premise and one made all the stronger by the screen time devoted to the erudite bloodsucker (Jon Sklaroff). His predatory dynamic with Mindy has echoes of Hellraiser, as she resorts to finding him alternative victims when she’s too week to feed him herself. Clearly a lot of effort has gone into his presentation, and Fox and Sklaroff are both excellent in these scenes. The monster, in this case, is clearly an allegory for an abusive partner gaslighting Mindy and forcing her to make sacrifices to keep him away from her daughter. However, at the altar of this message, quite a bit of logic is sacrificed too.
Upon the reveal of the dilemma Mindy has found herself, any number of questions will likely occur to the viewer: how did this all start? What leverage does he have over her? Why is he living in her basement when he doesn’t seem to be confined in any way? Why has he fixated himself on her and Alice? Has Mindy made any attempt to liberate herself yet? What made her succumb to this situation? Did she try to kill him already and fail? All valid questions that a film with an even moderate interest in covering its tracks ought to answer if we’re to take this dilemma seriously, and yet Little Bites does not answer a single one of them. We’re dropped in with this strange form of slavery already in progress and are just invited to take it at face value. It’s a poor job that strips any semblance of agency from its protagonist. Of course, it’s easy to say “why do you stay with him?” but it’s even easier to say when he’s a vampire.
Mindy puts up absolutely no resistance to his control and although that might be reflective of a realistic portrayal of an abusive relationship, this isn’t that, it’s a horror movie and the metaphor doesn’t accommodate that kind of interpretation because there’s not enough depth to the portrayal of Mindy. We don’t see how this began, what allows it to continue, or really what brings it to a conclusion. Without getting into spoilers, the ending feels really unearned, as does the seriousness of the film’s tone and message. Little Bites just doesn’t have the foundation to support its metaphor nor its bleak, claustrophobic atmosphere.
Aside from the fact that she really really looks and acts like Emily Hampshire in Schitt’s Creek and I honestly found it really distracting, Fox’s performance is strong enough to carry most of the film. She has to because the material does feel stretched thin, particularly by the last third where the build up is finished and you realize the plunge isn’t going to be very spectacular. There are some supporting appearances by horror royalty for fans to relish, though Barbara Crampton is a bit underused as a child services investigator, Heather Langencamp’s scene is honestly terrific and does a lot of the kind of heavy lifting the film could’ve used more of. The film just doesn’t have enough going on to justify what feels like a generous runtime. 105 minutes isn’t very long, but compared to something like The Babadook which had a similarly claustrophobic single mother-child-monster dynamic, and kept every one of its 94 minutes as tight as a drum, this does just feel overstretched for no particular reason. A tighter, more forgiving pace would have done a lot to keep the misgivings at bay.
I will say though, that most other reviews I’ve seen have not interpreted the film as I have, with most seeing the vampire as a metaphor for addiction rather than a predatory partner, but I’m not quite as sold on that angle. Personifying the monster as being so male and so directly linked to the father figure makes it pretty clear what the film is going for. Besides, vampire as addiction is a pretty played out metaphor and I consider it one of the stronger marks in the film’s favor that it doesn’t go that route. Like Nosferatu, Little Bites uses the vampire as a symbol of predation and abuse, but unlike the Robert Eggers film—which for the record I still wasn’t the biggest fan of either—Little Bites doesn’t explore the psychological implications with the same assiduity. It feels hollow and lifeless, which is unfortunate because there is a lot of good stuff here, it just doesn’t animate the way it should.
