On the other hand, the mob which pursues the vampire is terrorizing; armed with the fetishes and weapons of a barbaric horde; outraged that the alien would presume to borrow a bit of human essence for his survival.
Man’s response to the vampire, to any monster, is perhaps the real heart of the matter. As vile the creature, as brutal man’s reaction. Have we conjured up creatures and given them mystical properties so as not to admit that they are actually of our own race? Do we make them extraordinary out of guilt for what we instinctively recall of our own primitive past? Do we need a mythical whipping boy to punish brutally for our primal sins?
What a frightening concept! Are there those among us in free and “normal” society who would today take pleasure from driving a stake through the L.A. Slasher’s heart?
McNally reports in A Clutch of Vampires that in 1969 he was in the village of Rodna, near the Borga Pass in Romania. Seeing a burial being performed, he stopped to watch. The deceased was a girl who had committed suicide, an act which made her a candidate for returning as a vampire. McNally actually witnessed the driving of a stake through the corpse’s heart, done so as to prevent the vampire’s resurrection.
In fourteenth-century Scotland, a highwayman named Beane and his mistress lived in a cave along the shore. For fear of the king’s severe punishment for banditry, the Beanes hid the corpses of their victims in the rear chambers of the cave. As booty was poor in such impoverished times, the Beanes took to eating the corpses in their larder as a means of survival. Their reign of highway terror went on, and as the mouth of the cave filled with sea water for most of the day, they went undiscovered. They bred children, and their children bred among themselves. When they were finally uncovered, some thirty-five years later, there were fifty Beanes, the youngest of which had been raised on the band’s vile practices simply as a way of life. The back caverns of the cave were found to be filled with the carefully butchered parts of hundreds of victims, all salted and preserved as a food supply for the family. The king’s soldiers captured the Beanes, and in a forty-eight-hour orgy of bloodletting dismembered, disemboweled, and sliced them into small bits, infants included, in a town square exhibition, with the public invited to participate.
Man’s barbarism seems quick to rise, particularly when justified by some “cause” of righteous society, as witness the heinous acts performed in wartime.
Martin is about all the monsters of the world, proposing that they are simply extensions or exaggerations of a certain strain present in all of us. As do all monster stories, Martin concerns the varying levels of moral conscience in the human animal. Not only are moral lines difficult to draw, but any attempt to broadly categorize behavior as good or evil will warp any true search for the nature of man. Think of the lines of The Mikado: “. . . and I am right, and you are right, and all is right as right can be.”
Martin is not the first piece to bring up these concepts, nor will it be the last. It is an entertainment, drawn in homage to the great vampires we have known, by way of saying: We understand your predicament. You have been created by man, to be punished by man. Your destiny is to be destroyed so that man may be purged.
We can believe that Martin is cursed, or we can believe that he is simply mad. His visions of torch-bearing mobs may be called up from films he has seen. We’ve seen them, too.
The moral shuffling and the turns on tradition help make Martin our contemporary. He lives now, and this, too, provides contrasts. Martin’s little town is decaying. The work ethic destroyed, the people are leaving. The church is providing no answers anymore, and it, too, is considering closing its doors for the poor attendance. The pillars of society which gave stoic support to the fight against monsters in the past are crumbling. For better or for worse is not yet determined. Man is now armed with texts which explain the psychopathic mind.
Today’s knowledge should better equip us to handle Martin, but while we study his case, we do it rather academically. We don’t feel a purging thrill in the solutions offered by science; they don’t satisfy our human lusts for anger and revenge. Society no longer supports us in an emotional response, so we hardly respond at all. And yet monsters do exist—in us and among us. They walk in our shadow. They can prey on us more as we fear them less. We should know. We created them. Now we try to tell them to go away. Our new and knowledgable ways provide a certain freedom for the dark creatures.
This is not to say that the old ways are more effective in stemming the monster tide. The old ways never worked either. Martin is a vampire in that he drinks the blood of his victims, but to categorize him as such, in the traditional sense, is to not only misunderstand him, but to forgive him in a way.
To categorize monsters is to expect them to act predictably. We become predictable when we expect Martin to be predictable, and we are therefore more vulnerable to his crimes. If he is our own child, if he is our primal conscience looking back at us from the center of our souls, then Martin is truly a dangerous creature, for then he has us all figured out, while we haven’t come close to understanding him.
“MARTIN”
PRINCIPLE CAST
Martin ..... John Amplas
Cuda ..... Lincoln Maazel
Christina ..... Christine Forrest
Abby Santini ..... Elyane Nadeau
Arthur ..... Tom Savini
Housewife Victim ..... Sarah Venable
Train Victim ..... Fran Middleton
Lewis ..... Al Levitsky
“MARTIN”
PRODUCTION CREDITS
Written And Directed By ..... George A. Romero
Produced By ..... Richard Rubinstein
Director of Photography ..... Michael Gornick
Music Composed & Arranged By ..... Donald Rubinstein
Edited By ..... George A. Romero
Post Production Supervisor ..... Michael Gornick
Post Production Assistants ..... Michael Dilauro • Ed Keen
Sound ..... Tony Buba
Assistant Cameramen ..... Tom Dubinsky • Nick Mastandrea
Grips ..... Steve Lalich • Phillip Desiderio
Special Effects And Make-Up ..... Tom Savini
Technical Assistance ..... Regis J. Survinski • Tony Pantanella
Associate Producers ..... Patricia Bernesser • Ray Schmaus
Production Coordinator ..... Joyce Weber
Assistant To The Producer ..... Donna Siegal
Color By ..... WRS Laboratory
Titles By ..... The Animators
Financial Services ..... Barney C. Guttman
Legal Services ..... Goldberg & Snodgrass
Table of Contents
Back Cover
Reviews
Titlepage
Copyright
Acknowledgments
Quote
MARTIN
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Chapter Eight
Chapter Nine
Afterword
Principle Cast
Production Credits
Martin Page 19