Vampires want to do their business in the shadows—unseen. In Jeremy Herbert’s vampire-hunter tale, Blood & Rust, the vampire boss chooses to strike a simple, quiet Rust Belt town rather than a complicated, messy metropolitan locale.
In the fading Rust Belt town of Redpatch, Ohio, Lamont Guest (Morgan McLeod) manages a local diner. Lamont’s world is flipped upside down when his father, Joe (Jonathan Tazewell), is killed in what authorities write off as an animal attack. But something isn’t right about it. When he’s attacked by the same creature—almost human in nature and definitely not a coyote—he knows the truth.
Meanwhile, a drifter named Belko (Mark Kelly) rolls into town with a van full of hunting gear, but not for hunting animals—vampires. He’s here because vampires have been quietly feeding on Redpatch for a while now, and nobody noticed because the town seems to keep to itself.
There’s a master vampire—The Boss (Ross Partridge)—running a whole horde of mindless drones, draining the community dry. When Lamont is unwillingly drawn into Belko’s hunting scheme, he finds an unexpected ally in Marlene Fenton (Diana Frankhauser), a local city worker who’s been paying attention to the disappearances nobody else notices.
What follows is a battle between the living and the undead in a small Rust Belt community. As it becomes clear that small-town justice isn’t enough to fight supernatural forces, maybe the town’s collective will to survive is what tips the scales.
Belko (Mark Kelly) and Lamont Guest (Morgan McLeod) stand armed inside a dark industrial space as they prepare to battle vampires in Jeremy Herbert’s Blood & Rust.
“A drifter named Belko rolls into town with a van full of hunting gear, but not for hunting animals—vampires.”
There’s something I love about indie films that manage to feel big inside a small space. Blood & Rust does just that. Jeremy Herbert moves the story along at a nice, small-town pace, opening with Lamont trapped in a town with problems bigger than himself. You’ve got an entire town slowly being bled dry by vampires, and maybe a handful of people willing to do anything about it. It’s the small-town tone that Herbert captures so perfectly within this sizable vampire invasion.
What works best is that this is clearly written by someone who actually loves vampire lore. It respects the genre while allowing Herbert to make it his own. You’ve got the one smart vampire boss commanding a legion of mindless drones, and you’ve got Lamont—a shopkeeper still grieving his father—forced to team up with Belko, a guy who knows what he’s doing, and Marlene, who’s been paying attention when nobody else was. The lore is solid, which means there are rules to follow that can’t be broken.
The production values are solid; the sense of place is real—you know where you are. You don’t have A-list stars to draw attention away from its small-town story. You’ve got a modest amount of money for special effects and a long history of vampire stories to lean on—and that’s enough.
Blood & Rust is a solid vampire film from start to finish, and that’s exactly what you’re looking for in indie horror. It’s the kind of movie that works perfectly for that weekend horror fest you plan with your friends—no pretense, no apologies. It’s just a good time and worth giving a shot.
For screening information, visit the Blood & Rust official website.
"…"Vampires want to do their business in the shadows—unseen.""
