Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person

When a vampire who can't kill meets a suicidal teen who wants to die, they form an unlikely bond while fulfilling his last requests.

A 2023 French-language Canadian-made horror-comedy/drama vampire story, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person (Ou en français... Vampire humaniste cherche suicidaire consentant), also released as Humanist Vampire Too Sensitive To Kill, is the debut feature film from the Quebecois director and writer, Ariane Louis-Seize.

You can tell this is a film from Quebec, because in one scene, there’s a group of teenagers at a diner, and they're all casually eating big plates of poutine like that’s something that people eat regularly, and that you can just get anywhere.

Also, it’s all in French.

This isn't a film about clowns, but it does open with a clown. I know my last post was about a film that featured clowns, and while I am obviously a fan of any movie that opens with clown-death, I wanted you to know that I didn’t mean for this to be the second film in a row involving clowns. I’m not doing a “clown” theme here. It's important to me that you know that. I am most definitely not someone who it’s fair to say is "down to clown." At least, not on purpose.

My point is... it's not “clown week” here At The End Of Everything.

But if you're reading this and you're like, "That's funny, I thought every week was clown week here... because you're a clown, Jon!" I‘d respond with: “hey... fuck you, buddy. Although, okay, sure, that's fair.”

Anyway…

In her childhood, Sasha, a young vampire, is traumatized after her family eats the clown they had hired to perform at her birthday party.

As a result, Sasha's fangs do not come in, and she develops a squeamish and all-around uncomfortable attitude towards the whole idea of killing people for food. For years, despite an intensive amount of various kinds of therapy, Sasha's fangs will neither pop out, nor will she kill for her food.

Instead, her parents provide her with blood bags to sip on.

Years pass, and nothing has changed.

Much to the embarassed disappointment of her family, Sasha is far too sensitive to kill a human bring and drink their blood. She still doesn't have any fangs. She still sips on the blood bags that her family provides. Sasha's mom is upset about this, as she feels like she’s the one doing all the hunting, especially because Dad apparently has his own issues when it comes to hunting too.

This is perhaps an indication of where Sasha's issues really stem from, and also an explanation for why he is so patient with her and her squeamishness.

Sasha spends her evenings playing her keyboard, a busker on the sidewalks of the city. The people passing by seem to enjoy her work, and drop money into her hat. One night, someone drops a wrapped cookie amongst the crumpled bills.

Vampires can’t eat food, they can only ingest blood. If they eat any human food, they can die. But her curiosity at this forbidden treat causes her to take it home, to secret it away in her room, to unwrap it, to feel it, to smell it, and to almost take a very small bite…

Her parents walk in just then.

They freak out, thinking she is trying to kill herself. It’s a huge fight trying to convince them otherwise, which leads into the usual fight where her parents argue bitterly over the fact that Sasha doesn’t hunt her own food in order to get her own blood, and that they are still supplying her with blood bags, with Mom frustrated and Dad preaching patience.

One night, while busking in her usual spot, Sasha sees a young man across the lot, standing at the edge of the roof of the bowling alley that he works at. He is clearly contemplating killing himself, but he decides not to and climbs down. She follows the boy, flitting about at the edges of his senses, clearly enjoying herself, seeming to not realize that she's hunting him. But the boy very much does understand that he is being hunted, which causes himto panic, especially once he realizes that she's a vampire, and he falls and hits his head.

The instant Sasha sees his blood, her fangs come in.

Sasha runs home in a panic, and hurried sucks down one of the blood bags while hiding in the room, hesitantly feeling at her fangs.

Her family, meanwhile, concerned with her sudden appearance home, and rush upstairs, burst into her room. At first elated to see her fangs, they are disappointed to learn that she did not finish the hunt. At their wits end, and believing that their only option left, if they want Sasha to ever learn to hunt people and feed herself, is if they stop supporting her with blood bags, so her parents decide that she should move in with her older cousin, Denise, a very bohemian type of artist and vampire about town, who lives in an artist's loft in the city. Denise promises her parents that she will get Sasha to hunt.

Still, her father sends Sasha off with a couple of blood bags in a cooler.

But Denise finds the little care package cooler of blood bags and gets rid of them. Soon enough, Sasha’s stomach is rumbling.

Meanwhile, the boy that Sasha saw standing on the roof of the bowling alley is named Paul, and he is having a rough time, as his peers think he’s a huge weirdo, especially after he kills a bat that gets into gym class, in front of his classmates (It wasn’t a vampire). His mom has him go to group therapy.

Sasha, meanwhile, is proving to be a difficult and frustrating student for Denise. She is reluctant to learn, she attracts too much attention, and she won’t finish the job, even when Denise serves up a local dipshit named JP for her. To make things even worse, because of Sasha distracting her, Denise accidentally turns JP into a vampire. Now she’s stuck with JP's dumbass, like an idiot boyfriend that she can’t shake, who moves into her loft, taking up residence on her couch.

Distraught from the whole disastrous experience, Sasha runs off, and in a dark moment, she almost eats some poutine, but she stops herself. She looks up from her plate of french fries, cheese curds, hot brown beef, chicken stock gravy, and sorrow, and there across the street, she sees that there is a group therapy meeting for people who are contemplating suicide happening just then. She throws away the poutine and goes to join the meeting.

She quickly realizes that Paul is sitting across the circle from her.

Paul also recognizes her.

After the meeting, the two agree to help each other out. Paul will let Sasha feed on him, if Sasha promises to kill him while doing it.

But when the moment comes, and the two are just about to do the deed in her room at Denise’s place, Sasha's fangs disappear, even though she is starving from not eating. She tries to stall by asking Paul if he has a dying wish, and Paul says he wishes he could get payback on Henry, a co-worker who constantly bullies him.

The two head out into the night.

When they find out that Henry has gone to a party, Paul becomes hesitant about getting payback in front of everyone, so Sasha suggests he practice by doing some smaller acts of payback. Paul decides to get payback on the mean popular girl at school, his little asshole gym teacher, and the school principal who is trying to get him suspended.

This goes fairly well, and really commits Paul to the whole plan, as after doing all of this, there is no way he’d be able to go back to school the next day. Finally, at the party, Paul confronts Henry and Henry taunts Paul. There’s a scuffle, during which Paul bites Harry’s hand. They run, but only get a few blocks, before Sasha collapses from hunger. Paul cuts his hand to feed her his blood. While the two are recovering in the park, Henry and his friends find them and they attack Paul up. Sasha's fangs emerge, and she tosses the boys around easily, before killing and drinking Henry.

Horrified by what she’s done, Sasha tells Paul to go home.

Sasha calls Denise, who helps her bury Henry, but she also demands that Paul be killed too, as he knows their vampire secret. Sasha knocks Denise out, and runs to find Paul. They decide to run away. Hiding out at a hotel room, Sasha tries to turn him into a vampire, but Paul struggles to be reborn. With no other choice, Sasha calls her family and they manage to help Paul complete his transformation.

Some time later…

Sasha and Paul are at the hospice where his mother works. She brings them to a terminally ill patient who has asked for the special services that Sasha and Paul now provide. Sasha plays the keyboard for the patient, while Paul carefully drains their blood into a bag, and the patient passes peacefully.

The two then slip out of the hospice with a big bag of blood, and into the night.

I’m a little late to this one. It’s a 2024 film that premiered in 2023.

2023 was apparently a big year for some non-traditional takes at the classic vampire mythos, as this film, a fresh and fun take on being young and gothy and in love, all while adding an interesting wrinkle… How does a pacifist vampire survive in the modern world, debuted at the Venice Film Festival with both El Conde and The Vourdalak.

Set in a world where vampires not only live in secret amongst us, but also have their own shadow society, as there are vampire doctors and therapists and the like, these are the kinds of vampires where a person can be “turned” in traditional ways, but can also be born a vampire. They can’t go out at during the day, as they shrivel in the sun. They’re allergic to church, which I totally get. And of course, if they eat any food besides blood, they can die. So basically, it’s Blade Rules. This means the vampires age, albeit slowly. This means that the idea of vampire adolescence, not to mention the idea of vampire babies, and how they age, is weird, and probably best not to delve too deeply into. Honestly, the whole idea of vampires that age is a little too strange. Does the aging start fast and then slow down? How long do they actually live? At one point, Sasha’s mom angrily declares that she doesn't want to hunt for Sasha for the next 200 years. Later, Denise laments that she doesn’t want JP hanging around the next 300 years. Eventually the film reveals that Sasha is 68 years old, and that the moment with the clown at the beginning of the movie took place over forty years before. This all implies that while they certainly seem to live a long life, I don't think they're immortal. I guess it doesn't really matter, but I do prefer to have at least some concrete rules.

But despite being a film about vampires, this isn’t a horror film.

Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is basically just your typical teenage rom-com, with all the usual themes of rebellion and individualism and of course, resisting the expectations that their parents and society impose on them, it’s just one with some very specific and somewhat "non-traditional" issues standing in the way of our star-crossed lovers’ romance.

It’s also a very chaste romance, which honestly, considering that it’s a “first crush” kind of teenage romance, makes sense. But on the other hand, it's also kind of odd, when you consider the fact that it is a story that centers on vampires, and vampires are basically sex-monsters. But whatever, that said, yeah, there’s no sex here, and there's definitely no nudity, all you get here is some longing glances and the occasional bit of very hesitant hand-holding.

This is the feature film debut of director Ariane Louis-Seize, from a script co-written by her and Christine Doyon, and they bring some real comic book cool-looking shots and emotive lighting to a fun and funny and charming film. The film does a great job of developing Sasha and Paul separately, and the way that it finally brings them together midway through the film feels very natural. And the scene where Sasha shares “Emotions” by Brenda Lee with Paul is really great. The switch in the film’s tone in the second act, as Sasha and Paul venture out to accomplish Paul’s dying wish, might be a little rough, but it smooths out, and ends well. But this is mostly due to the performances of its stars Sara Montpetit, Gen Z’s Winona Ryder goth girl, and Félix-Antoine Bénard, who plays a depressed weird kid like he was born to it. For both of them, their looks, their anxious expressions, and their comic timing, it's just fantastic.

So, while it’s not really reinventing the wheel or anything, Humanist Vampire Seeking Consenting Suicidal Person is a pretty charming little dark comedy, and a fun twist on the familiar vampire mythos. Really, this is the kind of very confident and self-assured debut that makes me very interested in seeing what’s next from Ariane Louis-Seize.

Good stuff. Highly recommended. Lots of fun.