Stake Land (2010)

Stake Land is a road movie with fangs, a vampire plague that empties the American heartland and sends a teenage boy and his grizzled mentor north toward Canada. The filmmakers wanted to emphasize isolation and small moments of cooperation over bloodshed, and the result is patient and moody. The economic and political collapse preceding the outbreak gets a single mention and no examination. The catastrophe is viral, not environmental, so the ecological dread available to any story about a dying continent goes untouched.

The cast is almost entirely white. Sean Nelson appears as Willie, a former Marine, and his presence carries no commentary and no thematic weight. He is a survivor among survivors. There is no romantic or sexual material beyond the grim business of rape and enslavement, and no gestures toward bodily self-acceptance or neurological difference. The women are permitted competence, Sister with her rifle, Peggy with her crossbow, Belle with her stubborn hope, but the story belongs to the men, and the women are taken, used, or killed to move it along.

The true villains are the Brotherhood, a fundamentalist militia that reads the plague as divine instruction and drops vampires onto settlements from helicopters. The film treats their extremism as poison, though it does so by staging atrocities instead of announcing a thesis, which keeps the sermonizing brief. There is no indictment of wealth or markets; the antagonists are zealots, not oligarchs. The appeal is easy to see. It is efficient, atmospheric, and largely untroubled by the cultural questions of a later decade, which is either a limitation or a relief depending on the viewer's appetite for homework.