I was able to see an advanced screening of Juliet Landau's new film A Place Among the Dead. It's unsettling, intense, mind-bending, and disturbing on multiple levels...which is exactly what makes it work so well as an emotionally charged psychological thriller.
Within seconds, A Place Among the Dead captures viewers with an almost hypnotic hook that penetrates deep into the psyche of anyone whose ever felt or been told they are "less than." The technique enables the viewer to become emotionally entrenched within the film's first couple of minutes.
While it's billed as a "vampire film," A Place Among the Dead is much deeper than a story about vampires. Instead, it's an immersive look at narcissism, the concept of evil, and the tendency to blur the line of fact versus fiction through the course of our own inner narrative.
Juliet and crew blur their own lines between fact and fiction with scripted "interviews" from celebrities from within the vampire mythos, a compelling "reality TV/real crime" storyline, peppered with the occasional use of real names and relationships. The creative decisions to weave fantasy and reality together this way can be unsettling, evoking emotions akin to learning something you held as an indisputable truth is, in fact, completely fabricated.
As a person who typically avoids horror films and most thrillers, I had reservations about watching this film...doing so in a well lit room in the middle of the day. But A Place Among the Dead isn't "scary" so much as it is intensely disturbing in a thought provoking way. I'm glad I had the opportunity to watch it and by taking a chance on this film, I found myself becoming more aware of the core internal messages that I send myself each day.
