If you’re thirsty for more blood in the wake of Sinners, sink your fangs into the SCREAMBOX Original film Bleeding on June 10. In a world where vampire blood is harvested as a drug, two desperate teenagers on the run from a vicious dealer break into an empty house and find a sleeping girl locked inside.

I always want to like vampire movies more than I do sometimes.

Which isn’t to say there aren’t several I really enjoy. I’m a big fan of both the original and the remake of Fright Night. From Dusk Til Dawn is a great movie with a truly inspired screenplay. And just this year, the aforementioned Sinners came out and rightfully took everyone by surprise with how tremendous it was.

But aside from those entries and a few others… I don’t know; I just don’t often get caught up in the fangs of many vampiric motion pictures. Take Dracula, the 1930’s Universal Horror iteration: it’s a solid flick! But compared to the rest of the era’s offerings (like The Invisible Man or Creature From The Black Lagoon or Bride Of Frankenstein), it’s solidly mid-tier.

So what would I think of Bleeding, the new film being released on Screambox?

Well, interestingly enough, Bleeding has a new take on vampires, as they are largely the victims in the society the movie has created. What vamps we see in Bleeding are captured by humans and bled out to be used as a drug substance that is taking impoverished, white areas by storm.

We see this through the story of two cousins, Eric and Shawn, each of whom is directly affected by the Blood epidemic in a different way. While Shawn is a Blood addict and dealer, Eric’s older brother is recently deceased due to his drug addiction.

So there is not a lot of vampire-on-human action in Bleeding, but there is a story about drug abuse to be told through a new lens. How does it pan out? Well…

TWO UPS AND TWO DOWNS

+ Bleeding is a very imaginative and creative take on a vampire story, certainly the likes of which I had never envisioned seeing in my life. It’s a great blending of plot ideas. You have the story of drug abuse, addiction, and lifestyle, but there is also this intriguing vampiric element. It’s very well imagined.

I can certainly say I’ve never seen a vampire story like this. And that’s saying something in 2025 when this particular horror subgenre has been done to [un]death. So credit to writer/director Andrew Bell for his creative work here.

+ Shawn and Eric’s dynamic is realistic as two close-in-age cousins who love each other but are also kind of adversarial in the wake of some family tragedy. Their relationship is believable; they care for one another, but due to their upbringing and their lifestyle, they can’t quite manage as more normal functioning individuals might.

Shawn is the more particularly messed up of the two of them, and it shows, as he more often struggles with his emotions and making the right decision. Even late in the film where he gets his addiction in check and decides to do the best thing, it doesn’t work out for him. That’s a realistic take on addiction.

Eric is less of a pure fuck-up than Shawn, but he’s dealing with more trauma in his backstory, and, at times, he has little patience for his cousin. If you have ever dealt with addiction in your family, Eric’s attitude rings true. He wants to help Shawn, but he’s given all he can, so he doesn’t have the bandwidth for understanding and compassion.

– Pretty much every character is unsavory and unlikable. We start off with two drug users who also deal… and they end up being our protagonists! Everyone else just gets worse from there. If you are the kind of person who really needs someone to root for in your movie, you might want to look elsewhere.

On the one hand, it’s again an unflinching look at a poor and drug-stricken lifestyle. But on the other hand, the “nice guy” of the movie steals his mom’s medication because it’s good for a high and so he can trade it for other drugs. So he isn’t exactly dripping with cause for sympathy.

I guess midway through the movie, you meet a vampire, Sara, who is largely a good character deserving of your concern. But she isn’t around for swaths of the flick, so I’m not sure that’s helpful.

– The movie drags for stretches as nothing of note really feels like it is happening and the flick is hiding behind its low budget to just feature characters talking. We get precious little actual vampire action at all across this 97 minute runtime. Not that I needed or wanted Bleeding to be Fright Night, exactly, but it just feels like it all grinds to a halt a little too often.

I could have stood to get to get to know the vampire situation better instead of the umpteenth “Shawn and Eric have a fight” moment, you know? If you promise vampires, I would want you to deliver a little better than Bleeding does.

OVERALL

A great idea–and honestly? Pretty decent follow through on some aspects–is a little undone by being a vampire movie with too little in the way of showing the vampires or letting us get to know their situation outside of a quick exposition dump. Still, if you can forgive the movie for that, it’s a solid story of family in the face of drug culture, and Shawn and Eric are realistic depictions of that.