The Vampire That Sucked—And Not in the Good Way
Let’s get this out of the way: Black Water Vampire is not just bad. It’s aggressively, almost heroically bad. It’s like someone found an abandoned camcorder, filmed a weekend camping trip with their least interesting friends, and then decided it was a vampire movie halfway through.
Written and directed by Evan Tramel, this 2014 found-footage horror flick tries to combine The Blair Witch Project’s shaky cameras with Nosferatu’s creep factor. Instead, it delivers the cinematic equivalent of watching a mosquito buzz around your bedroom for 90 minutes—you’re mildly irritated, vaguely grossed out, and praying for someone to kill it.
This is a movie so dull it makes you nostalgic for that time your high school AV club tried to make a zombie film with ketchup packets.
The Setup: Vampires and Video Cameras Don’t Mix
The story—if we can call it that—follows Danielle (Danielle Lozeau), an amateur documentarian who believes that Raymond Banks (Bill Oberst Jr.) was wrongly convicted for a string of bizarre murders in the woods near the town of Black Water. Every ten years, a woman turns up dead, drained of blood, and covered in bite marks. Most people would see the pattern and say, “Hey, maybe let’s not go there!” Danielle, however, decides this is the perfect opportunity to grab her friends, a camera, and zero common sense for a weekend of investigative journalism.
She recruits Andrea (Andrea Monier), Rob (Robin Steffen), and Anthony (Anthony Fanelli)—a ragtag group of people who seem to have wandered in from a student film called Why Am I Here?. Together, they set out to uncover the truth. Instead, they uncover bad lighting, worse acting, and 80 minutes of walking in circles through the woods.
Found Footage, Lost Patience
I have seen security footage of empty hallways that had more suspense than this movie.
The film is technically found footage, which in horror-speak usually means “cheap.” Every shot looks like it was filmed on a flip phone duct-taped to a pogo stick. The camera shakes like it’s having an existential crisis, and the audio is so muddy you could use it to grow potatoes.
At least The Blair Witch Project used shaky cam to build tension. Black Water Vampire uses it to disguise the fact that nothing is happening. You could condense the entire movie into a single still image of four people looking confused in the dark, and you’d lose none of the story.
The editing doesn’t help either. There are long stretches of dialogue where characters say things like, “Did you hear that?” or “Where’s Rob?” or my personal favorite, “I think something’s out there.” Yes, Danielle, there is something out there—it’s the audience’s will to live, running away.
The Characters: Cardboard Cutouts in Hiking Boots
Let’s be clear: you will not remember anyone’s name. You will not care who dies. And when the movie ends, you’ll be hard-pressed to remember if any of them were even alive to begin with.
Danielle is our fearless leader, which is to say she’s the one who keeps making terrible decisions until everyone dies. Andrea is her loyal friend who mostly serves to scream and look worried. Rob disappears early, which honestly feels like he read the script and decided to fake his own death to escape. And Anthony, the cameraman, spends the entire movie oscillating between boredom and irritation—just like the audience.
Then there’s Raymond Banks, the supposed serial killer played by the always-committed Bill Oberst Jr. He’s the only one in the cast who seems to know how to act, and he’s in the movie for about as long as it takes to microwave popcorn. Watching Oberst trapped in this mess feels like watching Daniel Day-Lewis guest-star in a TikTok.
The Horror: Blink and You’ll Miss It (Lucky You)
Eventually, after an eternity of walking, whining, and night-vision footage that looks like rejected Bigfoot porn, our heroes finally encounter the titular vampire. Or maybe it’s a guy in a melted Halloween mask—I couldn’t tell because the movie’s lighting budget was approximately three flashlights and a dying campfire.
The vampire, when you do see it, looks like Nosferatu after a bad Botox treatment. It hisses, it drags people into the woods, and it apparently has an interest in interspecies breeding, because it knocks up poor Danielle in one of the most awkward “twists” ever filmed.
That’s right: the movie ends with Danielle giving birth to a vampire baby. If that sounds intriguing, congratulations—you have a better imagination than the filmmakers. The execution is so clumsy that by the time the baby pops out, you’re just relieved it’s almost over.
And then comes the coup de grâce: the closing shot of a baby vampire’s first birthday party, complete with the camera lovingly panning over Danielle’s dead face. I’ve seen tax audits with more emotional resonance.
The Tone: Too Serious for Its Own Good
One might expect a movie called Black Water Vampire to at least know it’s trash and lean into it. Alas, Tramel directs it like he’s making Schindler’s List: The Fang Edition. The pacing is solemn, the dialogue is humorless, and the atmosphere is as lively as a DMV waiting room.
There’s no wink to the audience, no sense of camp, just a parade of grim expressions and self-serious narration. If this movie had been 10% sillier, it might’ve been fun. Instead, it’s like watching a group therapy session for people who once read Dracula but didn’t enjoy it.
The Setting: Welcome to Nowhere
The movie takes place in “Black Water,” which sounds spooky but looks like a slightly damp park in Oregon. The townspeople, who are supposed to be menacing and mysterious, instead come across as locals who were promised free beer for letting the crew film in their backyard.
They deliver exposition in the least creepy way possible: monotone interviews that drag on longer than a funeral speech. “People say they’ve seen things in the woods,” one mutters, staring off-screen, probably at the craft services table.
The woods themselves are the real villain—not because they’re haunted, but because you spend so much time looking at them. Endless trees, endless walking, endless nothing. You start to hope the vampire shows up just to break the monotony.
The Script: Written by an Algorithm with Seasonal Depression
The screenplay by Evan Tramel feels like it was generated by feeding The Blair Witch Project, Paranormal Activity, and a dictionary into a blender. The dialogue is 60% exposition, 30% screaming, and 10% awkward pauses.
At one point, a character earnestly says, “There’s something not right about this town.” You think? You’re filming a vampire documentary with three people and one camera—maybe everything’s not right.
Tramel tries to weave in mystery, but his clues have the subtlety of a foghorn. It’s as if he watched The Blair Witch Project and said, “What if we made it slower, less scary, and added pregnancy?”
The Ending: Death, Birth, and Merciful Blackout
By the time Danielle gives birth to her vampire spawn, the movie has completely collapsed under the weight of its own boredom. The final sequence—complete with the bizarre “vampire baby birthday party”—feels like a parody of a horror film written by people who’ve never actually seen one.
It ends not with a scream, but with a whimper—a quiet sigh from the audience as they reach for the remote.
Final Verdict: Stake It, Burn It, Forget It
Black Water Vampire is a masterclass in how to waste a decent premise. It’s a found-footage horror film that finds nothing, a vampire movie that forgets to be scary, and a mystery that solves itself by making everyone too bored to care.
The only real horror here is realizing you sat through the whole thing.
★☆☆☆☆ (1 out of 5)
Black Water Vampire drains more than its victims—it drains your time, your patience, and your will to believe that found footage can still be scary. If you see this movie in the woods, do yourself a favor: keep walking.
