Stake Land
America is a lost nation. When an epidemic of vampirism strikes, humans find themselves on the run from vicious, feral beasts. Cities are tombs and survivors cling together in rural pockets, fearful of nightfall. When his family is slaughtered, young Martin (Gossip Girl's Connor Paolo) is taken under the wing of a grizzled, wayward hunter (In the Cut's Nick Damici) whose new prey are the undead. Simply known as Mister, the vampire stalker takes Martin on a journey through the locked-down towns of America's heartland, searching for a better place while taking down any bloodsuckers that cross their path. Along the way they recruit fellow travellers, including a nun (Kelly McGillis) who is caught in a crisis of faith when her followers turn into ravenous beasts. This ragtag family unit cautiously moves north, avoiding major thoroughfares that have been seized by The Brethren, a fundamentalist militia headed by Jebedia Loven (Tony award-winning actor Michael Cerveris) that interprets the plague as the Lord's work.
- Director
- Jim Mickle
- Actors
- Connor Paolo, Nick Damici, Kelly McGillis, Danielle Harris, Sean Nelson
- Genre
- Horror
Reviews from Rotten Tomatoes
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Ryan Samul's cinematography and Jeff Grace's score pick up the slack, smoothly maintaining an unstable atmosphere of lurking horror.
Jeannette Catsoulis, New York Times, 04.21.2011 -
Shows that a savvy mixture of characterization, atmosphere and gore-eographed suspense can make even the most familiar fright tropes feel vaguely organic again.
Robert Abele, Los Angeles Times, 04.28.2011 -
Though it has plenty of shocks, the film creates a wasteland that would be compellingly deranged even without vampires pressing insistently at every border. Horror is just the half of it.
Scott Tobias, NPR, 04.22.2011 -
Some numbers are too large to contemplate. How many drops of water are there in the ocean? How many grains of sand are there in the desert? How many more apocalyptic zombie movies must I sit through?
Kyle Smith, New York Post, 04.21.2011
