Blood Relatives Is a Warm, Bloody Lesson in Forging a Family

Noah Segan, in his feature directorial debut, conjures a very particular image of the vampire in the opening minutes of Blood Relatives. He drives into frame in a cool American muscle car, slips out of the driver’s seat in a cool leather jacket, and coolly handles an encounter with a potential victim. It’s a set of attributes that’s instantly recognizable to anyone with even a passing knowledge of vampire media, and if Blood Relatives stopped there, it might be just another link in a very long chain of the same trope.
But of course, Blood Relatives is about much more than a single specific image of a pop culture vampire, and what happens next allows Segan to break down, dissect and question that image by giving his vampire a family, something that deliberately and memorably clashes with the façade he’s so carefully curated. With this deconstruction firmly in place almost from the beginning, and through wonderful central performances by Victoria Moroles and Segan himself, Blood Relatives isn’t just a very good first feature, but a deeply endearing horror-comedy that’s one of the best genre films of 2022.
Francis (Segan) is a European Jew who became a vampire decades ago and now roams the American landscape largely undetected, sleeping in his car and feeding when he needs to while generally avoiding any sense of attachment. But attachment is looking for him, and it finds him when Jane (Moroles) hunts him down at a nondescript, crummy motel. It turns out a one-night stand 15 years earlier left Francis with a daughter he never knew about, and now Jane has opted to seek out her father and confront him about certain strange abilities she can’t quite explain. Francis is, of course, reluctant to engage with her, but the more he pushes back against Jane’s emergence in his life, the more he sees himself in the young vampire hybrid. As the two embark on a cross-country road trip, and their unlikely bond deepens, the older vampire has to decide if it might be worth it to give up his wandering ways at last.
If this is all giving you Paper Moon meets Near Dark vibes, you’re definitely not alone, and Segan is a keen enough student of film and filmmaking to immediately recognize the familiar elements with which he’s structured Blood Relatives. It is, of course, what you do with those elements that counts, and it’s there that the film begins to take on a singular vibrancy. Segan’s script is a richly textured storyscape which layers environment, character and horror together to build something new from pieces we’re used to seeing.