Nostalgia Kinky

Recently before suffering through Wuthering Heights, I saw an IMAX trailer for Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey. After several minutes of watching this BIG and BOOMING preview featuring big-stars and gorgeous 70mm photography, I heard someone in the audience say ‘that looks good’ and my first thought was ‘goddamn it should’ considering it cost a quarter of a billion dollars to make. That’s how much it costs to build a skyscraper. That’s more money than it costs NASA to blast a rocket into space and it still might suck. 

Anyway, I’m not interested in The Odyssey or any other obscenely budgeted collusion with the devil at this point. Christopher Nolan’s fine first film The Following (1998) cost six grand. That’s a filmmaker I’m interested in. Somebody give Christopher Nolan six grand again to make a film and I’ll go see that. I’d honestly be curious to see what he could do nearly three decades later?
Quarter of a billion? Not so much. 

Date With a Vampire didn’t cost six grand to make. In fact I’d wager that when all was said and done, director Jeffrey Arsenault probably dropped about 600 bucks on this this quite inventive and intriguing hour-long film. Cleverly creating half a softcore erotic title followed by a gory horror film, Arsenault’s first shot on video work is a fine example of New York-No Wave-No Budget filmmaking.

Date With a Vampire is making its Blu-ray debut from Visual Vengeance, who specializes in rescuing SOV titles like this one as fully-loaded special editions. Date With a Vampire is packed with interviews, commentaries, a poster, sticker-sheet and even a bonus feature Blood Craving (2002). While SOV no-budget titles certainly aren’t for everyone as a film historian and lover of DIY art, I absolutely love works like Date With a Vampire, even though they by their very nature resist labeling as good or bad. Viewed as a time capsule back to New York in 2001 though, the place and year that changed everything, Date With a Vampire is very valuable,

Amongst the things I regret most about my youth in the nineties, is the amount of attention I gave filmmakers who turned out to be nothing but ‘company men’ in the end. Regrets aside that I didn’t become directly involved in working on or writing about regional DIY titles like Date With a Vampire, I look forward to discovering more and more with the time I have left. Visual Vengeance have done a great and exhaustive job with Date With a Vampire. SOV collectors and lovers should welcome this very cool release.

Included as a bonus feature on Visual Vengeance’s excellent Blu-ray, Blood Craving (2002) is another interesting New York no-budget SOV film from director Jeffrey Arsenault. Conceived as a sequel to Arsenault’s influential 16mm 1993 production Night Owl, this 30 minute film is perhaps even more fascinating than the longer main feature on Visual Vengeance’s disc, mostly due to its backstory, the appearance of Caroline Munro and its very charismatic star Tiffany Helland.

Arsenault admits on the commentary for Blood Craving that as a follow-up to his most successful film it just didn’t work at all. As a little short though it is kind of neat. It is fitting that it seems partially inspired by Joe D’Amato’s Emanuelle and Françoise, considering D’Amato was another filmmaker who was no stranger to reutilizing film footage. 

Leaning away from the soft-core first-half of Date With a Vampire, Blood Craving is a more traditional horror film. The bloodletting takes a back seat though to the very memorable Tiffany Helland, an actress that has ended up spending most of her time on the stage as this article I found, released just after her appearance in this film, points out:

Visual Vengeance have loaded up this title as much as its Blu-ray feature and it also includes a commentary and director’s interview. This is a highly recommended Blu-ray release, but know what you are getting here.
They shot this in two days on VHS.
That’ll either be your thing or it won’t be.
For me, in this moment in time, it is very much my thing.

You can order Date With a Vampire from MVD. The above reviews were originally posted over at my Letterboxd.

-Jeremy Richey, February 2026-