Bite Me is almost criminally misbilled as a romantic comedy about a subculture of vampires. When you are setting out to write a comedy that features modern vampires, you have a lot of poetic anxiety on your shoulders from both What We Do In the Shadows the movie and the subsequent television show. There’s social commentary and incisive jokes to be made that don’t have to punch down on the subculture of Vampire LARPers, but this movie whiffs on all those opportunities, by instead making this movie less about the quirkiness of the community and more about a more or less conventional love story between a reluctant social outcast and a thirty-something late bloomer in New York City.
Bite Me is trying to turn an opposites attract story on its head by drawing out the distinctions between a rarefied subculture and an emotionally repressed Englishman. Sara’s face tattoo and–less so–her penchant for bloodsucking are active decisions to shift the beauty aesthetics of the female lead of the romcom to something more alternative (or Alternative), but a lot of those distinctions feel dated. It’s not edgy to cast a thin white woman with purple hair in the lead role of a romcom anymore. She retains too much privilege from her other identities to really suffer from her religious beliefs, which she doesn’t seem to take that seriously anyway. One of Sara’s friends, a Muslim kindergarten teacher who also practices as a vampire, seems like a much more interesting candidate for the leading role, since more of her identities present a fodder for the romantic couple’s culture clash. Too much of the courtship happens too quickly and is motivated by James’s fetishization of Sara. At one point she assures him, he’ll be able to find another girl who’s not a vampire that “makes [him] feel exciting.”
The writer and director, Meredith McDougall Jones and Meredith Edwards, are also stars of the show, which may explain some of the cyclopic tendencies of the plot and aesthetic feel. The liberal use of a fisheye lens in tight spaces was an ongoing struggle for Friend watching. For fans of the Harry Potter movies, this is probably not the return of Tom Riddle that you were looking forward to.
