Ever since F.W. Murnau‘s Nosferatu hit the screens in 1922, cinema has been overtaken by stories of vampires. Some, of course, are more well-known and well-loved than others. Still, from indie thinkers like Shadow of the Vampire and A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night to action romps such as Underworld and 30 Days of Night, the world of film has vamp stories for each and every kind of taste. The most recent addition to this long list of bloodsucking movies is, of course, Robert Eggers‘ own take on the classic Murnau tale, which also drinks a lot from the 1979 version of the story directed by Werner Herzog. Before venturing into this new flick, though, viewers might want to take stock of all the stories that came before. They might even want to check out some gems that have slipped under the radar. And no movie deserves this kind of attention more than 2012’s Byzantium.
Starring Gemma Arterton and Saoirse Ronan as a pair of mother-and-daughter vampires, Byzantium is the second contribution to the vampire subgenre from director Neil Jordan, following his 1994 adaptation of Interview with the Vampire. Based on the Anne Rice novel of the same name, Interview with the Vampire revived the interest in the genre in the ’90s and helped create a huge chunk of the imagery we have come to associate with these creatures of the night. Byzantium, sadly, did no such thing. Jordan’s 2012 movie has quite a few things in common with its predecessor, beyond the fact that the two films are based on previous texts written by women who also act as screenwriters. (This time it’s the play A Vampire Story from Moira Buffini.) Both Byzantium and Interview with the Vampire also deal with some similar themes, including romantic and parental relationships between vamps over the course of centuries.
But Byzantium also does its own thing. With two female vampires as its protagonists, the movie dabbles in topics such as patriarchal systems of oppression, secret societies, and exploitation. In the end, the film offers a unique perspective that makes it a valuable addition to the vampire genre.
What Is ‘Byzantium’ About?
The premise of Byzantium is deceptively simple. Clara (Arterton) and Eleanor (Ronan) are two vampires constantly on the run, trying to avoid being exposed for who they are. However, their would-be enemies are not just the humans that they feed on, but also a group of other, male vampires belonging to a secret society that accepts no women in their midst, especially not women of a lower class. Said organization sees Clara and particularly Eleanor as aberrations, creatures that must be stopped at all costs, even though they are not so different from themselves. Hidden in a coastal city — a city that they have visited before, as Eleanor points out — Clara works as a madam in a self-founded brothel, while Eleanor falls in love with a local schoolboy.
In a constant tension between past and present, Byzantium also takes place somewhere in the 1700s to 1800s. In this story — a completely different one, but also the same — Clara is an abused woman forced into prostitution by a certain Captain Ruthven (Johnny Lee Miller), a character loosely inspired by the one of the same name from John Polidori‘s The Vampyre, the 1819 short story largely considered the inaugural text on modern bloodsuckers. Clara has a daughter named Eleanor, whom she is forced to abandon, but never quite gives up on. One day, she and Ruthven are visited by one of the captain’s former army mates, Darvell (Sam Riley), who has found the secret to eternal life. He promises to share this secret with Ruthven, but Clara has other plans. Dying of syphilis, she takes her abuser’s place and becomes immortal herself.
The secret lies within a cave, in which lives a creature called a “succreant,” a term that, according to Jordan himself, evokes “some kind of Caribbean revenant that’s out at night and drinks blood and comes back and sleeps all day”. When Ruthven rapes Eleanor, condemning her to die of syphilis just like him, Clara takes Eleanor to the cave to save her life. Though Clara was allowed to live as a vampire, she was forbidden from creating other vampires by a vampire group known as the Brethren. After saving Eleanor, the two women go on the run, in an effort to keep her alive which isn’t always appreciated.
Why Did ‘Byzantium’ Get an R Rating?
But before pressing play in Byzantium, you might want to consider the movie’s rating. The fact that it deals with themes of familial love doesn’t mean that the film is family-friendly entertainment. As a matter of fact, Byzantium was rated R when it came out, and the reason behind this decision is not that hard to understand. No, there’s nothing to do with the fact that Clara owns a brothel – at least, not for the most part. While the film does have a few more suggestive scenes and a couple of instances of sexual violence, nothing is explicit. There are no moments that would make a teen blush if their parents were to cross the living room, so to speak. The real culprit here is the gore.
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Now, if you’re a hardcore horror fan, there’s nothing you have to worry about. Byzantium has nothing you haven’t seen before. However, those with a more sensitive stomach might feel a little uneasy at the sight of Clara decapitating a man with a piece of rope, for instance, or with her first feeding as a succrean. These scenes are not long, and they’re not actually that common in the film as a whole, but they sure raised a few eyebrows, as well as the movie’s rating. So, you know, it’s not Saw, but don’t go in expecting some PG-13 fun as well.
And, well, while the aforementioned sexual violence isn’t exactly on the nose, there might have been some issues taken with some of the themes the film discusses. Besides the rape and the prostitution present in Clara and Eleanor’s backstory, there is also a fair amount of sex work involved in the two women’s lives in the present. It’s not so much that Clara and Eleanor are femme fatales who use their sexual expertise to devour men — though Clara has learned to be something of a seductress during her time on Earth -, but that they are pushed to a life that forces them to rely on sexuality to survive. These themes may have also pushed the movie towards a higher rating.
‘Byzantium’ Touches on Many Themes Common to the Vampire Genre
Byzantium is a film that breathes the air of its time. It came out just four years after the first Twilight movie, as well as the first season of True Blood and the beloved indie darling Let the Right One In. Thus, Eleanor and her conflicted love affair with Frank (Caleb Landry Jones), a young man dying from leukemia, functions almost as a response to these kinds of stories. It is a young romance but it is filled with melancholy and fear, despite the excitement. Eventually, Frank comes to see Eleanor as a way to go on living, while she sees him as collateral in a life that she has little to no control over.
The movie also touches on the subject of parental relationships involving vampires, another topic that is common in the aforementioned stories. In Interview with the Vampire, of course, we see this kind of relationship blossom between Louis (Brad Pitt), Lestat (Tom Cruise), and Claudia (Kirsten Dunst). The movie focuses on how such tragic creatures, who will never die, cannot form healthy bonds. Meanwhile, in Twilight, the Cullens are indistinguishable from any suburban family in Forks. True Blood presents us with borderline incestuous relationships between parent and child vamps, such as Eric (Alexander Skarsgård) and Pam (Kristin Bauer), while Let The Right One In centers, among other things, a faux parentage situation involving a child vampire and a pedophile.
In Byzantium, the familial bonds that tie Clara and Eleanor together go beyond the vampirical. The two are indeed mother and child, connected by blood. Except their little family becomes a sort of secret society of its own. Transformed from a human woman, socially expected to give life, into a female succreant, forbidden from doing so, Clara shelters Eleanor, creating her own code to allegedly keep her daughter safe.
‘Byzantium’ Is a Critique of Patriarchal Structures
The relationship between Eleanor and Clara is, in a way, akin to that of the Brethren, a secret society of succreants. The two women form a hidden order of their own. However, that which Clara desires to keep safe is not a set of knowledge and norms accessible only to the few, but a human, albeit immortal, life. Clara does not wish to keep others at bay from her world because she finds herself to be special, but because she loves Eleanor. The Brethren, on the other hand, turn their backs on Clara and Eleanor because they are women, and are therefore considered lesser beings.
The Brethren, thus, stands not just for a group of immortal vampires that date back to the Crusades, or even earlier, but for a set of social structures created to keep women out of places of knowledge and power. Her gender, as well as her class, ensures Clara a life of suffering and exploitation, and she wishes for herself and others to be free of it. How much she is actually helping by opening a brothel of her own and becoming a madam is another topic, but that doesn’t detract from the commentary that Byzantium manages to craft. Perhaps there’s something to be said about how vampires just can’t fight their exploitative nature.
Or, perhaps, as we mentioned before, there just isn’t much that Clara can do with her life having been forced into prostitution at such a young age and commended to spend the rest of her life on the run. There is only so much agency that we can attribute to the female characters of Byzantium, as the Brethren do not allow them to live their own full lives. Just as Ruthven forced Clara into a line of work that she never wished for herself, his brothers forbid both her and her daughter from being anything but poor, persecuted women living on the margins.
It would be criminal to speak about Byzantium without mentioning the movie’s beautiful cinematography by Sean Bobbitt (Judas and the Black Messiah). Sometimes delicate, sometimes utterly terrifying, there is no image in Byzantium that fails to cause an impression. The most striking among them is certainly the bloody waterfall that appears whenever someone receives the gift of eternal life from the original succreant. We are almost left lamenting the fact that such a wonder does not exist in the real world. It is truly something that will charm even the most jaded of horror fans. And so will the rest of the film.
Byzantium is available to stream on The Roku Channel in the U.S.
- Release Date
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June 28, 2013
- Runtime
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118 Minutes
- Writers
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Moira Buffini
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