It’s been a long time for me. A long time full of crazy people.

Set in Braddock, Pennsylvania, a poverty-stricken mill town where most of the steel plants have been shuttered, Romero’s revisionist vampire movie works as a semi-documentary on the place where the edges of suburbia meet the ghetto. Half Eastern-European, half African-American, half closed-down, Braddock becomes in Martin a graveyard setting for fake vampirism, confused adolescent sexuality and generational conflict, the latter being one of the main themes of 70s cinema.

Martin claims to be an 84-year-old Romanian but looks like an average, pimply American teenager. His uncle, who runs a Braddock butcher shop and is pathologically attached to Old World superstitions, moves Martin into his house to keep him out of trouble and gives him a job delivering meat. Once in daily contact with suburban housewives, Martin’s self-image begins to crumble even as his bloodlust remains. – A.S. Hamrah