Tom Devlin's The After Dark

Cody checks out a new vampire movie.

Tom Devlin’s career as an FX artist stretches back more than twenty years, and he has racked up well over one hundred credits in that time, working on a whole lot of Full Moon productions, Troma’s Poultrygeist: Night of the Chicken Dead, big Hollywood movies like Red Dragon and Daredevil, and even some porn movies that required special effects, like Buffy the Vampire Slayer XXX and Ten Inch Mutant Ninja Turtles. So he already had a couple decades worth of experience working on movies before he made his feature directorial debut with the 2023 slasher Teddy Told Me To – and now that he’s directing, he’s making movies at an impressive pace. Before 2023 was over, he had already made his second movie, Las Vegas Frankenstein. Seven months into 2024, we’ve already seen two more movies from Devlin: the slasher Slaughterhouse on the Hill and now the vampire movie The After Dark.

With Devlin sending movies out into the world rapid fire, it’s no surprise to see that there may have been uncertainty as to which movie was going to be released first: although viewers have already seen Ashley Ballou in Slaughterhouse on the Hill, she gets an “introducing” credit on The After Dark. Here she plays the lead character, who’s called Mary Beth by some and just Beth by others. She used to be a loner who worked from home. Now she’s a vampire who’s stuck with a stuffy group called The Vanished, who feast on rat corpses and follow the lead of an overbearing douche called Vigo (David Heath), who feeds on humans (apparently much better than rats) when he’s behind closed doors.

Beth’s life gets shaken up in a major way (again) when she crosses paths with members of a group called The Lobos. An on-screen narrator played by Lars Frederiksen from Rancid has informed us that there’s “a war brewing between the creatures of the night,” the members of The Vanished and The Lobos. The name The Lobos might lead you to suspect that the script crafted by Tom Devlin, Lola Devlin, and Josh Cornell might be a play on the idea of vampires and werewolves battling each other (as seen in the Underworld movies), but The Lobos are actually just a separate group of vampires, led by former Vanished member Dax (Nicholas Cvjetkovich, a.k.a. Sinn Bodhi). We’ll find out why Vigo and Dax had a falling out eventually, but the differences in their approaches to leading a vampire clan is clear from the start. As mentioned, Vigo rules his highfalutin, dull clan with an iron fist. The Lobos, on the other hand, are just out to  sleep all day, party all night, and live their afterlife loud and fast. Since they’re going to live forever, they figure every day is a reason to a party. And this is a lifestyle that appeals to Beth immediately.

Among the new friends Beth makes as a Lobo is a character played by Daisy Ducati, and I was glad to see that Ducati (who was also in Teddy Told Me To) had a role in this film, after she missed out on Slaughterhouse on the Hill and only had a quick cameo in Las Vegas Frankenstein.

The title The After Dark comes from the underground club The Lobos hang out in, a place where Beth starts spending a large amount of her time. Vigo had sent her to infiltrate The Lobos and spy on them for him (as Vigo seeks to “put an end to Dax and his gang of lost boys”), but she ends up jumping clans and becoming a Lobo herself. Paving the way for a climactic confrontation between the two clans.

Like Devlin’s previous movies, this one was made on a shoestring budget and shot in minimal locations, but there’s more to the story this time around. Being about two warring clans, this one has a wider scope than its predecessors, which were either about people getting knocked off in a single location or a hypnotist building a monster in his break room. This feels like a step up for Devlin – which isn’t meant to be an insult to his other movies, because I’m a big slasher fan, so I have zero problem with stories about people getting knocked off in a single location. It was just nice to see Devlin do something a bit bigger, building up to some cool action. I don’t follow wrestling, so I had no idea going into this movie that David Heath and Sinn Bodhi are or have been professional wrestlers, but their wrestling history was obvious when Vigo and Dax get the chance to tear into each other.

The After Dark has been released through Tubi and other streaming platforms – and if you’re a vampire fan who doesn’t require your entertainment choices to have much of a budget, I would recommend giving it a chance. I had a good time watching this one.