“Bit”

This review was comissioned by @Vinegrape


"Trans-inclusive lesbian separatist vampires."

If that sentence makes you go "huh?" then this movie is for you.

If that sentence makes you go "omg based," then this movie is even more for you, but probably not for the reasons you'd prefer.

"Bit" (as in the past tense of "bite") is an indie comedy/horror/hardtodefine movie that came out of the LGBT film festival circuit in 2019. I was kind of surprised I hadn't heard about it until now, given the intersection of themes and subject matter it covers. Having now seen it though, well, it makes a little more sense. This isn't a great movie. I'm not even sure if I can find it in me to call it good. And yet, despite its issues, I would never dream of calling it bad either.

I think there might be a truly amazing movie buried in this one. It's just unfortunately all covered up by the creators' inexperience and (especially) apparent refusal to work within their means. A little more polish, a little more self-awareness, and a little more efficient use of the limited resources at hand, and it's possible that this might have been my favourite vampire movie of all time. As it is, well...I still recommend it as a fun film with some cool things to say about gender, power, and patriarchy, but with a substantial list of caveats.

...

The story follows Laurel, freshly graduated from high school and freshly transitioned MtF, as she leaves her rural Oregon hometown to spent the summer with her actor brother Mark in Los Angeles. Her first night in California, Mark pressures her to go clubbing with him despite her physical and emotional exhaustion. At the club, Laurel gets picked up by an attractive girl named Izzy with similar interests to hers and well-formed plans to kill and eat her after sex.

Laurel's life is saved at the last moment by Duke, the alpha member of Izzy's all-woman vampire coven, who tells her minion that she thinks this one might be more valuable as a new recruit than an exsanguinated corpse (she seems to have been impressed by Laurel refusing to take shit from inconsiderate guys at the club earlier, which foreshadows something we'll learn about later on). What follows is the most holistically fucked up and hypocritical corruption of a "grrrl power" arc that has ever been put to film. It's also one that - without ever calling too much attention to it, apart from one brief exchange in which Duke affirms Laurel's femininity as part of the lovebombing phase of her recruitment - only serves the story as well as it does because of Laurel's transness.

"Men can't handle power," Duke tells Laurel when explaining why their brood will only ever include women, "they have it already and look what they've done with it." In an (unfortunately not as well written) preface to this, she says of women "We are politically, socially, mythologically fucked. Our bodies suspect, alien, other. We're made to be monstrous...so let's be monsters. Let's be gods." Later, when opening up to Laurel about abuse that she herself once suffered at the hands of powerful men, Duke fantasizes about a world "where all women are vampires, and men are the ones who have to be afraid to jog at night."

Laurel is initially sceptical that a transwoman falls on the right side of Duke's war of the sexes. Duke assures her that she considers her a woman unreservedly, and Laurel - hungry for affirmation - allows this to sway her for a time.

The thing is that the movie has already shown that Laurel isn't on the right side of Duke's worldview. In fact, there isn't a right side of Duke's worldview. Laurel's introduction to the coven was as a totally innocent victim, saved from death only by a last-second whim of its leader. Even more damningly, while Duke assures Laurel that the coven favors abusive men as its foodstuff of choice ("we're not a movement," she tells Laurel, "at best we're a terrorist organization. We're about 80/20 on guilty versus innocent kills"), she also grudgingly admits that feeding is more enjoyable if the victim is someone who the vampire finds attractive.

It's already established by that point that the coven are all lesbians.

In light of these facts, I don't think that Duke's statistics are anywhere close to the neighbourhood of accuracy. All she and her brood are accomplishing is giving women yet another reason to fear jogging at night.

Duke's answers to these questions constantly oscillate between idealistic lesbian separatist talking points and performative "nothing personnel kid" style moral nihilism to keep herself on the winning side of each conversation.

Even if it weren't for that blatant hypocrisy, Laurel knows that she was once perceived as a man. She (probably) also once thought herself to be a man, however miserable that belief made her. Is there some moral quality that she always had, and that the cisboys she went to elementary school with lacked? Or did she herself lack that quality herself until she came out to herself?

Throughout the movie, Laurel's brother Mark grows increasingly concerned for her as these creepy punky rave girls keep dragging her away for days at a time and leave her too exhausted to move from his living room couch while the sun is overhead. She rebuffs him with increasing forcefulness as Duke pulls her in closer; mostly out of a desire to protect him, but also increasingly because of what Duke, Izzy, and Co have been telling her. She also falls out of contact with her increasingly worried parents, and her best friend from high school (a gay boy whose common GSM status with Laurel is suggested to have been a bonding element, and who is going through mental health issues of his own). Things come to a head when Laurel's high school friend - after over a month of reaching out to her for emotional support only for his calls and texts to go unanswered - attempts suicide by overdose. The exact same suicide method, it turns out, that Laurel's brother once prevented her from attempting.

Up to this point, Laurel has (to the growing frustration of the other vampires) been avoiding feeding as much as possible, still having too many moral reservations. When Mark confronts her about her behavior toward him and her other friends and family, her hunger has reached its apex, and when she loses it at him, well, she really loses it.

"I never stood in the way of you becoming who you really are. But it turns out that who you really are is a selfish bitch."​

This leads into the action-packed climax, in which Laurel tries to save her wounded, half-bled brother from either dying or turning, and is forced to confront the ugly truth of Duke's brood head on instead of twisting herself into knots around it.

...

Before getting into the movie's final act, I'll have to talk about some other plot complexities and details that have been building up alongside the (very strong) central character arc. And, unfortunately, this is where some of "Bit'" more serious flaws necessitate discussion.

Throughout the movie, there's this subplot about a gang of rightwing chuds turned vampire hunters that have Duke's coven in their sites. Duke uses them as helpful cases in point when making her arguments to Laurel, but the pacing of their appearances in the movie are just so insanely convenient that it takes you out of the story.

Like, for instance, the leader of the hunterchuds is this creepy old man who is shown to have zero reservations about killing innocent people when it's convenient for him, but who nonetheless tries to save Laurel from having her blood drained at the beginning. Seemingly for the dual purposes of a) letting her recognize him later when the plot needs her too, and b) making him play the role of "creepy old person who tried to warn them" that every horror movie's act one is legally required to include. If he somehow knew that Duke would decide to make Izzy turn Laurel instead of just killing her like they usually do with their victims then that might make sense, but there's really no way he could have known that.

This early encounter foreshadows the movie's first proper fight scene, which in turn forces me to ask why in god's name these creators thought they could do a fight scene?

They did not have the budget for this. They did not have the talent for this. The movie did not NEED this. They could have very, very easily made a few writing changes that would eliminate 75% of the action sequences without removing anything important from the story.

Yes, there is a part of this fight where the hunterchuds literally left a giant bear trap open on the floor in the middle of the vampires' own lair without anyone noticing, and Duke steps right fucking into it somehow.​

I can be extremely sympathetic to low-budget productions, but only on the condition that the creators make some effort to work within their goddamned limits. Like, the acting in this movie is all over the place in quality, with the lead brother-sister duo (Laurel in particular) being by far the best actors, and Duke and the creepy old hunterchud (chunter? chunter.) leader being the worsts. I'd never criticize the movie for that though, because they were stuck with the actors they could afford, and there's no way to write the story around that. This though? I will absolutely hold them responsible for this, and judge the movie as a whole for including it.

It isn't just one fight scene either. There are a bunch of these. All of them are piles of poorly directed, poorly blocced, bad special effects-ridden shit.

The chunter subplot serves to provide Duke with visual aids for her arguments, pressure Laurel into making split-second decisions that end up forcing her deeper into the coven's grip, and also give Laurel the occasional blood meal who she can kill in self-defence rather than for the sake of feeding and thus postpone her moral downfall until the story is ready for it. Like I said, it's all *really* convenient. However, it also serves to introduce another plot point that ties the whole movie together and is essential for the final act. And it's a good plot point on its own; I just really wish they could have used anything fucking else to introduce it.

...

The creepy old man who leads the chunters is a former retainer of the vampire who turned Duke herself, who had been promised vampiredom in exchange for a period of loyal service in the daylit world. This old vampire's origins are unknown, save that he is at least six hundred years old and monstrous in both temperament and power. This elder vampire (referred to most often as simply "the Master," though numerous aliases are also listed) may or may not have ever been planning to keep this promise, but was overthrown by his own spawn before he could, and his surviving human minions are still sore about it. After the first couple of chunter encounters, Laurel gets Duke to tell the story behind this.

Teenaged Duke ran away from her virulently homophobic rural family on pain of death sometime in the 1970's. She was homeless for a time. Addicted. Prostituting. She eventually, after immense pain and laborious effort, started to get her life together and get a stable job and living situation in the orbit of New York City's underground (there was no other kind, back then) queer scene. She learned not to take shit from anyone, and was sure that she never would again. Like this guy here who pours a drink on her head at a club, and who she pulled a knife on (which seems to be what Laurel's own behavior in the club at the movie's start reminded her of):

Was that a thing, in the 1970's? Pouring drinks on lesbians? I'm not sure. I think it should be a thing now, though. Next time you see a lesbian, try pouring a drink on her. If you are a lesbian, you can get someone else to pour a drink on you or even do it yourself. This would be a good action for us all to perform. Getting back to the review now.

Just as Duke was finding herself a happy, fulfilling life, the Master found her and basically did the Purple Man thing. He was going through a "bored of immortality, let's just be as decadent and hedonistic as inhumanly possible" arc at the time, which basically amounts to Vampire Kilgrave. To this day, his mind-whammy on Duke is so powerful that she still remembers him as the single most irresistibly sexy person ever, even though she's been otherwise 100% lesbian both before and after him. He kept Duke as part of his harem for decades, and turned her mostly just so she'd stay pretty for longer. Eventually he grew lax in his control, and when some vampire hunters attacked him Duke and one of his other concubines used the opportunity to kill him while he was distracted by the...um...whoever the fuck these people are supposed to have been:

Remember, this is supposed to have happened in late twentieth century America, and seemingly at some kind of club type place. I'm just imagining these fucking ComicCon dorks marching down the streets of LA or New York or wherever in full catholic-monk-as-imagined-by-japanese-manga-artist regalia hefting their flamethrowers and silvered longswords with those dead serious glares frozen on their faces on the way to the address, and I just lose my shit. I actually had to pause the movie and laugh for several minutes at this point.

It didn't help that the background song while Duke is narrating her time as a mind-controlled sex slave leading up to this incident is this one. Like, even if the Master is literally supposed to be Rasputin (which...maybe?), it's just too goddamned silly. Or that some of the imagery shown in the collage of her enslaved years looks like this:

I know that this movie as a whole is semi-comedic throughout, but this is just off. Duke's narration is dead serious, and the events she's describing are a nightmare born of both real world intolerance and cruelty and fantasy mind control horror, but everything we see and hear besides her voice for this entire sequence says "parody."

But, getting to the point of this all.

Bitverse vampires are only weakened rather than killed by things like sunlight, garlic, and silver. They are vulnerable to fire, but to kill one for good you need to make sure you incinerate its heart. That's pretty much the only way to do it. They burned the Master to ashes, but he was so powerful that his heart refused to burn. It remained intact and beating, ready to regenerate him as soon as it comes in contact with blood. The best his rebel wives could do was lock the Master's heart in a safe and guard it from his remaining allies and retainers.

Duke, who had a more dominant personality than the other unnamed wife, had little trouble in taking command of their new pack. She also discovered that by scraping little pieces off of the Master's heart and consuming them, she could use more of the elder vampire's power. Only a little at a time, though. Whenever she takes a nibble, she feels his personality thrashing against the inside of her mind, and she fears that eating too much at once may have dire consequences. She needs that power to keep the heart safe from the interlopers, though, so she continues taking those little scrapes. She can handle it. She's sure.

As for where the other wife is now? The other victim of the Master's who helped Duke overthrow and imprison him, and then acquiescently stood down and let Duke take command and claim exclusive access to his heart-power? Well, she's currently a disembodied heart herself. At the very, very beginning of the movie, before we're introduced to Laurel, there's a little teaser that shows Duke and her three other lackeys catching a fifth coven member in the act of bestowing vampirism on a man. They incinerate him, and sentence her to one year's solitary confinement. That fifth coven member was Duke's co-revolutionary, and her heart is still locked in Duke's basement being drip-fed just barely enough blood to keep it beating.

...

Toward the beginning of the film, after forcing Izzy to turn rather than kill Laurel and then giving the latter the recruitment pitch, Duke told Laurel several things.

First: that there are three rules in their coven. No turning boys ever, no turning girls without the rest of the coven's consensus, and no mind-controlling other vampires. Other than this, Duke assures, the coven offers absolute freedom. You can do whatever you want.

Except that she can't tell if you're following the rules if you aren't in her close vicinity, so as an unspoken logical extension of those rules you can't leave the area. And also you can't tell anyone about vampires, of course, obviously. And you can't keep refusing to feed just because the victims aren't deserving of death enough for you; if you get too hungry then you'll eventually lose control, and that's a threat to their secrecy. So, you have to stay in Duke's orbit, live her lifestyle, and let her keep tabs on you at all times, but other than that seriously she's offering total freedom to do as you will.

Second, during the pitch, Duke told Laurel that she had two options (other than death or disembodied imprisonment, of course). Either she accepts the rules and joins the brood, or she drinks a potion that Duke offers her; this potion can turn a vampire back into a human, but ONLY if they haven't yet had their first blood meal.

So, having lost control, fed on her brother, and stopped herself short of killing him, Laurel drives the unconscious Mark to the coven's lair and begs for the bottle of cure. She tells Duke and the others that she'll spend as many years in the disembodied heart basement as they demand, she'll even let them execute her if Duke wills it, provided that they allow Mark to return to his human life.

Duke reveals that there is no cure. The "potion" is just purified alcohol. Drink it, and a vampire's already flammable body becomes incinerable with a mere tossed match. Even after giving her the grrrl power speech and promising freedom, Duke placed zero value on Laurel's life and was ready to kill her in a heartbeat if she said no.

...

Here I need to talk about Izzy, the vampire who turned (and would have killed) Laurel after picking her up at the beginning. Or more accurately, Laurel's relationship with Izzy. The two of them continue hooking up during Laurel's dreamlike, night-haunting time as a coven-member, and at one point Laurel tries to work out her mixed feelings about sleeping with the girl who tried to murder her and never seemed to regret it. And also tries to ask her about longterm issues like "won't people eventually start to notice that we aren't ageing, and what will that do to our social and familial prospects?"

Izzy's responses to Laurel's questions are downright wooden. Anything challenging is deflected with either humor, or something like "I just don't think about it" or "I'll deal with that problem when it comes up."

Peel away the hedonistic, devil-may-care exterior, and Izzy starts to seem almost more zombie than vampire. We never get to know Duke's other two minions that well, but one gets the impression that they're the same way.

Izzy used Laurel for sex, and then killed her for food, and doesn't get what the big deal is. Any attempts to MAKE her get what the big deal is reveal a giant blank space where a person should be.

...

Finally realizing what she's really been dealing with, and about to be murdered along with her brother, the cornered Laurel runs to the feeding grate over the prison-pit, where she rips her own throat open to let extra-concentrated blood drip onto the heart below. Duke's rival - the vampire woman known only as "the first wife," regenerates her body, and smashes open the safe containing the Master's heart to revive him as well. Duke and the others try and fail to stop her, and while they're all distracted Laurel grabs the slowly-regaining-consciousness Mark and runs away with him. They drive away, Laurel tearfully explaining their situation to Mark and trying to apologize for things she knows can't be forgiven. The two now alone to figure out what to do with themselves, including whether or not they should walk into an incinerator together.

The actor they got for the Master has an uneven set of skills. In Duke's flashback sequence, his lack of nonverbal charisma just made the whole thing even more farsical than it already was. Given an opportunity to talk now, though, the dude becomes a completely different and far more talented actor. His vocal delivery carries so much power, menace, and malice that you immediately forget all about the goofy expressions and unconvincing body language.

I wish I could take a screencap of his voice.​

Immediately, it is clear that we haven't met a real vampire until this moment. Duke and the others - even with the former being bolstered from nibbling on the heart - were never anything more than glorified spawn.

The first thing he does is make Duke admit that she's been liberally using mind control on all the others, despite her insistence that not doing so is one of the core rules. That's why Izzy is so wooden when you try to push her on certain things. That's why Laurel ignored her reservations and went with the recruitment even after the way they treated her and others in front of her. I'd gotten fairly frustrated with Laurel by this point in the movie, but now it's made clear that she never had agency. The only vampire who was an actual character in this entire drama was Duke.

Except that Duke never had agency either. She just chewed the heart and let it do the thinking for her. She wasn't a real character either.

The Master was the only one who actually did anything in this entire story. After all, he's the master. The boss. The man.

A hidden Narcissus reverberated through a deceptively colourful cast of Echos.

He then turns his attention to the other girls present - the three who Duke and the First Wife turned during his imprisonment - and tells them that he's been gravely slandered. He has been many things over his centuries of unlife. A villain sometimes, yes, but also sometimes a hero. A liberator, a force for good in the flow of human history, at least sometimes. In the late twentieth century he was a decadent hedonist yes, but that's such a tiny percentage of who and what he is as a whole. It is unfair to judge him for that tiny slice of his life, and he will now prove that they were all wrong to do so. And really, what did he ever use his mind control powers for besides making his wives feel loved and happy? Just like Duke, who now dares to cast judgement on him, used it to make her wives feel empowered and free? Hell, he was at least honest about it.

It's literally just a more charismatic, better-structured version of Duke's bullshit, where she changes the focus of the conversation to keep herself in the right. Whether it's down to her eating too much of the heart, a learned behavior from her decades of slavery, or something from within Duke's original self, she and the Master are virtually the exact same person. He's just stronger and smarter.

This, in my opinion, is where the movie should have ended. Unfortunately, it isn't.

...

After starting to drive away with Mark, Laurel abruptly changes her mind and turns the car around. She surprises the Master and - with the help of the others once he's surprise-stunned by a clever trick involving the alcohol bottle - manages to incinerate him down to the heart again in another absolutely terrible, awkward, bad-CGI-filled fight scene. His heart goes back in the safe, and Duke's goes in the punishment pit.

There's a little dialogue scene between Laurel and Mark the next day, where they discuss the prospect of continued unlife, and Laurel wonders if maybe the answer is to make EVERYONE a vampire.

-____-

The stinger has the coven, now reorganized along democratic principles and including both the First Wife and Mark, sharing the heart of the Master equally.

I thiiiink the movie intends this to be a positive ending. Which, um. I have some problems.

...

I get that they didn't want this to be a pure horror movie in the end. But with everything they established, I think they really should have bitten the bullet and gone with the bleak ending that the story frankly needs.

Vampires are not a metaphor for the thing that this ending wants them to be a metaphor for. I'm not proscribing this. I'm not trying to force the movie to conform to a broader pop culture consensus of what vampires are and what they mean. I'm saying that IN THIS MOVIE ITSELF, vampires are not what the ending says they are. Being a vampire isn't just having power. It's specifically having the power to take, dominate, and victimize with impunity. More than that, it's a state of being that requires you to do those things.

There's a scene early on, right after Laurel gets turned, when Mark tries to give her a meal and she throws it up a la Tokyo Ghoul. The need to feed is established to always be present in the vampiric mind, and trying to resist it just leads to uncontrollable bloodrages happening the next time you're stressed or angry. Vampires can feed on other vampires, but the movie reeeeeaaally doesn't frame this as a perpetual motion machine where vampires can feed on each other for infinite energy. If a vampire bite doesn't kill you, you become another vampire, so every feeding results in either a death or another mouth to feed. There are no indications that they can get by on animal blood.

Vampires in this movie are monsters. They *have to* be monsters.

Likewise, trying to frame the heart of the Master as a neutral source of power that leads to evil only when hoarded by some at the expense of others ignores the literal text leading up to it. Duke says in as many words that she can feel the Master's presence in her mind when she tastes the heart, and is clearly lying to herself and everyone else when she claims that she can keep it under control as long as she paces herself. Keeping the Master's heart and using it to empower yourself turns you into the Master. It makes you an extension of him, regardless of how you or he feels about it.

The movie could have set up the metaphors differently in order to support this ending. But it didn't. This is probably the single biggest blemish on "Bit." I could be okay with this ending if there was any apparent recognition that Laurel's approach is every bit as doomed as Duke's and that this is just the beginning of yet another tragedy, but there doesn't seem to be.

I maintain that the best way to end this film would have been to roll credits after the Master's villain speech. Duke didn't get rid of the Master, and so now she'll never be rid of him, and thanks to her and others like her the world will never be free of his depredations. Laurel and Mark might find salvation for themselves somehow, but it barely matters, because they barely matter.

That's the unironic, non-joking, bona fide horror that Bit should have culminated in.

...

Glaring issues aside, I really appreciate what this movie has to say about patriarchy and power. And, even though I dislike the ending overall, there's one exchange within it that really puts that message into words. When Laurel and Mark are discussing their future as vampires in the penultimate scene, Mark wonders if he will eventually become power-mad and cruel just as Duke predicted. Laurel replies that saying he "will" end up that way is just making excuses for his future self. Excuses that he doesn't deserve. Just like Duke doesn't deserve, and the Master doesn't deserve. There's only one person who can decide whether or not Mark will be corrupted, and that person's power over the matter is absolute.

Once again, Laurel's transness is of utmost importance when she says this. She knows what it's like to be a man, and she knows what it's like to be a woman. It's not as different as they want you to think.

There's a corollary to this piece of dialogue, earlier in the movie. During Laurel's dreamlike whirl of mindfucked unlife in Duke's orbit, there's a bit where Laurel and Izzy go to an art show or something. At said show, they end up hearing this hipster dude give an insufferably performative speech about why he doesn't consider himself a feminist, because doing so would be like pretending he's already done all the work he needs to do and letting him ignore the fact that his maleness and privilege will always be lurking within waiting to strike unless he stays vigilant. You feel nothing but a slight catharsis when Izzy tears his throat out after the show, because you just know this guy is a serial rapist. Every word of his fake speech is making excuses for himself, under a skin of performative allyship.

Laurel's neglected best friend back home being a gay man - another anomaly within the world order of hetero-masculine dominance - is also important. He's indisputably a man. Never has been and probably never will be anything remotely feminine. But he, just by virtue of who he wants to bang, isn't really the type of "man" that Duke railed against either. Not that gay men can't be misogynists, of course, but it still very distinctly just *isn't* the same thing.

Patriarchy is just the monster's outer skin. The shape it happened to grow itself into on account of its surroundings. At its core, this is an evil far more universal and primal than such petty distinctions as "male" and "female," let alone "masculine" and "feminine." Those concepts are merely tools for it.

Looking at the movie from that perspective, it's actually kind of odd that Duke was so trans-accepting. Her worldview seems like it should point directly at TERFdom. Hmm. Yeah, not really sure what to make of that decision, aside from the plot's need for her to be lovebombing Laurel with affirmation.

It occurs to me, also, that I've seen this concept before in more than just K6BD. I'm thinking of Utena in particular, but also other things. The tyrant patriarch has fallen, but he is only dormant rather than dead, and tyrannical patriarchy grows and seeps from his tomb to infect men and women alike and force them to revive him. I wonder if, in addition to the obvious tensions between second and third wave feminism, this also reflects a much broader anxiety about power and control in the modern era independent of gender politics. The liberal world order prides itself on having cast down the kings and emperors of old, but did it ever actually escape them?

...

There are other things that annoyed me about this movie. The characters making these meta-ironic pop culture references and comparing the story that they're in to "one of those vampire movies" every few scenes is supremely obnoxious. When they had the damned Master utter the words "like it says in that one movie" in the middle of his otherwise superb villain speech, it almost ruined it for me. I know I said I won't hold the acting against the film, but Izzy's actress' performance is so much better than Duke's that I found myself wishing they'd given the (much) more important character to the superior talent (though to be fair, casting a black woman as Duke might have come with its own issues).

But.

The acting and interplay between the lead sibling duo was ironclad. The atmosphere of nihilistic, half-hallucinatory decadence while Laurel is being dragged into the vampire vortex in the movie's middle third felt like a mix between a nostalgic teenaged memory and a half-remembered nightmare. The strength and clarity of the message, and the earnestness with which the movie speaks it, shine brightly. These aspects of "Bit" are beyond reproach.

That's why I said at the beginning that this is an incredible movie buried in a mediocre movie. Give the script another few passes, rethink the last couple of scenes, and give it either a bigger budget or a less overambitious director, and we'd be looking at a masterpiece. As it is, I'm glad I watched it, and I recommend that you watch it as well, but it isn't nearly what it could and should have been.