On Monday, Oct. 27, the Yale Student Film Festival hosted a special screening of Pedro Kos’ In Our Blood (2024). It’s rare that a movie twist shocks me. It’s even more rare for a third-act twist to not make me groan with annoyance and dissatisfaction.
In Our Blood follows the fictional documentary filmmaker Emily Wyland, played by Brittany O’Grady, as she travels to Las Cruces, New Mexico to reconnect with her ex-addict mother. The film is composed of footage that Emily and Danny supposedly filmed. The characters are all conscious of the camera and its placement, with Danny seen focusing the camera and attaching mics on screen. The film falls into the found footage, faux-documentary genre. All the clips and audio we see and hear are from the professional camera, microphones and iPhones that both Emily and Danny—the cinematographer she’s asked to tag along—hold and set up throughout the film. While producers Aaron Kogan’00 and Steven Klein’98 cited The Blair Witch Project as an inspiration for this horror film, I found In Our Blood to be considerably faster-paced and much more engaging. Rather than slow treks through the Maryland forest, In Our Blood is filled with sprints across the New Mexico deserts, broad streets and shifting styles of documentary filmmaking. One moment, the film is a melodramatic confessional with Emily’s mother Sam, the next it’s a car chase with a potential serial killer.
After a tense dinner with her mother and Danny, Emily arrives at the clinic where her mother works. She tells Ana, the clinic’s front-desk receptionist, that she was meant to meet her mother, only to learn that Sam never showed up to work. The strained reunion between mother and daughter quickly gives way to a fast-paced investigation into Sam’s disappearance. Danny and Emily chase down interview subjects, barge into bars, methadone clinics, homeless encampments, churches and private residences to find Sam Wyland. As their search continues, they uncover a string of disappearances and murders, all centering on Sam Wyland’s closest friends.
The film scatters newspaper clippings and bulletin references to missing migrant workers, hinting at her mother’s involvement with a local gang. Emily and Danny encounter decapitated pig heads drenched in gore in the bathtubs of their frequented locations, assumed to be the calling card of the local gang. The second act culminates in the basement of Ana; the helpful clinic worker who offered them a place to stay after “the gang” left a pig head in their motel bathroom.
Boom—the first twist of the movie fires off to spectacular results. Ana pulls a shotgun on Danny and Emily, asking them to go down into the basement and, despite whatever happens next, to keep filming. Sam, alongside spoilers for the final two twists of this movie, wait below.
Sam shrieks, her lips curling back to reveal her pointy teeth.
Boom. The second twist of the movie fires off with diminishing returns. Sam Wyland is a vampire. Ana convinces Emily to become the next Buffy the Vampire Slayer and kill her mother while Danny, protesting and begging her not to, huddles up in the corner with the camera.
Emily agrees to become a vampire hunter. She walks over to Ana as she explains the hunting process, stands behind the veteran vampire hunter, snaps her neck with her bare hands and tears into her neck. Danny screams and Emily launches herself towards him, ripping him open off camera. Boom. Third twist. Emily Wyland is also a vampire, and has been this whole time.
This reveal comes within the last five minutes of the film. While it was a shocking shift in tone and narrative genre, especially considering the documentary style format with Emily’s narration, it wasn’t the most egregious of twists. There were signs and references to a vampiric underbelly of the film that eagle-eyed viewers—who accounted for a small part of the 53 Wall Street screening party—could pick up on. Empty blood bags appear beneath Sam’s bedside table. Emily emerges from an off-camera encounter at a gang hub covered in blood that is not her own. If you look close, she and her mother don’t eat on camera.
The vampirism wasn’t the egregious bit—rather, it was the final twist. Not only has Emily been turned, but she’s also a vampire cop working for the vampire CIA internal affairs division. The entire movie has been one big documented report, which culminates in Emily recording her resignation and rebellion before dollying out to reveal the trademark mysterious agent watching a television screen of Emily’s docu-resignation. The figure picks up a phone to tell another member of the organization that “we have a problem.” The film ends.
In Our Blood takes a commendable, experimental cinematic approach by picking Pedro Kos, an Academy Award-nominated documentary filmmaker, to direct this horror-investigation-thriller. It entertains, is well-paced, and melds genuine documentary footage—interviews with unhoused residents of Las Cruces’ real life Camp Hope—with a fictional disappearance. The first twist in the narrative, the inclusion of vampires, holds shock value but still contributes to the narrative which the first and second act spun. It was surprising, if not a tad baffling, but still satisfying. The second and third twists might have been one too many.
Based on the Q&A section of the screening, the directors knew the film would have an unreliable narrator at its conception. That would’ve been fine. I love a story colored by the narrator’s biased—or even straight-up deceitful—narration. Twists are fun, especially when they’re built into the narrative from the start. But coupled with the doorknob insertion of a shadowy vampire organization like something out of Vampire The Masquerade: Bloodlines, it pushed the limit I place on twists too far.
In pursuit of transparency, I enjoyed the film. After binging The Blair Witch Project and The Poughkeepsie Tapes and not particularly enjoying the two found footage staples, I was pleasantly surprised to enjoy this documentary take on a thriller classic. If you have any interest in a unique, well-paced narrative, give or take an overdone twist or two at the end, you should find a way to see In Our Blood.
