Byzantium (UK/Ireland, 2012)

I did actually watch the first half of Byzantium a few years ago but never finished it. While I was enjoying it, I got interrupted, and it vanished from the streaming service before I could finish. Truly a curse of the modern era.

Happily, when I signed up for a free trial of StudioCanal for the OHMC, I spotted Byzantium in their catalogue and decided this was a good opportunity to right old wrongs.

Byzantium is currently streaming on StudioCanal in the UK.

Synopsis

Eleanor, who appears to be a teenage girl, writes her life story over and over, discarding the pages as she does so. An old man finds some of these and approaches Eleanor, realising that she is a vampire. He has decided it is time to die, and Eleanor obliges.

Meanwhile, another vampire, Clara, flees the strip club where she’s been working when she realises she is being hunted. Cornered at home, she manages to turn the tables on her hunter and kills him. Eleanor back to their shared flat to find Clara burning the body, so they leave town in a hurry.

As they establish new lives in a crumbling seaside town, we learn that Eleanor is Clara’s daughter, and they have been travelling together for centuries. Eleanor is a gentle soul, honest to a fault, only feeding on the elderly or terminally ill. Clara, meanwhile, is an unrepentant murderer, hunting the dregs of humanity.

Needing money, Clara seduces a lonely man and convinces him to let her use his seedy hotel — the Byzantium — as a brothel. Meanwhile, Clara makes friends and takes classes, connecting with the human world. Unfortunately, her compulsion to write her life story attracts the wrong kind of attention, and their tenuous new life at the Byzantium starts unravelling.

General Thoughts

This is Neil Jordan’s second take on vampires after his 1994 adaptation of Interview With the Vampire. While Byzantium never got as much attention as its predecessor, it is much stronger. The scope of Interview was perhaps too ambitious for a single film, and the sanitised approach to its source material lacked any real bite. The recent television adaption is far closer to the spirit of Anne Rice’s books, and much more willing to celebrate the queerness of its characters.

The form of vampirism in Byzantium is an odd one. These vampires walk by daylight and have reflections, although they do need to be invited into homes. Instead of fangs, they sprout sharp claws when feeding, using them to tear open arteries. Most uniquely, their condition is the result of a pilgrimage to a sacred site rather than any curse or contagion.

There are some nice nods to classic vampire fiction, with Clara adopting the alias “Carmilla”, and her nemesis being named “Ruthven” — references, respectively to J Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla and John Polidori’s The Vampyre.

Byzantium was shot on location in Hastings, and it does nothing to sell the town as a holiday destination. The grey skies, shingle beaches, and especially the skeletal, derelict pier all capture the worst of the British seaside, adding a pall of gloom to everything we see. This is where Aleister Crowley went to die, and we can understand why.

Spoliers

There are some mild spoilers beyond this point. Skip ahead to the verdict if you’d prefer to avoid them.

Byzantium, ultimately, is a film about misogyny. The vampiric brotherhood who police those transformed by the shrine are a classic boy’s club, punishing women who would take the power they believe belongs solely to men. Clara, in particular, has suffered centuries of abuse and injustice at their hands, even before she became a vampire. While this has made her far more of a monster than her daughter is, it’s hard not to see her brutality as righteous anger, rooted as much in maternal love as vengeance.

I often rail against neat resolutions in horror films, but the ending of Byzantium largely worked for me. Despite the darkness of the story, it never felt like the kind of soul-destroying, nihilistic horror that so often gets neutered after testing badly. The outcome here is well earned and satisfying, and feels organic.

Verdict

Byzantium is a dark, tender, and often poignant take on vampires. It never really sets out to frighten us, but it certainly has its share of tense and bloody moments. While Clara and, to a lesser extent, Eleanor are blood-sucking monsters, they are some of the most sympathetic vampires in horror cinema. They have their failings, and they make mistakes, but they are very human ones for such ageless predators.

The acting is particularly strong, from Saoirse Ronan’s vulnerability as Eleanor, to Gemma Arterton’s iron-willed pragmatism as Clara, and an utterly skin-crawling turn from Jonny Lee Miller as the loathsome Captain Ruthven.

Even in such a strong cast, Caleb Landry Jones stands out, but not always for good reasons. His turn as Frank, a young survivor of cancer and Eleanor’s love interest, is awkward and diffident, but sometimes hard to follow. The accent he has adopted to represent an American transplant to England barely seems rooted in human speech.

All in all, Byzantium is a terrific film and an unusual take on the vampire genre. I’m not sure if I’d recommend it for Halloween viewing, however. It has a rich emotional palate, but it’s far from spooky fun. Still, a remarkable film if you feel like something more challenging.

The October Horror Movie Challenge

Please do join in and share your own thoughts with us about this or any other films as the month goes on. You can usually find us on BlueSky, Reddit, Discord, or lurking in the dark corners of your home.

If you would like to play along at home, my provisional selections are:

Heretic (USA, 2024)
The Sadness (Taiwan, 2021)
The Uninvited (USA, 1944)
The Lodge (UK/USA, 2019)
WolfCop (Canada, 2014)
Valerie and Her Week of Wonders (Czechoslovakia, 1970)
The Monkey (USA, 2025)
Sister Midnight (India/UK, 2024)
Roadgames (Australia, 1981)
Nightmare City (Italy, 1985)
Dangerous Animals (Australia, 2025)
Dead Talents Society (Taiwan, 2024)
Winterbeast (USA, 1992)
Byzantium (UK/Ireland, 2013)
The Ugly Stepsister (Norway, 2025)
A Page of Madness (Japan, 1926)
Heart Eyes (USA, 2025)
Grafted (New Zealand, 2024)
Arrebato (Spain, 1979)
Hatching (Finland, 2022)
Abigail (USA, 2024)
Ganja & Hess (USA, 1973)
The Devil’s Bath (Austria, 2025)
Pieces (Spain, 1982)
Infested (France, 2023)
Best Wishes to All (Japan, 2022)
A Cat in the Brain (Italy, 1990)
Enys Men (UK, 2022)
Creature From the Black Lagoon (USA, 1954)
Perewangan (Indonesia, 2024)
Bring Her Back (Australia, 2025)

A Final Note

If you have been enticed here by these posts, please do look around at some of our other film reviews. We also have a podcast, called The Good Friends of Jackson Elias, which occasionally covers horror films. If this appeals, you might want to check out some of the following episodes.